Setting up a 301 URL redirect for your Instant Site

You can create permanent redirects, also called 301 redirects, that send visitors and search engines away from one page to another. For example, from inactive or deleted pages to active pages of your website.

Setting up redirects ensures that anyone who opens the old URL either from their bookmark or search results, can still reach your site even after you changed the page’s URL. Redirects also pass all ranking power from the old URL to the new URL. So Google and other search engines will keep your site SEO ranking high.

Redirects only work with the Instant Site (New-Gen version). If you use another sitebuilder for your website, you set up redirects on their side.

When to use redirects

There are several main case scenarios when to use redirects. Depending on what your case is, you can create a single redirect or create redirects in bulk:

To replace outdated product pages. Forward traffic from discontinued products to actual products or related categories. And when an item becomes outdated, you can redirect from its page to a new version or model of this product. 

When running marketing campaigns. Promote your products outside your website with short and easy to remember URLs. For example, a short link mystore.com/dress on a landing page can redirect shoppers to the dress category of your store that actually has a longer link mystore.com/products/dress-c1096904. Or you can filter the list of products by a specific parameter and redirect to that page.

Setting up a single URL redirect

You can set up up to 10 redirects from the Website page of your store admin. For example, if you want to redirect from your landing page to a particular store category.

To change more than 10 links at once, use the import tool to create redirects in bulk.

To set up a single URL redirect:

1. From your store admin, go to Website.
2. Scroll down to the Instant Site redirects and click Create Redirect.
3. Click Create Redirect.
4. In the left field, enter the old link. For example, a page with a deleted product.
5. In the right field, enter the actual link you want to redirect to. Double-check URLs — if there are lowercase and uppercase letters in the link, you must enter them exactly as they are.
   Both from and to URLs can be either a relative URL (for example, /promo or /search=&123) or a full URL (for example, http://www.example.com/promo).

   

6. (optional) To add another redirect, Click Add Redirect.
7. Click Create Redirect.

That’s it. Your redirect will now appear on the Website → Instant Site Redirects page in your store admin. It may take about 10 minutes for your browser to recognize a new redirect, so give it some time before opening the old link to check the redirect.

It takes from a few hours to a few months for search engines to index the redirected page and start sending users to the new link instead of the old one. The duration depends on how large the site is and how many pages are crawled daily.

You may experience ranking fluctuations while Google recrawls and reindexes your site. As a general rule, a medium-sized website can take a few weeks for most pages to reindex; larger sites can take longer.

Setting up URL redirects in bulk (via CSV file)

Before you start, make sure you create a list of all pages on your site that you want to add redirects for. You can use a third-party SEO tool that crawls your site automatically, providing you with a list of broken links.

To create new redirects for your Instant Site and store:

1. In your store admin, add your products and categories manually or using import.
   URLs are created automatically as the product is added to your store. You cannot set URLs for new products yourself.
2. In Catalog → Data Import & Export, export your store catalog, then open the CSV file in your preferred spreadsheet editor. You will see the “url” column at the end of the file for “product” and “category” rows. It contains URLs of products and categories in your storefront.
3. Create a new file in your spreadsheet editor. In this file, you will need to fill in four cells with specific names: in A1 enter “type”, in A2 — “site_redirects”, in B1 — “site_redirect_from_url”, in C1 — “site_redirect_to_url”. Here’s how it should look:
   

   

   You can use the example file attached at the bottom of this article to create your redirects. Simply copy the file content to your spreadsheet and edit.
4. In the B2 cell, enter the old 404 URL, and in the C2 cell — enter the new URL that you want to redirect to.
   Copy new URLs from the “url” column in the file you’ve exported in Step 1, or open a product page in your storefront and copy the URL from the browser’s address bar.
5. To add more redirects, enter “site_redirect” again to the next row in the “A” column (A3 cell) and create a new redirect by repeating Step 3. Repeat it as many times as you need.
6. After you’ve listed all the redirects you want to create, save the file as CSV to your device, and upload it on the Catalog → Data Import & Export page in your store admin.

That’s it! The redirects are now added to your Instant Site. They will appear on the Website → Instant Site Redirects page in your store admin.

Please note that it may take between a few hours and a few months for search engines to index the redirected page and start sending users to the new link instead of the old one. The duration depends on how large the site is and how many pages are crawled daily. While search engines recrawl and reindex your site, your site may experience ranking fluctuations.

You can edit or delete created URLs by using the import tool. Learn how to change a redirect →

Deleting redirects

You can delete 301 redirects that you no longer need, but keep in mind that they will keep working for quite some time after. Depending on the site size, that window can be from 3 to 12 months since it takes time for browsers and search engines to delete redirects.

If your goal is to redirect customers to the original URL address of a page, you can create a reverse redirect instead of deleting. For example, if the original redirect was from A → B, you can create a new redirect from B → A.

To create a reverse redirect, set up a new redirect from В → А and submit both pages to Google Search Console.

To delete a redirect:

1. From your store admin, go to Website.
2. Scroll down to Instant Site Redirects, then click Manage Redirects.
3. Select redirects that you want to delete.
4. Click Delete selected, then Delete.

Further reading

Improving SEO for your site and store →