Q: Should I bother redirecting trailing-slash and uppercase URL variants, or is that overkill?

Q: Should I bother redirecting trailing-slash and uppercase URL variants, or is that overkill?

Not overkill at all — these tiny inconsistencies cause real duplicate-content and chain problems after a migration.

Short answer: pick one canonical form for slashes and case, then 301 every variant to it — but do it in the right order.

Long answer:
Decide your standard: trailing slash or not, lowercase always. Then redirect /Page, /page/, /PAGE all to the one true /page.

The tactic that trips people: ordering. If your normalization rules run after your migration rules, you create chains (old URL → new URL → lowercased new URL). Put normalization first or fold it into the same rule so everything lands on the final URL in one hop.

Server-level handles this best — Nginx and Apache both do case/slash rewrites efficiently.

Next step: define your canonical URL format, then test a few variants with a redirect-chain checker to confirm each reaches the target in a single 301.