Mo Beigi's Website URL Structure Preference

website-url-structure-preference.md

Mo Beigi's Website URL Structure Preference

Websites normally employ several redirects to avoid duplicate content pages etc for SEO purposes. The following is the behaviour I found easiest to setup and most consistently used on the web. It also aligns well with the behaviour popular tools like nginx / apache / wordpress. The key is consistency.

HTTP to HTTPS (use HTTPs only)

http://(.*) -> 301 https://$1

Exceptions can be made of course for HTTP only sites sitting behind reverse proxies.

Canonical urls

Always trailing slash for root

<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/" />

Always trailing slash for folders

<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/images/" />
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/blog/life/how-i-turned-water-into-gold/" />

Redirects

Avoid unneccessary hops

Always try to redirect in 1 hop if possible. Make sure you never hop to HTTP and then back to HTTPS! (common mistake with reverse proxy setups).

Always trailing slash for folders

https://example.com/image -> 301 https://example.com/images/
https://example.com/blog/life/how-i-turned-water-into-gold -> 301 https://example.com/blog/life/how-i-turned-water-into-gold/

No trailing slash for resources (i.e. static files)

https://example.com/image/logo.png?v=1 200
https://example.com/image/info.txt 200

Always preserve query strings

https://example.com/home/?lang=en 200
https://example.com/home?lang=en -> 301 https://example.com/home/?lang=en

Always preserve fragments

Nothing to do here, browser will auto handle this for us.

No trailing slash for resources that are not a folder or resource

https://example.com/thisdoesntexist 404 (no redirect hop to trailing slash)

No trailing slash for API endpoints

https://example.com/api/user/1 200
https://example.com/api/user/1/preferences 200

https://example.com/api/user/1/ 404 (should be no trailing slash!)