I’m migrating a site from squarespace and this has a flat url structure ie domain.com/page1 etc
There are a lot of pages and I was hoping to use the cms to create dynamic item pages quickly. However, the cms demands that item page urls include the collection name as the root ie domain.com/collectioname/page1
It does not appear to allow variables immediately after the domain unless I’m missing something? Some of these pages have very good authority and I don’t want traffic to tank as a result of the migration which did happen on another site even though I did all the redirects properly including in search console.
It will be so much extra work to do this as flat pages so can anyone offer me any solutions?
Yes, in my, now sadly, extensive testing, I’ve confirmed that the SLUG or URL Prefix must start with text and not a varuiable. Seems we can have anything we like but there must be static text at the beginning.
So, ABC/[article-slug]is fine but [article-slug] and [variable]/[article-slug] are not.
Correct - the reason fixed text is required before any variables is because dynamic pages work like routers behind the scenes.
Here’s what’s happening:
When a request is made to something like /abc/[slug], the system first identifies the static prefix (abc).
That prefix tells the router which collection or set of dynamic pages to use.
Then it uses the [slug] to find the specific item within that collection.
Think of it like this:
If you have multiple dynamic page sets like /abc/[slug], /xyz/[slug], /stv/[slug], the prefix (abc, xyz, stv) acts as the key to route the request to the right group.
Without a static prefix, the router wouldn’t know which collection to check—variables alone aren’t enough to determine that.