What Is Path Forwarding?

Why It Matters

When you move a website to a new domain, you don’t just have one URL — you might have hundreds or thousands of pages. Without path forwarding, every single link to your old domain dumps visitors on the homepage of the new site. They can’t find what they were looking for.

Path forwarding solves this by preserving the URL path during the redirect:

Without Path Forwarding	With Path Forwarding
old.com/pricing → new.com	old.com/pricing → new.com/pricing
old.com/blog/my-post → new.com	old.com/blog/my-post → new.com/blog/my-post
old.com/contact → new.com	old.com/contact → new.com/contact

This is critical for SEO preservation. Google treats page-to-page redirects much better than page-to-homepage redirects.

How It Works

The redirect server reads the incoming request path and appends it to the destination domain:

1. Request: GET /blog/my-post HTTP/1.1
2. Server reads the path: /blog/my-post
3. Server appends it to the destination: https://new-domain.com/blog/my-post
4. Response: 301 Moved Permanently + Location: https://new-domain.com/blog/my-post

The query string (everything after ?) is also preserved.

When to Use Path Forwarding

• Domain migrations where the URL structure stays the same on the new domain
• Brand changes where only the domain name changes
• Multi-domain consolidation when merging sites with similar structures
• Deep linking — preserving links to specific pages or app screens
• Catch-all redirects — combined with wildcards, forward any subdomain + path

When NOT to Use Path Forwarding

• The new domain has a completely different URL structure
• You’re redirecting a domain to a landing page (e.g., Linktree, Notion)
• You want all traffic to go to one specific page

How Domain Forward Handles This

Path forwarding is a toggle in the Domain Forward dashboard — enable it per forwarding rule. The full path and query string are appended to your destination URL. Works with 301 and 302 redirects, with full HTTPS support.