One thing you don’t want on your Shopify store is broken links as this is going to result in your sites visitors seeing your 404 Not Found page, which has a negative impact on:
- User experience (they usually click off and go elsewhere)
- SEO
- Sales and conversion rates
So what you need to do is set up 301 redirects for your Shopify store and while Shopify now offers a built-in redirection tool, it still doesn’t detect broken links so you may need to use an SEO app or third-party monitoring tool to check for them.
But in this post, we will show you how to set up 301 redirects using the built-in Shopify tool.
Step 1: Go To The Redirect Tool
Step 1 is to go to the Shopify redirect tool, which can be found by going to Sales channels → Navigation and then clicking the button in the top right that says View URL redirects.
This will then take you to the page where you can view existing redirects, delete selected redirects and add new ones.
Step 2: Add A New Redirect
From the redirect overview page, you can choose to add a new redirect in two ways:
- Create a new redirect manually
- Upload a CSV file (Shopify provide a template for this) with all redirects, this is great if you need to do a large number of redirects at one time
For this post, we will show you how to manually create a redirect, so click on the button in the top right that says Create URL redirect and it will take you to the following screen:
Enter the URL you want to redirect from, the easiest way to get this is to go to the front end of your store and copy the URL from the address bar in your browser and paste it into the box on this screen.
The tool will cut the URL you are directing from to the part after your domain name once you save the redirect.
Then enter the URL you want to redirect to but you only want to enter the part after your domain name if it is an internal redirect, so rather than pasting https://www.mydomain.com/products/product-name, you just want to paste /products/products.
If you are redirecting to an external URL, then enter the full URL.
Once you have entered the from and to URL’s, click save and you have then added this redirect to your Shopify store.
Editing A Redirect
There may be times where you need to edit a redirect, for example, if the page you initially redirected to now needs to be redirected.
This stops you from having redirect chains on your site, which are not only bad for SEO but also user experience as the browser is having to redirect through multiple pages to get to a live one.
It is really easy to edit a redirect as you just need to click on either the redirect from or redirect to URL that are in the redirect overview page (don’t check the box next to the URLs) and this brings you to the edit page.
And it looks the same as the add new redirect page, with the only difference being that there are URLs entered in the two boxes.
To change either URL, simply click on the box and enter the URL that you now to to redirect to or from and when you are happy, just click the save button and it will be updated.
Deleting A Redirect
As with editing a redirect, there may be times when you need to delete a redirect, for example you want to bring the original URL back live and people can access it.
There are two ways you can do this, you can go on the edit redirect page and click the red button that says Delete redirect or you can do it from the redirect overview page.
The second way allows you to delete a single or multiple redirects in one go, simply check the box next to the redirect/s that you want to delete and then click the Delete selected redirects button and then confirm that you want to delete them.
Note that you can’t recover these redirects once they have been deleted.
Conclusion
That is how you create a 301 redirect in Shopify and Shopify does create auto redirects when you change the URL of a page but won’t set them up if you delete a page, these need to be done manually as shown above.
Hi, I'm Paul, the Owner and Founder of EcommerceGold.
I ran my own Ecommerce Business for over 7 years and now help others start their own online retail empires!