Due to privacy issues, I can’t share the website. But I’ve just been handed over this website where I’m confused which is my official domain version (is it the one with the trailing slash or without the trailing slash?):
I get that for the rest of the subfolders, all URLs are redirecting to the version WITHOUT trailing slash, as is the protocol for Webflow websites (I think).
However, on Search Console, it’s telling me that some of my 404s are not redirecting (after a few validations) due to destination URLs being domain.com on the Publishing settings in Webflow.
Hi Steph, this isn’t so much a Webflow question.
Standard representation for a website’s homepage is typically;
https://www.domain.com
But a trailing slash shouldn’t hurt, it’s just an explicit path of / rather than an implied path of /.
No practical difference.
For Google search console, you’re best off setting up a domain property for domain.com to keep all of your results in one place.
By “official” I think you’re asking about which URLs are best used in links, and the answer is simply whatever URL the browser resolves to after redirects. When you’re not sure, just paste your URL into a browser, let it redirect, copy that URL, you have your answer.
Yes, they refer to the same page.
You’re really asking protocol-level questions here that don’t much relate to SEO.
With any modern webserver I’ve seen, if you use curl to get https://www.mydomain.com you’ll get a 200 response with the content and you’ll get exactly the same thing with https://www.mydomain.com/. Those are considered equivalent, so equivalent that servers don’t even redirect, they just return the homepage.
In short, to a typical webserver, there’s no such thing as a null path, it would default to /.
The browser does the same. In Chrome if you request https://www.mydomain.com and look at the request headers that were sent, you’ll see Chrome sends https://www.mydomain.com/ to give a very explicit path. That’s not necessary, but it’s efficient because very old servers might avoid a redirect when it’s specified so clearly.
For other routes, it depends on the webserver implementation.
For Webflow, the homepage is the only default document. Every other page is represented with a slug path. As such, on non-Webflow servers, /about/ would mean e.g. /about/index.html. On Webflow it redirects that to /about which resolves behind the scenes ( guessing ) to /about.html.
I’m basing that on how Webflow exports code. The interals aren’t published but you can poke at the black box and learn a lot if this stuff interests you.
