Shopify redirects: when to create one and where it should point

A store that has been trading for three years has dead URLs it has never counted. Products discontinued, a collection renamed, a handle tidied in a hurry, a supplier line dropped when the margin stopped working. Each leaves a URL that used to work and now returns a 404, and a few of those still have links pointing at them and still turn up in Google.

Shopify ships a redirect tool for exactly this. It takes ten seconds per entry, and most stores use it in one of two wrong ways: they redirect everything, or they redirect everything to the homepage. Both waste the work.

Moving an entire store onto Shopify from another platform is a different job with a different failure mode, and it has its own guide in replatforming without losing your rankings. This is about the redirects a running store needs on an ordinary Tuesday. The examples come from a pet gear store selling harnesses, beds and crates, a category with enough product churn to make the decisions difficult.

What does a Shopify redirect actually do?

It sends both a visitor and a search engine from a URL that no longer exists to one that does, and it carries most of the ranking signal the old URL had earned. Shopify issues these as permanent redirects, which is the behaviour you want.

The reason to care is the signal rather than the visitor. If a forum thread or a breed club’s stockist page ever linked to your discontinued step-in harness, that link is worth something to your domain. A 404 throws it away. A redirect hands it to a page that can still sell.

What a redirect cannot do is create value that was never there. Redirecting a URL nobody linked to and that never ranked moves nothing from nowhere to somewhere. It adds a row to a list you then have to maintain. That distinction is what the rest of this post turns on.

Where do you create redirects in the Shopify admin?

In the URL redirects screen. Current admins put it under Content alongside menus; older ones filed it under Online Store and then Navigation, so if a guide sends you somewhere that does not exist, that is why. Old path in the first field, new path in the second, then save. Paths only, starting with a slash, no domain.

Two things on that screen matter more than the add button. The first is bulk import: it accepts a CSV of old and new path pairs, which turns an afternoon of clicking into a five minute upload. For anything over roughly twenty redirects, build the sheet and import it, because typing rows by hand is how one gets entered wrong and nobody notices for a year.

The second is the checkbox that appears when you edit a product’s URL handle, offering to create a redirect from the old one. Leave it ticked, always. It is the most valuable default in the SEO section of a Shopify product page, and unticking it to keep the redirect list short is a false economy.

Here is the gap that generates most of the work: deleting a product creates no redirect at all. Shopify protects you when you rename something and leaves you entirely alone when you delete it. Since deleting discontinued products is a normal part of running a store, that is where dead URLs come from.

Which dead URLs deserve a redirect, and which should stay 404?

Redirect a dead URL when something links to it or when it still earns impressions. Let everything else 404.

A 404 is a correct, honest answer to a request for a page that should no longer exist. Google crawls it a few times, works out the absence is deliberate and drops the URL. That is the outcome you want. The idea that 404s are damage to be eliminated is what produces bloated redirect lists, and it is wrong.

Three questions decide each URL:

• Does anything link to it, from outside the store or from inside it?
• Did it earn impressions or clicks in the last twelve months?
• Is there an obvious live equivalent to send it to?

Two clear yeses means write the redirect. Three noes means leave it. The middle cases are judgement, and getting those wrong in either direction costs very little, which is worth remembering before you spend a weekend on this.

One Shopify-specific pattern is worth knowing before you start. A store generates far more URLs than it has products, because the same item is reachable through collection paths and variant query strings. Those are not pages you retired. They are duplicates the platform created, canonical tags handled them while they were live, and they need no redirects when they stop resolving.

Where should a retired product URL point?

At the nearest live equivalent. Failing that, the collection the product sat in. The homepage almost never.

Google’s documentation is explicit that redirecting deleted pages to the homepage gets treated as a soft 404, so the redirect is ignored and you keep none of the signal you were trying to preserve. You also drop a visitor who wanted one harness onto a page selling everything, which converts about as well as it sounds.

The ladder for the pet gear store, best destination first:

• A discontinued colour of a harness you still sell goes to that harness’s product page.
• A discontinued model with a successor goes to the successor. Whoever wanted the old crate almost certainly wants the new one.
• A discontinued line with no successor goes to its collection, so a request for a retired orthopaedic bed lands on the beds you do stock.
• A retired collection goes to the nearest live one, or its parent.
• A seasonal item returning next winter should not be redirected at all. Keep the page, mark it unavailable and let it hold its rankings until the stock lands.

That last one catches stores out every year. Redirecting a seasonal product in February and rebuilding the page in October throws away a URL that would have been on page one when the season opened.

Why is my Shopify redirect not working?

Nine times out of ten, because the old path still resolves. Shopify serves a redirect only for a path that would otherwise 404, so a draft page or a duplicate that still exists quietly wins over the rule you wrote.

The other causes, in the order we hit them:

• A chain. The old URL redirects to one that itself redirects. It works for a visitor and dilutes the signal, and after three or four hops search engines stop following.
• The wrong path format. The tool wants a path beginning with a slash, not a full URL with the domain on the front.
• Query strings. Shopify matches the path, so a rule written against a URL with tracking parameters will not behave as you expect.
• Your own browser. Permanent redirects cache hard, so you keep getting the old target back after fixing the rule.

Test from outside the browser rather than trusting what you see:

curl -sI https://yourstore.com/products/old-harness-handle | head -n 5

A working redirect returns a 301 and a location header pointing where you intended. A 200 means the page still exists and your rule is dormant. A 404 means nothing matched.

How do you find the 404s that are costing you traffic?

Search Console’s Pages report, under the “Not found (404)” reason. That is Google’s own record of the dead URLs it has crawled on your store, which is exactly the population that matters.

Work it in this order. Export the 404 list. Take each URL to the Performance report, filtered by page over the last twelve months, and see whether it earned anything before it died. Then check the Links report for external links pointing at it. Either signal puts the URL on the redirect sheet with a destination. Neither takes it off the list.

It is the same habit that produces the striking distance keyword list: your own Search Console beats any third party estimate, because every number in it is what happened to your store. Our Search Insights module runs this on a schedule and flags dead URLs that still hold impressions, but the manual version costs an hour and finds the same URLs.

Broken internal links are the other half, and Search Console will not show you those. A crawl of your own store finds the menu entries, product cards and in-article links still pointing at deleted products. Fixing those at source matters more than redirecting them, as the next section covers and as our guide to internal linking on Shopify goes into. The Wise Links module does that crawl.

What does a redirect not fix?

A redirect is a patch over a broken link, and patches accumulate. Three things it leaves undone:

• Internal links still pointing at the dead URL. The redirect makes them work. It does not make them right. Update the menu entry, the article or the product card, and let the redirect serve the outside world only.
• Chains and loops you created yourself. Every rename adds a hop, and renaming a handle back to one you previously redirected away leaves the request nowhere to go. Once a year, sort the list and collapse anything pointing at a URL that appears in the old column.
• The reason the page died. If a supplier keeps discontinuing lines, the list grows every quarter, and the fix is upstream in how you archive rather than delete.

What this costs, and what automating it changes

An hour to clear the backlog on a store that has never done it, then about ten minutes a month. That is genuinely all it is. Redirects are cheap maintenance you can do with the Shopify admin, Search Console and a spreadsheet, and no part of this post needs software from us or anyone else.

What we automated in QueryClimb is the finding rather than the fixing: which dead URLs still hold impressions, which internal links point at nothing, and which pages the work feeds back into through the content calendar and Blog Writer. The case study covers what that loop did to our own store’s traffic and the pricing page covers what it costs. Redirect hygiene is the part of it you should be least willing to pay for, because the hour it takes by hand is an hour you spend once.

Redirects are also the tail end of the publishing system in the working system behind a store that ranks, because a store that merges and retires pages properly generates these decisions every month.

Frequently asked questions

Should I delete a product or just unpublish it?

Unpublish it if there is any chance it comes back. That keeps the URL out of the store without destroying it, so there is no redirect decision to make later. Delete only when the line is gone for good, and write the redirect at the same time rather than promising yourself you will do it later.

Do I need an app to manage Shopify redirects?

No. The built in tool creates redirects, imports them in bulk from a CSV and exports the list, which covers what a store needs. Apps here mostly add 404 monitoring and bulk suggestions, which are conveniences rather than capabilities. Spend the budget elsewhere until your list runs to several hundred rows.

Can Shopify do wildcard or pattern based redirects?

Not in the way an Apache or nginx rule can. Shopify’s tool matches exact paths, so there is no regex and no rule that catches every URL under a retired collection in one line. For a large batch, the answer is a CSV with one row per URL rather than a clever pattern.

Does a 404 hurt my Shopify SEO?

A 404 on a page that should not exist does no harm. It is the correct response and Google handles it as one. What costs you is a 404 on a URL that still has links or still ranks, because that signal gets discarded. It is the only reason to keep a redirect list at all.

What is the difference between a 301 and a 302 on Shopify?

A 301 is permanent, a 302 is temporary, and Shopify’s URL tool creates permanent ones. That is what a retired product needs, because a temporary redirect tells search engines to keep the old URL indexed and wait. For a genuinely temporary case, such as a product returning next month, leaving the page live and marked unavailable beats any redirect.