Addresses and redirects

How a page gets its address, and what happens to the old one when it changes.

Pages nest, and the nesting is the address

A page can sit inside another page, to any depth, and its address is built from the chain:

Services                 /services
  Dental                 /services/dental
    Whitening            /services/dental/whitening

Move a page and its address changes, along with every page beneath it. There is nothing else to keep in step — the address is derived from where the page sits, not stored separately.

The homepage lends no segment

Your homepage is served at /, never at its own slug. A page inside the homepage is at /about, not /home/about.

Addresses have no trailing slash

Every address on a MightyBuilder site is written without one — /contact, not /contact/. If somebody types the other spelling, they are redirected to the real one, so a link written either way reaches the page and only one version is ever indexed.

Renaming makes a redirect

Rename or move a published page and a redirect is created automatically, from the old address to the new one. Anyone following an old link — a search result, a printed card, somebody’s bookmark — still arrives.

The redirect ships in the same release as the rename, so there is never a window where the new address is live and the old one is broken.

Automatic redirects are marked as such. Edit one yourself and it becomes yours: the system will not overwrite or remove it afterwards. If the list ever grows too long, the oldest automatic ones are dropped first and the ones you wrote by hand are never dropped.

A page that was never published gets no redirect

There is nothing to redirect from. Renaming a draft is free.

Disabled, trashed, and the 404

A page can be enabled, disabled or trashed. Only an enabled page is on the internet — a disabled one stays in your dashboard and is deliberately kept off the live site. Trashing does not move anything, which is what makes restoring work. Unlike everything else on this page, a status change does not wait for Publish: see Status and trash.

You can choose which page answers when an address does not exist. It is kept out of the sitemap, because telling a search engine to index the page that says “this does not exist” is the one thing a sitemap must not do.