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
-
Google Not Indexing Pages (Wordpress)
Hello, recently I started noticing that google is not indexing our new pages or our new blog posts. We are simply getting a "Discovered - Currently Not Indexed" message on all new pages. When I click "Request Indexing" is takes a few days, but eventually it does get indexed and is on Google. This is very strange, as our website has been around since the late 90's and the quality of the new content is neither duplicate nor "low quality". We started noticing this happening around February. We also do not have many pages - maybe 500 maximum? I have looked at all the obvious answers (allowing for indexing, etc.), but just can't seem to pinpoint a reason why. Has anyone had this happen recently? It is getting very annoying having to manually go in and request indexing for every page and makes me think there may be some underlying issues with the website that should be fixed.
Technical SEO | | Hasanovic1 -
Removing site subdomains from Google search
Hi everyone, I hope you are having a good week? My website has several subdomains that I had shut down some time back and pages on these subdomains are still appearing in the Google search result pages. I want all the URLs from these subdomains to stop appearing in the Google search result pages and I was hoping to see if anyone can help me with this. The subdomains are no longer under my control as I don't have web hosting for these sites (so these subdomain sites just show a default hosting server page). Because of this, I cannot verify these in search console and submit a url/site removal request to Google. In total, there are about 70 pages from these subdomains showing up in Google at the moment and I'm concerned in case these pages have any negative impacts on my SEO. Thanks for taking the time to read my post.
Technical SEO | | QuantumWeb620 -
Remove sitemap, effect ranking?
We are considering to remove our sitemap because it doesn't display the right structure. Will it affect current rankings if we remove the sitemap en continuing without a sitemap? Thanks
Technical SEO | | rijwielcashencarry0400 -
Should we remove category paths for better SEO?
We're looking to build some serious content and capitalise on long-tail keyword traffic for our sub-category pages, example for targeted keyword "designer dining tables". Example of current link: www.website.com/designer-furniture/designer-dining-tables.html Would removing the category paths help? Example result - www.website.com/designer-dining-tables More user friendly URLs and better for SEO would you suggest? The only problem is, if we removed the paths would this have a hit on our traffic? Any advice would be much appreciated. We are using Magento platform.
Technical SEO | | Jseddon920 -
Wordpress versus html and google ranking
My current SEO has always recommended that I take my site to wordpress. I really don't want to move to wordpress. I don't like it... I just like writing code in raw html, css, and script. I feel like I have more control that way. Wordpress just seems like a platform for blogs (I have my blog in wordpress). My question is, do wordpress websites typically rank better? Is there benefit to moving to it?
Technical SEO | | CalicoKitty20000 -
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 -
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 -
Duplicate canonical URLs in WordPress
Hi everyone, I'm driving myself insane trying to figure this one out and am hoping someone has more technical chops than I do. Here's the situation... I'm getting duplicate canonical tags on my pages and posts, one is inside of the WordPress SEO (plugin) commented section, and the other is elsewhere in the header. I am running the latest version of WordPress 3.1.3 and the Genesis framework. After doing some testing and adding the following filters to my functions.php: <code>remove_action('wp_head', 'genesis_canonical'); remove_action('wp_head', 'rel_canonical');</code> ... what I get is this: With the plugin active + NO "remove action" - duplicate canonical tags
Technical SEO | | robertdempsey
With the plugin disabled + NO "remove action" - a single canonical tag
With the plugin disabled + A "remove action" - no canonical tag I have tried using only one of these remove_actions at a time, and then combining them both. Regardless, as long as I have the plugin active I get duplicate canonical tags. Is this a bug in the plugin, perhaps somehow enabling the canonical functionality of WordPress? Thanks for your help everyone. Robert Dempsey0