Short answer
Make a CSV with two columns, Redirect from and Redirect to, then upload it in Shopify admin under Content, Menus, View URL Redirects, Import. The old address goes in as a path, such as /product/blue-shirt. The free redirect CSV generator on this site builds the file and cleans up chains and repeats.
Free tools for this
The file Shopify expects
It is a plain CSV with a header row and two columns: Redirect from and Redirect to. The first is the old address as a path from the root of the site, starting with a slash. The second is where visitors should land: a path on your store, or a full address if the page lives somewhere else.
Shopify's URL redirects are permanent, 301 redirects. That is what you want when a page has moved for good, because it tells Google to pass the old page's standing to the new one.
Step 1: list every old address that matters
Start with the addresses that earn clicks, not every address that exists. Export them from Google Search Console (Performance, Pages) and from your old store's sitemap. Anything with search traffic, backlinks or a spot in your ads needs a destination.
Add the products, collections and pages customers still bookmark. A discontinued product with traffic should go to the closest live product or its collection, not to the home page.
Try it now: Shopify Redirect CSV Generator → · Redirect Checker →
Step 2: pair each one with its new address
Put old addresses in the first column and new addresses in the second, in a spreadsheet. Paste the two columns into the generator and it strips the domains, fixes slashes and builds the file.
Coming from WooCommerce? The common pattern is /product/name to /products/name, and /product-category/name to /collections/name. The generator can fill those in for lines where you only have the old address. Check a few by hand, because handles do not always match.
The mistakes that break redirects
Chains. If /a goes to /b and /b goes to /c, a visitor and Google take two hops. Point /a straight at /c. The generator does this for you.
Loops. If /a goes to /b and /b goes back to /a, the page never loads. The generator drops both and tells you.
Repeats. The same old address listed twice with two destinations leaves the result to chance. The generator keeps the first and tells you how many it dropped.
Redirecting to the home page. Sending every old product to the home page reads as a soft 404 to Google and wastes the ranking the old page had. Map to the closest match.
Old pages that still exist. A redirect from an address that still shows a live page may not take effect. Remove or unpublish the old page first.
Step 3: import and test
In Shopify admin, open Content, then Menus, then View URL Redirects, and choose Import. Upload the file. Then open ten old addresses, including a product, a collection and one with a query string, and confirm each lands on the right page in one hop.
The redirect checker on this site shows every hop an address takes, which catches a chain or a wrong destination in seconds.
What a redirect file cannot do
It saves the links. It does not make the page they land on good. If the new product page has the wrong variants, a thin title or missing images, the visitor arrives and leaves, and the ranking you carried over does not hold.
That is why we treat the catalogue and the redirects as one job: every product built properly, and every old address pointing at it.