What Is URL Path?

Why It Matters

The path is what makes the difference between redirecting a whole domain and redirecting individual pages. Without path forwarding, every URL on your old domain goes to the homepage of your new domain — losing deep links and SEO value.

Path Examples

https://example.com/blog/2024/my-post?ref=twitter#comments
                    └──────────┬─────┘
                          URL path

Full URL	Path
https://example.com/	/ (root)
https://example.com/pricing	/pricing
https://example.com/blog/my-post	/blog/my-post
https://example.com/api/v2/users	/api/v2/users

The last segment of the path is often called the URL slug — that’s the human-readable identifier like my-post in /blog/my-post.

Path Forwarding Strategies

Strategy	Old URL	New URL	Use Case
Domain-only	old.com/anything	new.com	Simple brand swap
Path preservation	old.com/blog/post	new.com/blog/post	Brand migration
Path rewrite	old.com/old-page	new.com/new-page	URL restructuring
Wildcard + path	*.old.com/page	new.com/page	Complex migration

How Domain Forward Handles This

Enable path forwarding in your redirect configuration to preserve the URL path from source to destination. Domain Forward also supports query string pass-through and custom path rewriting.