Shopify Redirects: The Complete 2026 Guide (Create, Manage, Export/Import)

Quick answer: Shopify redirects live under Content > Menus > URL redirects in your admin (some accounts still show this as "Navigation" both terms point to the same screen). You can create them one at a time, edit or delete them in bulk, and export or import them via CSV for large-scale changes. Shopify's native tool creates 301 (permanent) redirects; only a temporary 302 redirect needs a third-party app or custom code.

Standard stores can hold up to 100,000 redirects; Plus stores up to 20,000,000. Two rules trip people up most: a redirect only fires if the old URL currently returns a 404 it can't override a page that's still live and certain paths (/cart, /products, /collections, and a handful of others) can't be redirected at all, since Shopify's core functionality depends on them.

Most Shopify redirect guides cover the click-by-click admin steps and stop there. This one covers that too, but also the specific technical details that actually cause Shopify URL redirects to fail the auto-formatting behavior that silently breaks CSV imports, the exact reason a redirect sometimes "doesn't work" even though it looks correctly set up, and how to actually structure a bulk import without hitting errors partway through.

In your Shopify admin, go to Content > Menus, then click URL redirects that's the current path per Shopify's own help documentation. You'll also see some guides, including fairly recent ones, refer to this as being under "Navigation" instead. If Content > Menus doesn't match what you're seeing, check under Navigation Shopify's admin layout has shifted terminology across versions, and which one you see can depend on your store's specific admin rollout.

1. Go to Content > Menus > URL redirects.
2. Click Create URL redirect.
3. In the Redirect from field, enter the old path; this must be a relative path (starting with /), not the full URL. For example: /products/old-product-name.
4. In the Redirect to field, enter the destination a relative path for a page within your store, or a full URL (including https://) if redirecting to an external site.
5. Click Save redirect.

A full export gives you a snapshot of everything currently forwarding traffic on your store worth pulling before any major site change, so you have a record to fall back on if something breaks, and it's also the starting point if you'd rather clean up or restructure a large redirect list in a spreadsheet than click through each one in the admin.

1. Go to Content > Menus > URL redirects.
2. Click Export.
3. Choose whether to export all redirects or only the ones currently selected/filtered.
4. Select the CSV file format.
5. Click Export URL redirects. Shopify emails you a download link rather than downloading instantly for very large redirect lists, this can take a few minutes to arrive.

1. Go to Content > Menus > URL redirects.
2. Click Import.
3. Click Add file and select your CSV.
4. Click Upload file.

This is a genuinely separate feature from everything above, and it's easy to confuse the two given the similar name. If your store automatically forwards all traffic to one specific domain for example, always redirecting yourstore.com to www.yourstore.com, or bouncing visitors to a domain you don't actually want as primary that's controlled from Settings > Domains, not from URL redirects at all.

Click into your primary domain, and you'll find a toggle labeled "Redirect all traffic to this domain." Turning it off stops that automatic domain-wide forwarding. This is worth knowing specifically because troubleshooting it under URL redirects (where it doesn't exist) is a common dead end.

This is the gap that trips up more people than the store-wide redirect limit ever does: certain URL prefixes are reserved by Shopify's own architecture and simply can't be used as a "Redirect from" path, no matter how you configure it. These include anything starting with /apps, /application, /cart, /carts, /orders, /shop, or /services, along with Shopify's fixed structural paths like /products, /collections, and /collections/all.

Trying to route /cart to a custom checkout page, for instance, simply won't take the native redirect tool and rejects it because Shopify's core functionality depends on those paths staying exactly where they are. If you hit a redirect that silently won't save or apply, checking whether the source path falls into one of these reserved categories is worth doing before assuming something else is broken.

Shopify's built-in redirect tool creates 301 (permanent) redirects only. Understanding Shopify 301 redirects specifically matters here, since it's the type that transfers accumulated SEO ranking value ("link equity") from the old URL to the new one, the correct choice for permanent changes like renamed products, restructured collections, or a full domain migration.

A 302 (temporary) redirect signals to search engines that the move is short-term and the old URL may return useful for things like a temporary out-of-stock page pointing to a similar product, where you plan to restore the original URL later. Shopify's native admin doesn't offer a way to create a 302 specifically; achieving one requires a third-party redirect app or custom code in your theme. For the vast majority of ecommerce use cases permanent product moves, discontinued pages, migrations a 301 is what you actually want anyway.

• Renaming or restructuring product/collection URLs - anyone with the old link, including search engines with it indexed, needs to land somewhere that still works.
• Discontinuing a product - redirect to a similar product or the relevant collection page rather than letting the traffic hit a dead end.
• Migrating to Shopify from another platform - this is the highest-stakes redirect scenario, since your old platform's URL structure almost certainly doesn't match Shopify's, and every indexed page is at risk of becoming a 404 on launch day.
• Changing your domain or rebranding - every single indexed URL under the old domain needs to be mapped to its new equivalent, or you lose the SEO value built up under that domain entirely.

A redirect chain happens when URL A redirects to URL B, which then redirects again to URL C instead of sending the visitor (and the search engine crawler) straight to the final destination, they bounce through an extra hop first. Each additional hop adds load time and can dilute how much SEO value actually makes it to the final page. The fix is to always point a redirect directly at its true final destination if B has since moved to C, update A to point straight at C rather than leaving the chain intact.

A redirect loop is the more serious version: URL A redirects to URL B, and URL B redirects back to URL A, creating a cycle with no exit. Browsers and crawlers alike just bounce back and forth until they give up, which is a dead end dressed up as a working link. Loops usually happen by accident often after a URL gets reused for something else without checking whether an old redirect was still pointing at it. Auditing your redirect list periodically (via the export feature above) is the most reliable way to catch chains and loops before they quietly cost you traffic.

Beyond the "the old URL isn't actually a 404" issue covered above, a few other things commonly cause a redirect to appear broken:

• A typo in either URL. A missing character, an extra space, or a wrong slash in the "Redirect from" or "Redirect to" field is the single most common cause to double-check both fields character by character.
• Browser caching. Once your browser has seen a redirect (or a 404) at a given URL, it can keep serving that cached result even after you've made a change. Test in an incognito/private window to rule this out before assuming the redirect itself is broken.
• The path falls under a reserved prefix. Covered above Shopify simply won't apply a redirect to paths like /cart or /products, regardless of how correctly it's configured.
• A third-party app is interfering. Redirect, SEO, or checkout-customization apps occasionally conflict with how Shopify resolves a path. If a redirect stopped working right after installing something new, temporarily disabling it is a fast way to confirm whether that's the cause.

If you're running multiple markets or languages through Shopify Markets, redirects behave slightly differently than on a single-market store, and this is a detail most redirect guides skip entirely. Shopify Markets typically organizes languages and regions through subfolders yourstore.com/en-ca for a Canadian storefront, for example.

A standard redirect you create generally applies across every subfolder automatically: redirect yourstore.com/old-product to yourstore.com/new-product, and yourstore.com/en-ca/old-product inherits the same logic to yourstore.com/en-ca/new-product, without needing a separate rule for each market.

Where it gets more specific: if a particular market needs a genuinely different destination not just a translated version of the same page - you create an individual redirect scoped to that subfolder rather than relying on the global rule. This matters for stores running region-specific promotions, region-exclusive products, or localized landing pages that don't have a direct equivalent everywhere else.

Separate from URL redirects entirely, Shopify also offers automatic storefront redirection based on a visitor's detected location or browser language, managed under Online Store > Preferences > Automatic redirection. This is geolocation-based, not URL-based; it sends a visitor to the right market's storefront rather than fixing a broken link so it solves a different problem than everything covered above, but it's easy to conflate the two given the similar name.

Shopify's built-in redirect manager handles the vast majority of stores well. It's worth considering a dedicated app (Matrixify being the most commonly used for this specifically) when:

• You're migrating between two Shopify stores and need to carry over an existing, already-exported redirect set with more automation than a manual re-upload.
• You need to synchronize redirects across multiple Shopify stores running the same catalog.
• You want scheduled, recurring redirect exports as part of an ongoing SEO monitoring process rather than a one-time task.

For a standard single-store setup, even a large one Shopify's native export/import via CSV covers what most merchants need without an added app subscription.

Every existing guide on this topic talks about redirects purely in terms of Googlebot and human visitors. There's a newer piece worth knowing about: Shopify added native AI-discovery infrastructure to every store in 2026 llms.txt, agents.md, and related files that AI shopping assistants (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and similar) use to understand your catalog and act on it directly.

Crawlers from these systems (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and others) follow 301 redirects the same way Googlebot does which means a URL restructure or migration that isn't properly redirected doesn't just cost you Google rankings, it can also break how AI shopping agents find and reference your products.

Two things worth checking specifically if you're doing a larger URL restructure in 2026:

First, that your robots.txt isn't accidentally blocking these AI crawlers (some Shopify themes do by default), since a redirect is useless if the crawler can't reach it in the first place.

Second, that any custom or app-generated agents.md content referencing specific product URLs gets updated alongside your redirect rollout, since a stale AI-discovery file pointing at now-redirected URLs creates the same kind of broken reference for an AI agent that a dead link creates for a human visitor.

Shopify's native redirect tool covers what almost every store needs creating, bulk editing, and CSV export/import are all built in without an extra app. The part that actually causes problems isn't the tool itself, it's the details: forgetting that a redirect won't fire on a still-live page, missing a leading slash in a CSV, or uploading an unbatched file of tens of thousands of rows at once. Get those right, and Shopify's built-in system is more than enough to protect your SEO value through any URL change, migration, or rebrand.

If you're setting up redirects as part of a platform migration specifically, see our guide to the best Shopify migration apps for tools that handle redirect mapping as part of the broader move rather than as a separate manual step.