In this tutorial, you will learn how to import redirects into your Shopify store.
Those are also known as 301 Redirects – they tell the browser that the URL has permanently moved to another URL.
Steps to import redirects:
- To import redirects, create new Excel file and copy column names from the Matrixify template file Redirects sheet.
- Leave ID column empty, fill in Path column with URLs or paths you want to redirect from, Target column with URLs you want to redirect to, set Command column values to NEW.
- Rename the Excel file sheet (tab) to “Redirects” so that the Matrixify app knows what’s inside that sheet.
- Import the new Excel file to Shopify using the Matrixify app.
When do you need Redirects?
- The typical reason for making redirects – when you are migrating from your old eCommerce Platform to Shopify. Usually, search engines have indexed your old URLs and it takes time to reindex your new site. Therefore, visitors will still be sent to your old URLs. Your domain will remain the same, but the path to products or pages will be completely different. Customers also might have saved those URLs in their bookmarks. Above all, there may be precious “backlinks” referring to your site which you don’t want to get the 404 error that page is not found – you want them still to get to the new correct page.
- Another case for using redirects is when you changed handles of the products, collections or pages, or any other items. After that, URLs with old product handles are still in place. To make those URLs working, you can add redirects from URLs with old handles to URLs with new handles. For example, redirect from https://yourdomain.myshopify.com/products/old-product-handle to https://yourdomain.myshopify.com/products/new-product-handle.
Good to know:
- In the “Path” column you can put the whole URL with the domain like “https://yourserver.com/products/product-123“, or just the path, like “/products/product-123“.
- Here you can find full documentation on redirects.
- You may also want to read, How to Bulk Delete Redirects tutorial.
- When updating Handle for any item the app by default will also create a Redirect from old Handle to the new one. You can turn this off in the Import options with importing a file.
