I want to migrate more 6,000 blog posts to backdrop. However, I am facing two challenges. The first is that the URLs in Backdrop come without a trailing slash while the wordpress blog article URLs have a trailing slash. This may have a huge impact on SEO. Is there a way for me to generate identical URLs in while migrating them from WordPress to Backdrop?
So far, I have imported around 150 posts as a test. But I was not able to migrate the featured images of these posts. I am not sure whether I made a mistake due to which I was not able to pull in these images. is there a way to solve this problem?
Thanks and regards
Comments
I had never heard that a trailing slash was necessary for SEO. I asked ChatGPT (recognized chances of errors) and got this answer which makes sense to me.
No, the presence or absence of a trailing slash doesn’t produce an SEO benefit by itself.
Yes, it matters indirectly because sloppy inconsistency can create duplicate URLs, wasted crawl budget, and diluted ranking signals.
According to ChatGPT, it's important that you are consisent with either always having a trailing slash or not having them at all.
Since you are moving from an environment with trailing slashes, it MAY be important (or have some value) to keep them.
I though maybe the solution was to be sure that you are not using automatically generated URLs and to manually add the slashed during migration. BUT, it seems if I try to add the slash this way, Backdrop ignores it.
This leaves me thinking that either:
This may require some custom code
It's really not that important as long as all URLs are set up the same (but, I'm not able to say this with confidence).
If the page of your site in Google has the address /тews/, and the new address will be /тews, the user will still get to the /тews page, there will be no errors.
Try to go to the address
https://forum.backdropcms.org/forum/how-and-troubleshooting/ or
https://forum.backdropcms.org/forum/how-and-troubleshooting
there is no difference.
When using rel="canonical", everything reindexing over time.
Perhaps someone will give more information.
On the issue of migration, I already spoke https://forum.backdropcms.org/comment/8487#comment-8487
(And take a look at it https://backdropcms.org/project/globalredirect
I always use this module.)
I doubt you could get path aliases to add a slash to the end in Backdrop or Drupal. If you really want to fiddle with it, you could do a rewrite in .htaccess if you're using Apache or something equivalent in nginx. But mainly what Enthusiast says about canonical URL is key.
This might help too https://ahrefs.com/blog/trailing-slash/