Redirect mapping

Why it matters

The redirect map is the deliverable that decides whether a migration keeps its organic traffic, and it is routinely treated as a task for launch week rather than a plan built alongside everything else.

The mechanism is simple. A 301 tells search engines a page has permanently moved, and the ranking signals it accumulated transfer to the new URL. An unmapped page returns 404, and everything it earned is gone — not reduced, gone.

The scale of what is at risk is easy to underestimate. A store with five years of history has ranking pages nobody remembers creating: discontinued products still receiving traffic, old campaign landing pages with links pointing at them, blog posts that rank for terms the business no longer targets. All of them count.

How it works on Shopify

The map is built from a complete inventory of existing URLs, and "complete" is the operative word. Export from the old platform, crawl the live site, pull every URL that has received impressions from Search Console, check analytics for anything with traffic, and check backlink data for pages other sites link to. Each source finds URLs the others miss.

Then every one of those maps to a destination. Products to products, collections to collections, content to content. Where an exact equivalent does not exist, map to the closest relevant page — a discontinued product to its category, not to the homepage. Bulk-redirecting to the homepage is treated as a soft 404 and passes nothing.

Shopify's URL structure is fixed and differs from every other platform's, so a full map is always required rather than occasionally.

Redirects are managed in the Shopify admin and can be imported in bulk. Chains should be avoided — every redirect should point at its final destination, not at another redirect.

Deploy at cutover, then verify: crawl the old URL list against the live site and confirm each returns 301 to a 200.

Common mistakes

• Building it from the product export alone. Blog posts, campaign URLs, and filtered pages are missed.
• Everything to the homepage. Passes no signal and reads as a soft 404.
• Redirect chains. Each hop loses a little and costs a crawl.
• Forgetting parameters and case variants. Old platforms serve the same content several ways.
• No post-launch verification. The map is a hypothesis until it is crawled.
• Removing redirects later. They are permanent. Old links keep arriving for years.

When you need help

This is the single most valuable thing to hand over on a replatform, because it is entirely knowable in advance and entirely unforgiving of gaps.

The work is the inventory more than the mapping: assembling every URL that matters from crawl, analytics, Search Console, and backlink data, then validating the deployed result against it. A map built from one source looks complete and is not, and the pages it misses are discovered as a traffic decline three weeks after launch.