Should You Have a Trailing Slash at the End of URLs? [Answered]
Whether to have the trailing slashes at the end of URLs is a tricky question for many.
Ahrefs’ Patrick Stox has answered this question in a detailed manner.
He says, “A trailing slash is a forward slash (“/”) placed at the end of a URL such as domain.com/ or domain.com/page/. The trailing slash is generally used to distinguish a directory which has the trailing slash from a file that does not have the trailing slash. However, these are guidelines and not requirements.
In the past, a folder would have a trailing slash and a file would be without the trailing slash. A folder would indicate there were more files and you’d typically have an index file (index.html, index.php, etc.) where the content of the page would load from. So the content would come from say domain.com/page/index.html but domain.com/page/ would be shown to users. With individual files, you’d have the file name and no trailing slash on the end.
These days, URLs in most systems aren’t pointing to files. The URL is a record stored in a database. Serverless systems don’t even host files on your server”.
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