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How a hardware store should handle canonical URLs
26 Jul 2026
How a hardware store deals with canonical URLs — and what usually goes wrong.
The problem: a www record that disagrees with the apex. This breaks canonical URLs for a hardware store.
a hardware store asked us to look at canonical URLs after a customer screenshot showed a browser warning. The fix took eleven minutes; finding the cause took two hours.
Six months later, a hardware store asked us to look at something unrelated. While we were in the panel, we noticed a www record that disagrees with the apex had crept back. We fixed it before it caused trouble.
The vendor portal had silently rotated the key for canonical URLs, but a hardware store was still using the old one. Every outbound message bounced quietly.
HTTPS is table stakes, but canonical URLs is where trust actually lives for a hardware store. A padlock with a misconfigured record behind it is decoration, not security.
We keep a playbook for canonical URLs. Step one is always the same: pull the live record with dig, compare it to what the admin panel shows, and fix the mismatch.
The real issue was not canonical URLs itself — it was a www record that disagrees with the apex. One feeds the other, and fixing only the visible symptom means it comes back in three weeks.
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