Creating redirects for removed products

Hello,

I want to create redirects for removed products, but in the Shopify’s URL redirecting instructions it states that you cannot redirect urls that have “/products” portion, which is all product pages.

Could someone please clarify?

Thank you,

Ken

You’re reading it wrong.

It says you can’t create redirect like
/products => /pages/ABC or
/collections=> / or
/collections/all=> /collections/OPQ

However, you definitely can create redirect like
/products/ABC=> /products/XYZ

Also, keep in mind that redirect would not kick-in if the original URL can be rendered.
Original URL have to result in 404 for redirection to work.
So, you can’t redirect from one “visible” product to another one.

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Hmm but so if I removed a product and now it’s 404, I can’t redirect that url to a collection of products similar to the one that was removed? That seems counterintuitive…

1 Like

Hi @Bath4All

Yes, absolutely! You can redirect any 404 product URL to another page — such as a collection, homepage, or a similar product.

For example:
If your old product URL was
https://yourstore.com/products/old-product
and you want to redirect it to a similar collection page, you can create a redirect like this:
From: /products/old-product
To: /collections/similar-products

You can set this up in Shopify admin by going to:
Online Store → Navigation → View URL Redirects → Create URL Redirect.

Best regards,
Devcoder :laptop:

3 Likes

That’s what I thought. But the link in my OP says you can’t…

Hi @Bath4All

Try it once using the steps I sent you.

Best regards,
Devcoder :laptop:

No, you can and that’s precisely what I said in my previous post.

See the difference in wording:

  • You can’t redirect URLs that begin with the following prefixes: /apps, /application, /cart, /carts, /orders, /services, or /shop.
  • You can’t redirect URLs that use fixed Shopify paths: /products, /collections, /collections/all.

See that first sentence uses “begin with the prefixes”, but the second one does not?
If it was the same meaning, then they would probably combine those 2 lists.

Second sentence means you can’t redirect URLs that match exactly, not start with.

I guess their choice of words also meant to convey that if you have several markets, you can’t redirect /en/products and /es/products (for example) in addition to /products


And yes, as already suggested -- you can simply try and see what happens.
2 Likes

This means Shopify is not allowed us to do redirections from paths like /products, /collections/, /collections/all, etc. as it will redirect all related pages and cause error. You can only redirect broken links from them, and this is what it said.

1 Like

Thanks guys.

Another question. The shopify guide states there is a 10,000 limit for redirects.

I removed about 10,000 products from the same brand. Their urls were all like this:

/products/brandname-sku-color

Can I use a wildcard to setup a bulk redirect?

like this:

/products/brandname-* => /collections/similar-collection

thx

1 Like

It’s 100 000:

  • You can create a maximum of 100,000 URL redirects unless your store is on the Plus plan, which has a maximum of 20,000,000 URL redirects.

You can’t use wildcards, but you there are apps which can do bulk edits even on free tier – https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/shopify-admin/productivity-tools/bulk-actions#resources-without-bulk-edit-bulk-action

@SEOAnt-Jeffery can probably better help you here.

2 Likes