need help with www.example and example.com

Use a redirect on your main site to do a perm redirect all example.com traffic to https://www.example.com instead.

Basically, add this to the .htaccess file in your web root:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) https://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

That will redirect everything without the “www” to the same thing but with the www. Search engines will pick up on it and redirect as well.

I prefer to use these rules. They’re similar in nature, however they always redirect the www version to the NON-www version of my domain.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This is the more preferred way to do it nowadays, as www is deprecated.

thanks does it matter where in the .htaccess file i put it?

Should be the first lines in the file, before anything else.