How to remove trailing slash from URLs with htaccess

Last Updated on February 24, 2022 by Amit

This article explains how to remove trailing slash from URLs using htaccess file.
If you want to do the opposite , then see How to enforce a trailing slash .

A trailing slash in any URL is a slash character that appears at the end of the URL. The following URL has a trailing slash at the end :
https://example.com/foo/bar/ .
If you don’t like your URLs with a slash character at the end , you can use RewriteRule directive in your htaccess file to remove it. And if your URLs do not have a trailing slash and you want to enforce a slash at the end then check this article .
Removing trailing slashes from URLs is important if your site URLs are indexed on search engines with a slash and you recently changed your URL structure where your new URLs don’t end with a / . To maintain the SEO it’s important to make a 301 redirect from old format to the new one.

Suppose , your site URLs look something like the following :
https://example.com/foobar/

And you want to change this URL to :

https://example.com/foobar .
This can be done with a 301 Redirect rule that matches all URLs containing a slash and redirect to the new URLs that do not have a slash.
The following simple rule can be used to remove trailing slashes from URLs . Just put this at the top of your htaccess file so that it can be read first by server :

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(.+)/$
RewriteRule ^ %1 [L,R=301]

The following rule works same , the difference between this and the rule above is that we are checking the requested path in pattern of the RewriteRule instead of using RewriteCond directive .

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ /$1 [L,R=301]

With the rules above you can easily enforce no-traling slash on your site URLs. If the doesn’t work then try clearing your browser caches or use a different browser to test the redirection. If you still need my help with this, post a comment below .
Thanks for reading this article.