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A redirect preserves the value a URL has accumulated — links, rankings, and citation history — when that URL changes or disappears. Losing redirects during a migration is one of the few SEO mistakes that is both severe and permanent.

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Creating redirects on Shopify

URL redirects are managed in the Shopify admin under Content → Menus → View URL Redirects (older admins show this under Online Store → Navigation). Shopify issues them as 301 (permanent), which is what you want for anything that has moved for good. You can bulk import redirects via CSV, which is essential for migrations.

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What to redirect

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Redirect to the closest equivalent, not the homepage

Mass-redirecting removed products to the homepage is treated as a soft 404 — the destination does not satisfy the original intent, so the value is not passed. Redirect to the nearest genuinely relevant page. Where none exists, the collection is a better target than the homepage.

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Migration checklist

Losing traffic in a migration is almost always a redirect failure. Before switching:
  1. Crawl the existing site and export every indexable URL
  2. Export Search Console data — every URL with impressions or clicks over the last 16 months
  3. Export your backlink profile — URLs with external links are the highest priority
  4. Map old URL → new URL for every one of them, individually
  5. Load redirects before the switch, not after
  6. Verify after launch by crawling the old URL list and confirming each returns a single 301 to a 200

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After launch

  • Submit the new sitemap in Search Console
  • Watch Search Console → Pages for a spike in 404s and fix as they appear
  • Check for redirect chains — each additional hop loses a little and wastes crawl
  • Expect a temporary dip in rankings; a clean migration recovers, a broken one does not

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Redirect chains

A → B → C should be collapsed to A → C. Chains accumulate silently over years of small changes and waste crawl budget on large stores. Check them with a crawler after every migration.

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Why this matters beyond rankings

A moved page loses accumulated citation history in AI answers as well as search rankings. Since citations are volatile to begin with, a broken URL is unlikely to be re-earned quickly. Decide slugs once and keep them.

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What Ryze does

The Technical Audit finds broken pages that still get search clicks. Fix with agent creates the 301 redirect in Shopify only when your connection has redirect access — that needs a Shopify Custom App with the write_online_store_navigation scope. The standard Shopify connection can’t create redirects, so the agent gives you the exact from → to pairs to add under Content → Menus → View URL Redirects.