Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How to force Wordpress to remove trailing slashes?
-
I've searched around quite a bit for a solution here, but I can't find anything. I apologize if this is too technical for the forum.
I have a Wordpress site hosted on Nginx by WP Engine. Currently it resolves requests to URLs either with or without a trailing slash.
So, both of these URLs are functional:
<code>mysite.com/single-post</code>
and
<code>mysite.com/single-post/</code>
I would like to remove the trailing slash from all posts, forcing
mysite.com/single-post/
to redirect tomysite.com/single-post
. I created a redirect rule on the server:^/(.*)/$ -> /$1
and this worked well for end-users, but rendered the admin panel inaccessible. Somewhere, Wordpress is adding a trailing slash back on to the URL
mysite.com/wp-admin
, resulting in a redirect loop. I can't see anything obvious in .htaccess.Where is this rule adding a trailing slash to 'wp-admin' established?
Thanks very much
-
WPEis run on a base server using Apache with a Nginx proxy so you can use the WP engine 301 redirect system built-in or you can simply add a redirect to the HTAccess file. If you would like to use a tool to do this I recommend this one another alternative is to ask WP engine to make a change for you.https://www.aleydasolis.com/htaccess-redirects-generator/non-slash-vs-slash-urls/ApacheJust copy to your htaccess:```
https://example.com/page/**https://example.com/page** ``` <label for="nonslash">**Slash to Non-Slash URLs**</label> > <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine on > RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d > RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ /$1 [L,R=301]</ifmodule> **Non-Slash to Slash URLs** ``` ****Apache** https://example.com/page**
> <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine on > RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f > RewriteRule ^(.*[^/])$ /$1/ [L,R=301]</ifmodule>
USEING Nginx to do
**https://example.com/page/**
As you see, there is one tiny difference between those two URLs, and it’s the trailing slash at the end. In order to avoid duplicate content, if you are using Nginx you can **remove the trailing slash from Nginx** URLs. Place this inside your virtual host file in the server {} block configuration: > ``` > rewrite ^/(.*)/$ /$1 permanent; > ``` Full example: > ``` > server { > listen 80; > server_name www.mysite.com; > rewrite ^/(.*)/$ /$1 permanent; > } > ``` All done, now Nginx will remove all those trailing slashes.
USEING Nginx to do
https://example.com/page
https://example.com/page/Add a trailing slash by placing this inside your virtual host file in the server {} block configuration: > ``` > rewrite ^(.*[^/])$ $1/ permanent; > ``` Full example: > ``` > server { > listen 80; > server_name www.mysite.com; > rewrite ^(.*[^/])$ $1/ permanent; > } > ``` From now on, Nginx should add your trailing slash automatically to every url * https://www.scalescale.com/tips/nginx/add-trailing-slash-nginx/ * https://www.scalescale.com/tips/nginx/nginx-remove-trailing-slash/ I hope this helps, Tom
-
Hi John, sorry ive been on leave so not checked back on the forums.
Glad it looks like its working for you. I dont think the comments do anything except signify where word press has begun writing to the .htaccess (i dont run wordpress so can't be sure). Normally comments do nothing but signify something useful to the user.
I can try to breakdown the code a little for you, but my htaccess isn't fantastic so its by no means complete.
Firstline: RewriteCond%{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-d
RewriteCond% = This says use this condition if....
{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-d = ... is NOT a directoryRewriteRule^(.*)/$ /$1 [L,R=301]
I believe this bit takes a snapshot of the url upto the final / then rewrites it to that snapshot.The combination of these must mean it doesn't affect your wordpress admin directory. I know this code can break if your install is within a directory (as is discussed in the stackover flow link) but they have provided a solution for that in that topic. I would say test if on your live website to make complete sure it will work as this may be slightly different to your local install. Have a back-up ready just incase it doesn't.
Make sure you check every url including
Homepage
Pages
Posts
Category Pages
Sub Category Pages
Post Pages
Any images or filesTo make sure it is working as expected on all of them.
-
Thanks so much, ATP! It looks like writing the condition into .htaccess does the trick—at least for my local install. Is this because the commands located within the
BEGIN WordPress
END WordPress
comments only apply to URLs outside of the WP admin area?
Thanks again, ATP—that was a very thorough and helpful response!
-
Hi John
Did ATP's solution help you out? Let us know if we can look into this further!
-
Hi John,
I asked something similar myself something myself but im on the Magento platform. This should matter as the solution wasn't platform specific. It just involved editing htaccess file. If your up for editing your .htacccess file then it could be of some use. The topic URL is below and it contains multiple solutions for editing and removing the / and the debugging process we went through along the way. (Courtesy of Andy and Dirk) Hopefully its of some use to you
https://moz.com/community/q/cms-pages-multiple-urls
SUMMARY:
If you know how to edit your .htaccess and your ready to dive straight in this code should do it.RewriteCond%{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-d
RewriteRule^(.*)/$ /$1 [L,R=301]If you want the page with explanations and walk-through please see the original topic as editing your htaccess badly can cause all sorts of errors.
Edit: I realised i was probably a tiny bit lazy and should of probably included this link which is the original link i got sent from stackoverflow with instructions on how to to edit your .htaccess file.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21417263/htaccess-add-remove-trailing-slash-from-url
Dirks answer later in the post offer guidance on applying it to certain parameters which should prove helpful if your still having loop problems with the admin page.
-
Thanks for the replies, Donna, Martijn. I am running Yoast and considered adding the trailing slash, but:
-Most of the inbound links we have are to URLs with no slash
-The slash style seems a little dated in general-few sites use them these days.
I'd really love to just figure out how to solve the issue a little closer to the root.
-
Hi John,
It seems obvious, but why not go for a adding a trailing slash to every URL instead or removing it, would solve your issues at least.
-
Are you using the yoast SEO plugin? There is a setting under Advanced > Permalinks that forces a trailing slash onto URLs. I'd try looking at that first.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Homepage was removed from google and got deranked
Hello experts I have a problem. The main page of my homepage got deranked severely and now I am not sure how to get the rank back. It started when I accidentally canonicalized the main page "https://kv16.dk" to a page that did not exist. 4 months later the page got deranked, and you were not able to see the "main page" in the search results at all, not even when searching for "kv16.dk". Then we discovered the canonicalization mistake and fixed it, and were able to get the main page back in the search results when searching for "kv16.dk". At first after we made the correction, some weeks passed by, and the ranking didn't get better. Google search console recommended uploading a sitemap, do we did that. However in this sitemap there was a lot of "thin content sites", for all the wordpress attachments. E.g. for every image in an article. more exactly there were 91 of these attachment sites, and the rest of the page consists of only two pages "main page" and an extra landing page. After that google begun recommending the attachment urls in some searches. We tried fixing it by redirecting all the attachments to their simple form. E.g. if it was an attachment page for an image we redirected strait to the image. Google has not yet removed these attachment pages, so the question is if you think it will help to remove the attachments via google search console, or will that not help at all? For example when we search "kv16" an attachment URL named "birksø" is one of the first results
Technical SEO | | Christian_T0 -
What should I name my Wordpress homepage?
I work almost exclusively in wordpress now. And I always hesitate when it comes to naming a site's homepage. I have to give it a name - right? I usually pick the business name or /home. And then that is identifies as the site's static homepage in the Wordpress settings and it works just fine. But I've started to get warning that it is an issue because it creates redirects. For example, I just ran the Ryte service analysis on a website and it warned me about "Non-indexable pages with high relevance" and it's basically my homepage that has 29 incoming links that "passes all pagerank to https://ourdomain/home But what am I supposed to call my homepage if not "Home"? It's not like the old days where anyone has to type it in. The root domain loads the homepage just as it should. Can anybody advise me regarding best practices for what to name a Wordpress homepage for good SEO? With thanks in advance for your help.
Technical SEO | | Dandelion0 -
How do I redirect the Author archive page in Wordpress?
If you do a search for my name on Google, the first result is the author archive page of my Wordpress blog. I would like to redirect the author page to my "about me" page but cannot add a 301 as the author page is created dynamically in Wordpress. Anyone know how I can do this?
Technical SEO | | richdan0 -
Will deleting Wordpress tags result in 404 errors or anything?
I want to clean up my tags and I'm worried I'm going to look in my webmasters the next day with hundreds of errors. Whats the best way of doing this?
Technical SEO | | howlusa0 -
Noindex vs. page removal - Panda recovery
I'm wondering whether there is a consensus within the SEO community as to whether noindexing pages vs. actually removing pages is different from Google Pandas perspective?Does noindexing pages have less value when removing poor quality content than physically removing ie. either 301ing or 404ing the page being removed and removing the links to it from the site? I presume that removing pages has a positive impact on the amount of link juice that gets to some of the remaining pages deeper into the site, but I also presume this doesn't have any direct impact on the Panda algorithm? Thanks very much in advance for your thoughts, and corrections on my assumptions 🙂
Technical SEO | | agencycentral0 -
Can I remove 301 redirects after some time?
Hello, We have an very large number of 301 redirects on our site and would like to find a way to remove some of them. Is there a time frame after which Google does not need a 301 any more? For example if A is 301 redirected to B, does Google know after a while not to serve A any more, and replaces any requests for A with B? How about any links that go to A? Or: Is the only option to have all links that pointed to A point to B and then the 301 can be removed after some time? Thank you for you you help!
Technical SEO | | Veva0 -
Exclude Child URLs from XML Sitemap Generator (Wordpress)
Hi all, I was recommended the XML Sitemap Generator for Wordpress by the very helpful Keith Bloemendaal and John Pring - however I can't seem to exclude child URLs. There is a section Exclude items and a subsection Exclude posts. I have tried inputting the URLs for the pages I don't want in the sitemap, however that didn't work. So I read that you have to include a list of "IDs" - not sure where on earth to find that info, tried the page name and the post= number from the URL, however neither worked. I hope somebody can point me in the right direction - and apologies, I am a Wordpress novice, and I got no answers from the Wordpress forums so turned right back to SEOmoz! Cheers.
Technical SEO | | markadoi840 -
Subdomain Removal in Robots.txt with Conditional Logic??
I would like to see if there is a way to add conditional logic to the robots.txt file so that when we push from DEV to PRODUCTION and the robots.txt file is pushed, we don't have to remember to NOT push the robots.txt file OR edit it when it goes live. My specific situation is this: I have www.website.com, dev.website.com and new.website.com and somehow google has indexed the DEV.website.com and NEW.website.com and I'd like these to be removed from google's index as they are causing duplicate content. Should I: a) add 2 new GWT entries for DEV.website.com and NEW.website.com and VERIFY ownership - if I do this, then when the files are pushed to LIVE won't the files contain the VERIFY META CODE for the DEV version even though it's now LIVE? (hope that makes sense) b) write a robots.txt file that specifies "DISALLOW: DEV.website.com/" is that possible? I have only seen examples of DISALLOW with a "/" in the beginning... Hope this makes sense, can really use the help! I'm on a Windows Server 2008 box running ColdFusion websites.
Technical SEO | | ErnieB0