How to best set up 301 redirects from CS Cart to a new domain?

Technical Q&A
1

I have a current site running on CS Cart and plan to launch a new site on Shopify with a new domain.

What is the best way to handle setting up 301 redirects from the old CS Cart site to the new Shopify site?

2

Hi there, @David272 !

Thanks for reaching out to the Shopify Community with your URL redirects question! This is a great place to come by any time you have questions about your Shopify Store, or anything else Shopify related.

There are a couple different ways you can go about setting up these 301 redirects. Your Shopify admin actually has a URL redirect feature built into it under ‘Online Store > Navigation’. It’s within this area that you begin setting up your redirects.

The first major step to building these redirects is getting the older URLs from your previous store. There are tools you can use to crawl your website and generate a list of these older URLs for you, or you can try to do this on your own by hand with copy/pasting URLs to a spreadsheet. Tools that you can consider using here to crawl your older store would include some of the following:

After you’ve collected your older URLs, the next step is to create the redirects within Shopify. You can do this manually within the URL Redirect section of your admin, you can upload them using the native CSV upload within Shopify, or you can use a third party application to assist you with the upload and management of these redirects. I have a link to our app store page here that has several applications from Shopify Partners that you can use to for your redirects.

The last thing is that this URL redirect functionality is meant to be used with links that will be leading to 404 errors. You will want to make sure that your older URLs from the old store/domain lead to 404s, but they should anyway if you’re going to be using a new domain. The biggest thing with the redirects is just taking the time to make sure you put them in as required.

Another thing: You will want these redirects to be as accurate as possible. You don’t want a product page from your old store going to the homepage for your new store, for example, as this will mess with your SEO. Do your best to make it so your old product page urls lead to new product pages urls.

This should be much of the information you need! If you have any additional questions, just reply and let me know!

3

Hi @David272 ,

Thanks for asking your question on Shopify Community, and we’re glad to help you with this.

As Imogen mentioned in his answer, you can set up 301 redirects by yourself or use the third-party app. If you want to save time and effort in this task, we suggest you could check out our service. We are LitExtension - the world’s #1 shopping cart migration expert with more than 10+ years in the field. Our company has helped +60,000 worldwide customers successfully migrate +160,000 eCommerce stores. Using our solution could help you accurately and quickly perform the SEO URLs migration process from CS Cart to Shopify. You can take a look at LitExtension’s app on Shopify App Store here and we’re looking forward to discussing this project with you.

Best regards,

LitExtension Team

4

Hi @Imogen_1

Thanks for getting back to me. Re: the redirect option in Shopify, I’m assuming that these redirects will only kick in once the old domain DNS is pointed back to the registrar or (preferably) forwarded to the new domain.

5

Hi again, @David272 !

These redirects will only kick in once the older URLs begin leading to 404 errors. Typically, that’s when that older page no longer exists, or becomes inaccessible. Typically, that happens when a domain is pointed to a different platform, or an entirely new domain is used. So if you change the DNS settings of your current domain from pointing at CSCart, and instead point them at Shopify, the content of the pages from CSCart would be either deleted, or moved over to Shopify. That would cause a 404 error for your CSCart links, and then allow the redirects within Shopify to work as intended.

So yeah, long story short, those redirects won’t work until the older url pages lead to 404 errors.

Let me know if you have any additional questions!