I took a look at the link you gave, and I indeed see an about 1 second delay before I receive a 302 redirect to the URL with www.
prepended. Not entirely coincidentally, the actual page HTML also takes quite long (about 1.7 seconds) to load.
This is a fairly common issue with large web applications: to return even a simple response like a redirect, the entire application must load and run its startup code. Couple this with a not so fast shared webserver that isn t optimized for that one application, and you can get quite slow page load times. It s nothing unique to Magento; I ve seen the same effect with MediaWiki myself, and I expect that it happens with other applications too.
The obvious solution is just to avoid redirects: as long as you make sure all your URLs have the right hostname, the extra delay due to wrong hostnames will not appear. Magento itself will presumably take care of this for its own URLs, but if you have any other code (or static pages) that link to your Magento URLs, make sure they use the right hostname.
You can also sign up for Google Webmaster Tools (and similar tools for other search engines) and configure your preferred domain there (it s under Site configuration → Settings) so that Google will automatically prepend www.
to any links to your site it indexes.
You can (and should) also try to reduce Magento s startup time in general. This will speed up not only redirects, but all other page loads as well. I m not familiar enough with Magento to be able to give much detailed advice on this, but the obvious first step for any massive PHP application is to make sure you re using a PHP accelerator such as APC.
Finally, the fastest way to redirect visitors to the correct hostname is to make your webserver send the redirect directly without ever invoking Magento at all. The details on how to do this depend on the server software you re using, but apparently LiteSpeed supports the same RewriteRule
syntax as Apache s mod_rewrite, so you should be able to do this just by adding the following lines to your main .htaccess
file:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.mmmspeciosa.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mmmspeciosa.com/$1 [R=301,L]
(By the way, I m using HTTP 301 permanent redirects here instead of the HTTP 302 temporary redirects Magento seems to be using. This is not only more appropriate according to the HTTP standard, but also works better with search engines, which treat a 301 redirect as an indication to index the target URL instead of the source of the redirect. If this redirect type is not configurable in Magento, I would consider it a bug. If it is configurable, you should set it to 301.)