User experience and the trailing slash for directories in the URL?

Question

From an SEO perspective, it may be negligible if you include a trailing slash for directories or not, as long as you set redirects to the chosen one (to avoid duplicate content) and link-build to the right one:

example.com/about/
example.com/about

Other authors suggest that it's best to avoid a redirect and that a trailing slash is typically for directories (folders), while a lack thereof implies a file.

But what about the user's perspective?

Is there any research on the best practice? What do users expect? (If anything.)

Answer 1

Case 1:

A slash indicates a directory. The lack of a slash indicates a file. Obvious cases:

• http://example.com/files/public/presentations/ - the user is expecting a directory listing with the presentations.

• http://example.com/files/public/presentations/2012-12-08-monads - the user is expecting a specific presentation.

• http://example.com/files/public/presentations/2012-12-08-monads/ - the user is expecting a directory listing the files which were used for a specific presentation, like the slides, the source code, etc.

Case 2:

What is less obvious are the cases where URIs are not mapped directly to the file system. For example:

• http://example.com/products/addToCart/58241 is not mapped to any precise file or directory. Given the MVC pattern, we can expect to find a bunch of controllers, models and views, but the mapping between the files behind those controllers/models/views and the URIs make no sense.

  Here, the lack of the slash indicates that there is nothing to specify after the ID of the product. For example:

  • http://example.com/products/addToCart/58241/doSomethingElse would make no sense for the engine,

  • http://example.com/products/addToCart/58241/Intel-Xeon-E5-2670 would simply do the same thing as the URI without the name (the same technique is used by Stack Exchange when the friendly name is appended to the URI, but if you remove it, keeping only the unfriendly unique identifier of the question, the same page will be shown),

  • http://example.com/products/addToCart/58241#cart will scroll the page to the top to show the cart, and:

  • http://example.com/products/addToCart/58241?promo=51D80IA will use additional, often optional, parameters.

• http://example.com/products/list/ on the other hand indicates that something could have been appended to the URI, example:

  • http://example.com/products/list/processors/intel/socket2011/

  or that the URI is used to get a list of something, like:

  • http://example.com/products/search/?Intel%20Xeon%20E5 - lists the products corresponding to a search.

Conclusion:

Append a slash if:

• The target is listing something (like a set of files in a directory or a bunch of products on an e-commerce website), or:

• The target expects to be completed to form a more complete URI.

Note that in practice, nobody, among the users, care if there is a slash or not. If the URI is typed, most users would omit the slash. If the URI is a link, few people will read it, and even fewer try to assert something from the presence or the absence of a slash.

Also, you're free to use whatever convention feels natural for you. For example, Stack Exchange seems to avoid using a slash as much as possible, probably to shorten the URIs.

Answer 2

If you think of the web as files put in folders that are listed in a certain hierarchy on a web server, pretty much like how a book is organized, you know that every web page you see is actually a page and not a folder. The same goes for a book... if someone told you to open up chapter 5 of the book - you would go to the first page of chapter 5 and not any random page or the last page.

Users know that they open a page, but not necessarily how the page is named. In this case I would end URLs' with either a trailing slash representing a folder, or writing out the entire file name as well as in http://www.example.com/about/index.html.

More to read: Trailing slash in URLs - which style is preferred?