301 redirects on Shopify: the complete guide (2026)

A 301 redirect tells browsers and search engines: "this page has moved permanently, go here instead, and transfer the old page's reputation." On Shopify it's your main weapon against dead links. Here's how to use it well.

The native tool: Online Store → Navigation → URL redirects

Shopify ships a perfectly good redirect engine. In the admin, go to Online Store → Navigation → View URL redirects, click Create URL redirect, enter the old path (/products/old-tee) and the target (/products/organic-tee). Done. The redirect is live, returns a proper 301, and works on all your domains.

Three important properties:

• They only fire on 404. A Shopify redirect never overrides a live page. It's only consulted when the requested path doesn't exist, so you can't break a working page with one.
• They're native. They belong to your store, not to any app. They survive theme changes and app uninstalls.
• They pass link equity. As true 301s, they transfer the old URL's SEO authority to the target.

Bulk import and export via CSV

For migrations, the admin accepts a CSV with two columns, Redirect from and Redirect to:

Redirect from,Redirect to
/old-shop/tee,/products/tee
/old-shop/hoodie,/products/hoodie

Export works the same way, which is useful for backups and audits. If you're migrating from WooCommerce, Magento or Wix, building this CSV from your old sitemap is step one of the replatforming checklist.

The limits of the native tool

The engine is solid but the workflow around it is manual, and that's where stores bleed:

1. No detection. Shopify never tells you a URL is 404ing. You create redirects for the URLs you think are broken; the real list is always longer.
2. No wildcards. /blog/* to /blogs/* is impossible natively. A blog restructure means creating every redirect one by one.
3. No automation. Delete 50 seasonal products and you have 50 redirects to create by hand, or 50 dead URLs.
4. Renamed handles are half-covered. Shopify offers a checkbox to create the redirect when you rename a handle, but it's easy to miss, and it does nothing for the old collection URLs of that product.

Strategies that scale

Redirect to relevance, not to the homepage. A deleted product should point to its closest substitute, or failing that its collection. Mass homepage redirects get classified as soft 404s by Google and pass little value.

Think in patterns. When whole URL families move, define the rule once: /blog/* to /blogs/{1}, or /collection/*/products/* to /collections/{1}/products/{2}. Tools that support captures turn thousand-row migrations into three lines.

Cover deletions automatically. The moment a product is deleted or archived, its URL should get a redirect. This is a background job, not a human task.

Log everything. Six months from now you'll want to know why /products/x redirects to /products/y. An activity log gives you the answer in seconds.

When to automate

If your catalog changes weekly (new drops, seasonal cleanups, supplier turnover), manual redirect management can't keep up. That's the case Radar404 handles: it watches your 404 page in real time, uses AI to match each broken URL to the right page in your actual catalog, creates the native Shopify 301 automatically (or waits for your one-click approval below your confidence threshold), and applies your wildcard patterns on the fly. Because the redirects it creates are native, they keep working even without the app.

Whatever tool you choose, the rule is the same: every URL that ever earned a click or a link deserves a destination. The 301 is how you keep that promise.