Dealer.com WWW issue for Secure Sites

[George Nenni]

I've searched the forum and can't find a post on this, so figured I would throw it out there to help folks not aware of the issue. If you have a Dealer.com site, and are on the secure version (https), if you remove the WWW from the URL, the site won't resolve. Chrome gives an error:
This site can’t provide a secure connection
yourexamplewebsite.com uses an unsupported protocol.

ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH

I don't know how big of a deal this is, I stumbled into it while setting up Google Search Console for a Ford Direct dealer (setting up GSC for both https://www and https:// ). Ford Direct said that DDC is aware of the issue and working on it, a heads up if you didn't know.

As far as how to resolve, above my tech level. Is that at the domain name level, CNAMEs, and all that sort of thing?

 

[Alex Snyder]

I'm not sure this is that big a deal in the scheme of things. Not many dealership customers are manually removing WWW after a page loaded.

Funny timing though. I finally got one of my sites all SSL'd through CloudFlare and had a bunch of fun trying to connect www's and https-forcing between my site host, CloudFlare, and Wordpress. Only took 2 days

 

[craigh]

The issue here is when your marketing materials don't have the www (think license plate brackets).
Fortunately, most servers will redirect an HTTP request for non www to the HTTPS site with www.

http://dealersite.com -> https://www.dealersite.com
So it's very rare for a customer to go to:
https://dealersite.com since both the search engines and insecure redirects will avoid this.

The solution is simple: use wildcard certificates. Dealer.com is installing certificates that are based on the subdomain itself, rather than using the new LetsEncrypt wildcard certificates that can protect an entire domain and all subdomains.

They're pretty new, but it's worth making the switch.
https://letsencrypt.org/2017/07/06/wildcard-certificates-coming-jan-2018.html

That said, Alex is correct in that this has a very low impact, if any at all.