Kripke's modal essentialism applies to natural kind terms via rigid designation, but water's reference was fixed before H2O was discovered, making the necessity aposteriori rather than metaphysically grounded in composition.
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The moment when we settled on what a word points to or means; in this case, people called the clear liquid H2O 'water' before scientists discovered what it was made of chemically.
a posteriori necessity(Proposed interpretation of Aristotle's philosophy of science)
Necessity discovered through experience rather than derived from pure reason alone
modal essentialism(Presented as a coarser-grained alternative to Aristotelian essentialism)
The view that a property is essential to a kind if and only if it is a necessary property of that kind
natural kind terms(Putnam (1975))
Terms that refer to natural categories or substances, such as 'gold' and 'water', whose reference is fixed by causal relations to instances of those kinds rather than by descriptive content in the speaker's mind.
rigid designation(Illustrated by the indexical 'I', which rigidly designates the speaker of the context even when evaluated at counterfactual circumstances)
An expression rigidly designates when, uttered in a fixed context, it refers to the same entity across all circumstances of evaluation