The usual concern here is that the content on the different versions will cause duplicate content. The same content is shown on trailing slash and non-trailing slash URLsĪs I mentioned before, if your content can be seen on both the trailing slash version and non-trailing slash version of pages, the pages can be treated as separate URLs. Here are a few common scenarios you may encounter. You may want to make different decisions depending on how your systems work. This is because most systems will assume that the file is a folder and since there’s nothing after this path, usually a 404 page will be returned. In most cases, if you add a trailing slash to a file such as. Trailing slashes matter for other URLsįor every case besides the trailing slash directly after the root domain, a trailing slash will be treated as a separate URL. These URLs are treated exactly the same and it doesn’t matter which version you use. Trailing slashes after the domain name don’t matter Whether you choose to use a trailing slash or not is more of a personal preference than anything. Serverless systems don’t even host files on your server.ĭifferent URL structures may be treated differently. The URL is a record stored in a database. These days, URLs in most systems aren’t pointing to files. With individual files, you’d have the file name and no trailing slash on the end. So the content would come from say /page/index.html but /page/ would be shown to users. 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.

In the past, a folder would have a trailing slash and a file would be without the trailing slash. However, these are guidelines and not requirements. 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. A trailing slash is a forward slash (“/”) placed at the end of a URL such as / or /page/.

Forward slash vs backslash