Create a URL redirect in Shopify

URL redirect, often referred to as a 301 (though there is a 302, in 99% of the cases you are looking at the 301), is a technique that is used to redirect your page’s visitors and search engines to a different page/URL.

Let’s say you had a decent-performing product that you have stopped selling, for any reason. You have deleted it, but the page is still indexed in Google, and also has backlinks to it from other websites, and the visitors that are landing on that page are getting the 404 – page not found, and leaving your website.

That could potentially cost you a lot of revenue. How about you redirect those users to another similar product or page on your site where they could find what they are looking for? You can do that easily in Shopify by using a URL redirect.

The URL redirects may be a little harder to find in Shopify in case you don’t know where to look.

How to create a URL redirect in Shopify?

Navigate to your Admin -> Online Store -> Navigation:

On the right you will see a link to “View URL redirects”.

Click the “View URL redirects” and you will land on the “URL redirects” page. Now click the green “Create URL redirect” button:

In the first field, “Redirect from”, you will enter your old link, the one you want to redirect users from, and in the other, the “Redirect to” field, you will enter the new URL destination. And of course, SAVE the redirect.

Please note that the page you are redirecting FROM needs to be deleted or in draft – you can not redirect a live, working page. If the page is live, the URL redirect will not work.

Another thing to note is that, per Shopify’s documentation, You can’t redirect URLs that begin with the following prefixes: /apps, /application, /cart, /carts, /orders, /shop, or /services, or redirect URLs that use fixed Shopify paths: /products, /collections, /collections/all.

Importing URL redirects

Another option you have is to import the URL redirects via a .CSV file. This would be a better solution in case you have multiple links that need to be redirected. That could be the case if you are migrating to Shopify from another platform, like BigCommerce or Magento.

It would be much faster to simply add the links to one file and then import it than manually go through the process described above for 500 times, or more.

What is a .CSV file?

CSV, or comma-separated values, is a text file that stores mostly tabular data, such as text and numbers (think of Excel-type of file) which we use to import large amounts of data in Shopify, such as products, or in our case, the redirected URLs.

It is always the best idea to download a sample .csv file directly from Shopify’s admin, in case something changes in the future, which is why I won’t add the download file here, but this is how it currently looks:

If we were to add more redirects, we would simply paste the next one below in this same format, and continue for as many items as we need. After that, it is just a simple click of the button, namely the “Import URL redirects” button.