Trailing slash issues

[NicoHood]

There are multiple issues with trailing slashes in Grav.

The current situation:

• https://mywebsite.de/contact is the canonial url
• https://mywebsite.de/contact/ redirects to https://mywebsite.de/contact with 302 status code
• The homepage is always https://mywebsite.de/, not https://mywebsite.de due to the http protocol. Browsers do not display them though!

Those are the current issues:

1. Redirects should be 301 rather than 302 (Update: Fixed now)
2. https://mywebsite.de/ is the website root with a canonial of https://mywebsite.de
3. The sitemap plugin lists https://mywebsite.de instead of https://mywebsite.de/ (also an invalid canonial)

This is important for search engines, as they will no correctly crawl the main homepage (which is most important).

Solutions:

1. Can be fixed via Fix #3127 redirect trailing slash using 301 statuscode #3128

2. & 3. Can be fixed in multiple places (I guess), you should know best. I've edited Page.php like this (can be improved possibly):

// trim trailing / if not root
if ($url === '') {
    $url = '/';
}
else if ($url !== '/' && rtrim($url, '/') !== rtrim($grav['uri']->base(), '/') ) {
    $url = rtrim($url, '/');
}

[mahagr]

Can you try Grav 1.7, it should work there.

[NicoHood]

It does not work.

[NicoHood]

I've seen the 301 fix which looks good. However the canonical of the root page is still wrong, I guess (unless there was a recent fix I missed).

[mahagr]

You mean this: <link rel="canonical" href="http://grav.local" />?

[NicoHood]

Yes! It should be http://grav.local/

[mahagr]

Oh, now I think I remember why I didn't do 301 redirects. On the home page, it caused a loop between slash and no slash and never ended up requesting anything from the server.

[NicoHood]

Well, that needs to be fixed than. I dont think the redirect code itself makes any difference here, it is just a cosmetic thing for search engines, isnt it?

[mahagr]

I think it has been fixed, but the main issue was that when you accessed the page, it redirected without ever contacting the server. So the only way to fix that was to clear the cache in the browser.

[NicoHood]

Alright, but what about the canonical URL? That should be independent. I've suggested a possible fix in my first post, but there might be better solutions.

[mahagr]

Well, there was actually a second issue that is not related to SEO.

Create a Grav site and in there create home/index.php (with phpinfo).

Now try to access:

• /home
• /home/

The links end up pointing to a different instance, the first one stays in the Grav site, and the second loads the PHP info.

This means that the root page should always have the trailing slash or the home page may not work properly.

[NicoHood]

Wow, that is a simple fix. Are you sure this does not break?

For example if you run Grav in a subdir https://example.com/grav and did you also test if language prefixes are used https://example.com/en? The slash should be removed in those cases.

[mahagr]

I have tested it with language prefixes. Though it will not make any difference as the only slash that will remain is coming from $uri->rootUrl() call, which is always pointing to the path where Grav has been installed.

[mahagr]

So basically it redirects https://example.com/grav to https://example.com/grav/ but keeps everything else without the slash. So internally Grav always uses a trailing slash for the root page, even if it is in a subfolder.

I made this change for two reasons:

• it was a lot simpler fix
• having url of https://example.com/grav is wrong as it can point to another PHP application in https://example.com and thus not show the Grav home page.

[NicoHood]

Sounds reasonable. I will give it a try later this day. Thanks a lot for taking the time!

[NicoHood]

Seems to be fixed for me, I will close this. Super nice!