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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 Online Store → Navigation → URL Redirects. 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. Ryze flags them during the audit.

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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.