Step By Step URL 301 Redirection in Shopify

When it comes to having online stores that are built from Shopify, business owners need to make sure that their customers are able to find and buy their products without any hassle. One important thing to look out for is the URLs (Uniform Resource Locator) of your Shopify website.

URLs are simply an address or identifier that helps online users to find what they’re looking for. Each product, category/collection, and menu, in your Shopify store has a URL that can be found on the ‘search bar/tab’ on top of the page. Sometimes, URLs can lead to a ‘404 error’ page which means that the link is broken or not working as expected. From a user point of view, if you are browsing through a Shopify website and click on a product that you like but then it leads you to a blank page with ‘404’ on it, you would easily skip to the next best store and not think of visiting that site again. If this happens with more than 50 products in your online store, your business will start to lose customers and eventually stop making profits.

Step By Step URL 301 Redirection in Shopify

If you are worried about your online business losing customers just because of 404 error pages, don’t worry. We have a solution for you, and it only takes a couple of minutes to fix this error.

The solution for 404 error pages on your Shopify website is 301 URL redirection. It is a way of letting the bots (crawlers) know that you have permanently moved a URL (page) to another URL (page). This way, your customers won’t end up on a 404 page and will be able to click and buy a product that they need

Here is how to create 301 redirection in Shopify: Step-by-Step

Here’s how to create 301 redirects manually:

From the 3 options on the “View URL Redirects” page, click on the “Create URL redirect” button.

You will find the “Redirect from” and “Redirect to” fields

To redirect the users within your Shopify store, you can use only the page path e.g. “/old-product”. Enter this page path in the “Redirect from” field.

To redirect users outside of your Shopify store, use the full URL. e.g “https://www.yoursite.com/old-product”

Now, you can add the new page path e.g. “/new-product” in the “Redirect to” field.

After adding the URL, click “Save redirect”.

Add the broken links one by by using this manual method if there are only a few.

Here’s how to create 301 redirects in bulk:

In the “View URL Redirects” page, click on Import.

You should see a pop-up that says “Download a sample CSV template to see an example of the format required”. You’ll also see the “Add file” option.

Download the sample CSV template and upload all the page paths with 404 errors in the “Redirect from” column, and add the new page paths in the “Redirect to” column. Upload this file.

You can review the URL redirects after you upload the CSV file on the “Import details screen”

Click “Import redirect” and click “Close”

Here, you’ll find all the URLs that you want to redirect.

Step 5: Test Redirected URLs

You can test the URL redirects by searching the old URL to make sure it has been successfully redirected to the new URL.

For e.g.

If you enter the old URL: “https://www.yoursite.com/old-product”, It should take you
to the new URL, something like “https://www.yoursite.com/new-product”

You can even delete and manage 301 redirects on Shopify by going to Online Store > Navigation > URL Redirects and selecting the redirects to edit or remove them.

Creating a 301 redirect for your Shopify store is important to maintaining SEO rankings when you are migrating content, removing old pages, or updating URLs. A 301 redirect makes sure that all the traffic and search engine rankings that are linked with the old URL are redirected to the new URL. This helps maintain your online store’s SEO ranking and prevents users from running into 404 pages.