Shopify Redirects: How to Set Up a 301 and Build a 404 Page That Doesn’t Lose Visitors

If you’ve read our guide to Shopify URL structure, you already know what you can and can’t change about your permalinks, and which changes are actually worth making. If you’ve read our canonical URL guide, you know how to stop Google from indexing two live versions of the same page. This post picks up where both of those leave off: what to do after a URL has actually changed. On purpose or by accident. That’s a 301 redirect, and, for whatever slips through, a 404 page that doesn’t just dead-end the person who followed the old link.

Most merchants land here for one of two reasons: they renamed a product or collection handle and started seeing 404 warnings in Google Search Console, or they deleted a product or retired a collection and forgot something out there still links to it. Either way, it’s the same two-part fix. Redirect the old URL, and make sure whatever still slips through doesn’t hit a dead end.

When you actually need a Shopify redirect

A redirect is only needed when a URL that used to resolve to something no longer does. That happens more often than merchants expect:

• You renamed a product or collection handle — to fix a typo, shorten it, or work a keyword in
• You deleted a product that still has backlinks, bookmarks, or old ad/email links pointing to it
• You merged or retired a collection into another one
• You changed the URL of a standalone page or blog post
• You migrated from another platform (or another Shopify theme) with a different URL structure
• You added or switched a domain

In every case, the old address needs to point somewhere. Either automatically, or because you set it up yourself.

Does Shopify redirect old URLs automatically?

Sometimes — but only for a single edit at a time, and only if you catch it. When you change a product, collection, or page handle inside Shopify admin, a “Create a URL redirect for” checkbox appears on the same screen. Check it before you save, and Shopify creates the 301 for you.

Two gaps matter here. First, that checkbox doesn’t appear when you delete a product or collection outright — there’s no “new” URL for Shopify to offer to redirect to, so nothing gets created unless you add it manually. Second, it doesn’t appear at all when handles change in bulk. A CSV re-import or a bulk-editing app rewriting hundreds of URL handles in one pass has no per-item checkbox to check, and no app closes that gap automatically either: Plug In AI’s own redirect-on-change only fires when you edit one product’s URL through the app individually, not across a bulk batch.

That’s exactly where redirects get missed at scale rather than one at a time. If you’re working from a list of already-broken links rather than a URL you’re about to change, Plug In SEO’s broken link detector finds every 404 across your store. And lets you fix each one by pasting in the new destination. It builds the redirect for you, one link at a time.

How to set up a 301 redirect on Shopify manually

Creating one redirect

1. In your Shopify admin, go to Content > Menus, then click View URL redirects (older store setups may still show this under Online Store > Navigation).
2. Click Create URL redirect.
3. In “Redirect from,” enter the old path only — e.g. /products/old-handle, not the full domain.
4. In “Redirect to,” enter the new path, e.g. /products/new-handle.
5. Click Save redirect. It’s live immediately — no propagation delay.

Three things trip merchants up here. Redirects only fire on a URL that’s genuinely broken — if the old path still resolves to a live page for any reason, the redirect won’t trigger. A handful of system paths (/apps, /cart, /orders) can’t be used as a “redirect from” at all, live or not. Those need a theme-level fix rather than a redirect record. And the destination matters as much as the redirect itself: only point an old URL at a genuinely similar product or collection.

A redirect to your homepage or an unrelated category still “works” technically. But it tells visitors and search engines the wrong thing about what that URL is now about.

Creating many redirects at once

The same URL redirects screen accepts a CSV import, so you don’t have to add large batches one by one. Useful after a platform migration or a big URL restructure. A single Shopify store can hold up to 100,000 redirects (20 million on Shopify Plus), so volume isn’t the constraint; remembering to create them is.

Building a 404 page that doesn’t dead-end visitors

Even with every redirect in place, some broken links will get through. An old bookmark, a stale backlink you don’t control, a typo in someone’s URL bar. That’s what your 404 page is for, and Shopify’s default one is thin: a plain “page not found” message with a link back to your homepage, nothing more.

That’s the human cost. There’s a machine-readable version of the same problem, too: SE Ranking’s December 2025 analysis of 145,463 URLs cited by ChatGPT and 438,903 cited by Google’s AI Overviews found ChatGPT citing 404-returning URLs at more than double the rate (1.22% vs. 0.56%) — and 91% of ChatGPT’s broken citations were pages that no longer exist, not simple typos.

Option 1: Customize it with no code

Go to Online Store > Themes > Customize, then find the 404 page under “Other pages” (or “Templates,” depending on your theme) in the theme editor. Add a search bar, a couple of links to your best-selling collections, and a homepage button. Most themes let you drop these in as regular sections, the same way you’d edit any other page.

Option 2: Customize it with theme code

For more control, go to Online Store > Themes > Actions > Edit code and look for 404.liquid in the Templates folder (create it if it isn’t there). This is where you’d add dynamic content — recently viewed products, a category grid pulled from your store’s actual catalogue. Rather than a static message.

Either way, the goal is the same: make it obvious the page is gone, and give the visitor at least one real place to go next — search, homepage, or a popular collection. A 404 page that only says “not found” is a wall. One with a search bar and two links is a detour.