Helping search engines. WWW to non-WWW redirect with Nginx and urls.

Optimizing urls

Slash makes like much easier for the search engines and your own webserver.

First of all, APPEND_SLASH should not be False in your settings.py. By default it is True, but in case you set it to False, undo it.

Secondly, in your urls.py files and in robots.txt use slash as well. I find using an html template a better solution than making a view. So, my favorite way to make a robots.txt in Django can be this:

1. templates/general/robotstxt.html

User-agent:*
Disallow: /admin/
Host: https://lovelywebsite.com
sitemap: https://lovelywebsite.com/sitemap.xml
Clean-param: ref /home/
Clean-param: ref /home/pets/
Clean-param: ref /home/pets/my_love/
Clean-param: ref /home/pets/*

2. urls.py

urlpatterns = {
    path('robots.txt', TemplateView.as_view(template_name='general/robotstxt.html', content_type='text/plain'), name='robots'),
}

Third, organize your patterns’ order the way that it is easy to find essential pages (listing with SEO text etc.). For example, this is not effective:

urlpatterns = {
  path('pets/<slug:slug>/', core_views.DogView.as_view(), name='dog'),
  path('pets/my_love/', core_views.MyLoveView.as_view(), name='my-love'),
}

Because if you need to access /pets/my_love the webserver will first reach to the first pattern and then move to the second one. It is not much of a hassle, but does not look too good either way.

WWW to non-WWW redirect with NGINX with https

This tutorial worked like a charm, so I’d like to share a piece that solved my problem in a second. Add this to your .conf file in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/:

server {
listen 80;
access_log off;
error_log off;
server_name www.lovelywebsite.com;
return 301 https://lovelywebsite.com;
}

Then reload:

sudo systemctl reload nginx