Can I keep my existing URLs after migrating to Statamic?

Yes, and you might not want to.

We can absolutely preserve your existing WordPress URLs during a migration. But it’s worth considering whether you should. WordPress’s URL structure is famously rigid — your options are basically whatever the permalink settings offer, and if you’ve ever tried to change them on an established site, you know how painful that is. A lot of WordPress sites end up with URL patterns that were chosen early, regretted later, and never fixed because the redirect overhead felt too risky.

Statamic’s routing is dramatically more flexible. Each collection has its own configurable route, and you can define whatever URL structure makes sense for that content type. Want dates in blog URLs but not in case study URLs? Done. Want nested parent/child paths for some content but flat slugs for others? That’s just a route definition. The point is, you’re not locked into a global permalink setting that applies to everything.

A migration is the single best time to rethink your URL structure, because you’re already doing the work of mapping content from one system to another. If your WordPress URLs are /2019/04/some-blog-post/ and you’d rather they were /blog/some-blog-post/, migration is when you make that change. Same for cleaning up messy category hierarchies, shortening overly long paths, or getting rid of URL patterns that don’t match how your site actually works anymore.

When URLs change, we set up 301 redirects from every old URL to its new location. Statamic has a built-in redirects feature for this, and for larger sites we can manage them at the server or CDN level too. Either way, the result is the same: search engines follow the redirect, transfer the ranking signals to the new URL, and bookmarks and inbound links keep working. We’ve done this across enough migrations that the redirect mapping is a well-practiced part of our process.

If your current URLs are already clean and well-structured, keeping them is straightforward. If they’re not, this is your chance to fix them properly. A site audit is the right starting point to understand what you have and what the options are. Our migration guide also walks through how URL mapping works in practice.