I set the canonical tag in the sites general settings and it works correctly to a point. However on all pages ending with .html it sets the tag correctly except doesn’t append the .html at the end of the page name. This results in a 404 for the page and subsequently all of the pages show up in search console as 404 not found.
Here is my site Read-Only: LINK
(how to share your site Read-Only link)
Webflow does not publish .html extensions on its URLs.
If you’re exporting the site, you’ll need to decide whether you’re keeping that extension or whether your server setup has a pretty URLs config you can use.
Then you’ll need to decide whether to update your canonicals and sitemap accordingly.
well that bites. It means when I export sites I’ll have to manually update a potentially boatload of pages.
It’s very uncommon to see .html in URLs these days, most hosting environment are configured for more user-friendly URLs.
But if you did want to modify the HTML for any reason, it’s why there are a ton of task runners like Gulp, and tools like sed, awk, cheerio to mod your content as part of your build process.
yes, I appreciate what you are saying. But that’s not the point. The service exports them as .html pages. The autoplugin of canonical should work correctly thereof. This should be fixed. It’s a missing feature to say the least.
In 8 years of using Webflow, you’re the first person I’ve ever seen request html extensions in the canonicals. I really think you’re misunderstanding how web hosting works.
Exported files need the .html extension or the hosting file system won’t know what they are in the extracted ZIP, and web servers won’t know how to MIME type them for delivery to browsers.
Separately, the URLs are completely a function of the webserver and how it chooses to read the filesystem.
Webflow’s export feature has no way to know what you’re doing with the exported HTML, or what your hosting configuration might be, so it gives you the content and you modify it as needed for your purposes.
I’m actually very surprised that you’re saying that Webflow is exporting a canonical at all, and I might have to test that. IMO, it should not, since it has no idea what your exported URL origin will be.
But if you do want to recommend a feature change to Webflow- they have a wishlist app for that purpose. Posts in the community forum aren’t tracked or seen by many people in Webflow.
If you’re trying to re-host a basic site as-is, look at Netlify- you can easily upload the full zip, and the pretty URL function is built in. I believe it has some features for canonicals and sitemaps as well.