Thoughts on the web, web design and film photography…
Quick Perf Tip: Always Add A Trailing Slash
Here’s a quick performance tip for your Friday (or Saturday for those of you across the date line) – when linking to a directory, be sure to add the trailing slash to the directory name, otherwise, it causes a redirect from the server, thus adds a bit of time to your page load!
Do
<a href=”http://petelepage.com/blog/”>Pete’s Blog</a>
Don’t
<a href=”http://petelepage.com/blog”>Pete’s Blog</a>
What’s going on?
When the browser makes a web request for a page without the slash, it responds with a 301 redirect response, which then causes the browser to make a second request for almost the exact same page, except it asks for it with the trailing slash! On a client with a slow network connection, that’s going to be really painful! Even if it’s not a slow connection, it is going to add some extra time to your page load!
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What do You two mean saying http://petelepage.com/blog/ is site specific? It works with and without trailing slash. But version without it is slower and users redirect.
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Hey mate,
Does this matter with pages? This may be a stupid question, but http://www.yreceipts.com/ and http://www.yreceipts.com/home.html/ ?
I am going through our site putting on the trailing links, and my thoughts are that you would not put a slash after an html page, but thought I would ask.
Cheers
SCott -
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I agree, but you could’ve given a better example.
Please, do link to http://petelepage.com/ but not to http://petelepage.com (without trailing slash) to save an unnecessary redirect. This applies to all sites and domains.
The fact that http://petelepage.com/blog/ requires a trailing slash is site-specific and based on the site author’s personal preference. There are other sites that rely on the trailing slash being omitted. So you certainly don’t need to trailing slash every URL you ever encounter
Just my € 0.02.