Trailing Slashes on urls

Issue Description

Every few months we have a discussion about trailing slashes in urls.

This tweet from John Mueller should clear it up

How to Fix the Issue

At the root, trailing slash/none trailing slash doesn’t matter.

So:

issues.cargocreative.co.uk

and

issues.cargocreative.co.uk/

Are treat the same.

Elsewhere it does matter, so:

issues.cargocreative.co.uk/back-end

and

issues.cargocreative.co.uk/back-end/

Are treat differently so open to duplicate content penalties.

Note on the code for htaccess – most solutions cause wordpress to break on form submissions – I’ve learned the hard way, so the solution below excludes posts to wp-admin and wp-json which solves most contact form issues.

Fixed Code Snippets

# Force trailing slash in WP without damaging the admin interface or the JSON API
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/wp-json
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/wp-admin
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+)/wp-json
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+)/wp-admin
  RewriteRule ^([^.]+)([^./])$ %{REQUEST_URI}/ [L,R=301,NE]
</IfModule>

References