When should I use a trailing slash in my URL

Question

When should a trailing slash be used in a URL  For example - should my URL look like  about-us  or like  about-us   I am fully aware of the SEO-related issues - duplicate content and the canonical thing  I m trying to figure out which one I should use in the context of serving pages correctly alone   For example  my colleague is thinking that a trailing slash at the end means it s a  folder  - a  directory   so this is not a correct style  But I think that without a slash in the end - it s not quite correct either  because it almost looks like a folder  but it isn t and it s not a normal file either  but a filename without extension   Is there a proper way of knowing which to use

User · Answer

The trailing slash does not matter for your root domain or subdomain. Google sees the two as equivalent.

But trailing slashes do matter for everything else because Google sees the two versions (one with a trailing slash and one without) as being different URLs. Conventionally, a trailing slash (/) at the end of a URL meant that the URL was a folder or directory.

A URL without a trailing slash at the end used to mean that the URL was a file.

Google recommendation

User · Answer

When you make your URL  about-us   with the trailing slash   it s easy to start with a single file index html and then later expand it and add more files  e g  our-CEO-john-doe jpg  or even build a hierarchy under it  e g   about-us company    about-us products   etc   as needed  without changing the published URL  This gives you a great flexibility

User · Answer

That s not really a question of aesthetics  but indeed a technical difference  The directory thinking of it is totally correct and pretty much explaining everything  Let s work it out   You are back in the stone age now or only serve static pages  You have a fixed directory structure on your web server and only static files like images  html and so on  mdash  no server side scripts or whatsoever   A browser requests  index htm  it exists and is delivered to the client  Later you have lots of - let s say - DVD movies reviewed and a html page for each of them in the  dvd  directory  Now someone requests  dvd adams apples htm and it is delivered because it is there   At some day  someone just requests  dvd  - which is a directory and the server is trying to figure out what to deliver  Besides access restrictions and so on there are two possibilities  Show the user the directory content  I bet you already have seen this somewhere  or show a default file  in Apache it is  DirectoryIndex  sets the file that Apache will serve if a directory is requested    So far so good  this is the expected case  It already shows the difference in handling  so let s get into it   At 5 34am you made a mistake uploading your files   Which is by the way completely understandable   So  you did something entirely wrong and instead of uploading  dvd the big lebowski htm you uploaded that file as dvd  with no extension  to     Someone bookmarked your  dvd  directory listing  of course you didn t want to create and always update that nifty index htm  and is visiting your web-site  Directory content is delivered - all fine   Someone heard of your list and is typing  dvd  And now it is screwed  Instead of your DVD directory listing the server finds a file with that name and is delivering your Big Lebowski file   So  you delete that file and tell the guy to reload the page  Your server looks for the  dvd file  but it is gone  Most servers will then notice that there is a directory with that name and tell the client that what it was looking for is indeed somewhere else  The response will most likely be be   Status Code 301 Moved Permanently with Location  http         dvd   So  totally ignoring what you think about directories or files  the server only can handle such stuff and - unless told differently - decides for you about the meaning of  slash or not    Finally after receiving this response  the client loads  dvd  and everything is fine   Is it fine  No    Just fine  is not good enough for you  You have some dynamic page where everything is passed to  index php and gets processed  Everything worked quite good until now  but that entire thing starts to feel slower and you investigate   Soon  you ll notice that  dvd list is doing exactly the same  Redirecting to  dvd list  which is then internally translated into index php controller dvd amp action list  One additional request - but even worse  customer login redirects to customer login  which in turn redirects to the HTTPS URL of customer login   You end up having tons of unnecessary HTTP redirects    additional requests  that make the user experience slower   Most likely you have a default directory index here  too  index php controller dvd with no action simply internally loads index php controller dvd amp action list    Summary    If it ends with   it can never be a file  No server guessing  Slash or no slash are entirely different meanings  There is a technical resource difference between  slash or no slash   and you should be aware of it and use it accordingly  Just because the server most likely loads  dvd index htm - or loads the correct script stuff - when you say  dvd  It does it  but not because you made the right request  Which would have been  dvd   Omitting the slash even if you indeed mean the slashed version gives you an additional HTTP request penalty  Which is always bad  think of mobile latency  and has more weight than a  pretty URL  - especially since crawlers are not as dumb as SEOs believe or want you to believe

User · Answer

It is not a question of preference   base and  base  have different semantics  In many cases  the difference is unimportant  But it is important when there are relative URLs    child relative to  base  is  base child  child relative to  base is  perhaps surprisingly   child

User · Answer

In my personal opinion trailing slashes are misused   Basically the URL format came from the same UNIX format of files and folders  later on  on DOS systems  and finally  adapted for the web      A typical URL for this book on a Unix-like operating system would be a file path such as file    home username RomeoAndJuliet pdf  identifying the electronic book saved in a file on a local hard disk    Source  Wikipedia  Uniform Resource Identifier  Another good source to read  Wikipedia  URI Scheme     According to RFC 1738  which defined URLs in 1994  when resources contain references to other resources  they can use relative links to define the location of the second resource as if to say   in the same place as this one except with the following relative path   It went on to say that such relative URLs are dependent on the original URL containing a hierarchical structure against which the relative link is based  and that the ftp  http     and file URL schemes are examples of some that can be considered hierarchical  with the components of the hierarchy being separated by        Source  Wikipedia Uniform Resource Locator  URL   Also      That is the question we hear often  Onward to the answers  Historically  it   s common for URLs with a trailing slash to indicate a directory  and those without a trailing slash to    denote a file       http   example com foo   with trailing slash  conventionally a directory       http   example com foo  without trailing slash  conventionally a file    Source  Google WebMaster Central Blog - To slash or not to slash  Finally    A slash at the end of the URL makes the address look  pretty   A URL without a slash at the end and without an extension looks somewhat  weird   You will never name your CSS file  for example  http   www sample com stylesheet  would you    BUT I m being a proponent of web best practices regardless of the environment  It can be wonky and unclear  just as you said about the URL with no ext

User · Answer

I m always surprised by the extensive use of trailing slashes on non-directory URLs  WordPress among others    This really shouldn t be an either-or debate because putting a slash after a resource is semantically wrong   The web was designed to deliver addressable resources  and those addresses - URLs - were designed to emulate a  nix-style file-system hierarchy   In that context    Slashes always denote directories  never files  Files may be named anything  with or without extensions   but cannot contain or end with slashes    Using these guidelines  it s wrong to put a slash after a non-directory resource

User · Answer

From an SEO perspective  choosing whether or not to include a trailing slash at the end of a URL is irrelevant  These days  it is common to see examples of both on the web   A site will not be penalized either way  nor will this choice affect your website s search engine ranking or other SEO considerations    Just choose a URL naming convention you prefer  and include a canonical meta tag  in the  lt head gt  section of each webpage   Search engines may consider a single webpage as two separate duplicate URLS when they encounter it with and without the trailing slash  ie example com about-us  and example com about-us   It is best practice to include a canonical meta tag on each page because you cannot control how other sites link to your URLs    The canonical tag looks like this   lt link rel  canonical  href  https   example com about-us    gt   Using a canonical meta tag ensures that search engines only count each of your URLs once  regardless of whether other websites include a trailing slash when they link to your site

User · Answer

Other answers here seem to favor omitting the trailing slash   There is one case in which a trailing slash will help with search engine optimization  SEO    That is the case that your document has what appears to be a file extension that is not  html    This becomes an issue with sites that are rating websites   They might choose between these two urls    http   mysite example com rated example com http   mysite example com rated example com    In such a case  I would choose the one with the trailing slash   That is because the  com extension is an extension for Windows executable command files   Search engines and virus checkers often dislike URLs that appear that they may contain malware distributed through such mechanisms   The trailing slash seems to mitigate any concerns  allowing the page to rank in search engines and get by virus checkers   If your URLs have no   in the file portion  then I would recommend omitting the trailing slash for simplicity

User · Answer

Who says a file name needs an extension   take a look on a  nix machine sometime    I agree with your friend  no trailing slash

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