Member Avatar for nathanpacker

I am making some changes to a website for a friend, (because the guy who created her website charges $50 an hour, and I'm only $25). And I noticed that he has her set up with an index.html, and a home.html. Both of the pages are identical. When you type in just the url, it takes you to home.html. And the links on the top of the page to go to the home page all point to home.html. So what is the point of even having an index.html? Is it going to be bad if I just delete it? Will some browsers point to the index.html? If so, that means every time I make a change to home.html, I have to make those changes to index.html as well!
Thanks.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by tgreer

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Following and , here are practical, non-invasive steps to make one URL the single source of truth and avoid update drift, SEO problems, or broken links.

Pick a canonical URL (prefer the clean root /) and make the other URL redirect to it. Server-side 301 redirects are best because they preserve search ranking. Example options:

# Apache simple redirect
Redirect 301 /index.html /
# Apache (mod_rewrite) to catch direct requests reliably
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} /index\.html [NC]
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ / [R=301,L]
# Nginx
rewrite ^/index\.html$ / permanent;

If server config is not editable, a very short meta refresh page can be used as a temporary fallback (not ideal for SEO):

<!doctype html>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=/">

A couple of alternative approaches: create a filesystem symlink so both names point to one file (ln -s home.html index.html) or add a canonical link in the head of the preferred page:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/">

Checks and housekeeping: search the codebase and external backlinks for references to index.html (grep, analytics, or server logs), run curl -I https://example.com/ to inspect headers and confirm the redirect, clear any CDN caches after changes, and update the site map. After deploying redirects, resubmit the sitemap so search engines re-crawl the preferred URL.

Server docs and best-practice references:

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Member Avatar for tgreer

Typically, in the absence of a particular file in a URL (the URL points to a folder), the web server is configured to deliver an "index" file inside the folder. Traditionally, this is index.html, or index.php, etc. It doesn't have to be. It sounds like the developer started with index.html, and for some reason later created home.html, set the web server to deliver it, and never deleted index.html.

In other words, you don't have to worry about browsers: they don't determine what file gets served.

Member Avatar for nathanpacker

Thanks, so it sounds like I could delete the index.html, and it would be just fine? I just don't want to have to keep worrying about updating it.

Member Avatar for tgreer

Yes, that's what it sounds like. Be sure to make a backup and test the site, of course.

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