Bulk URL Redirects on Shopify: The Manual Method and Its Limits

Key Takeaways

• Shopify supports bulk redirect imports via CSV — useful after migrations, rebrands, or large catalogue restructures
• The CSV format is simple: two columns, old URL and new URL, no headers required
• Shopify caps you at 100,000 redirects, and redirect chains degrade performance — keep your list clean
• Bulk redirects fix broken URL responses but don’t update the broken links in your content
• For internal links in blog posts and product descriptions, you need to find and fix them at the source

When you restructure a Shopify store — a domain migration, a catalogue overhaul, a rebrand — you can end up with hundreds or thousands of URLs that need redirecting. Setting these up one by one through Shopify’s admin isn’t practical. Bulk import is the answer.

This guide covers how to do bulk redirects correctly on Shopify, what to watch out for, and why bulk redirects are only half the job.

How Bulk Redirects Work on Shopify

Shopify lets you import URL redirects via a CSV file. Each row in the CSV maps one old URL to one new URL. Shopify processes the file and creates all the redirects at once.

The CSV Format

Create a plain CSV file with two columns:

/products/old-product-handle,/products/new-product-handle
/collections/old-collection,/collections/new-collection
/pages/old-about-page,/pages/about-us
/blogs/news/old-post-handle,/blogs/news/new-post-handle

Important rules:

• URLs must start with a forward slash (/)
• No column headers — Shopify treats the first row as data
• The old URL must not have a live page at that address (Shopify won’t create a redirect over an active page)
• One redirect per row
• Destination URLs can be internal (starting with /) or external (full URL with https://)

How to Import

1. Go to Online Store → Navigation → URL Redirects
2. Click Import (top right)
3. Upload your CSV file
4. Shopify will show a summary of how many redirects were created, skipped, or failed

Shopify processes the import and creates 301 (permanent) redirects for all valid rows. Rows with errors are skipped, not failed silently — check the import report.

How to Export Existing Redirects

From the same URL Redirects page, click Export to download all your existing redirects as a CSV. Useful for auditing, cleaning up, or editing in bulk before re-importing.

Common Use Cases for Bulk Redirects

After a Domain Migration

Moving from old-store.com to new-brand.com? You need a 1:1 mapping of every URL from the old domain to the equivalent on the new one. Bulk import handles this efficiently. Prepare a CSV mapping every indexed URL on the old domain to the corresponding new URL.

After a Product Catalogue Overhaul

If you’ve restructured your product handles — standardising naming conventions, adding categories, reorganising collections — you’ll have a list of old-to-new URL mappings. Import them all at once.

After a Theme Migration

Some theme migrations change URL structures for pages, collections, or blogs. A post-migration audit using Google Search Console or a link scanner will surface these, and bulk import handles the fix.

After Merging Multiple Stores

Consolidating two Shopify stores into one means many old product URLs from the source store need redirecting to the correct products on the destination store.

What Can Go Wrong with Bulk Redirects

Redirect Chains

If you import redirects where the destination URL is itself redirected elsewhere, you create a chain: A → B → C. Each hop in a chain adds latency for users and dilutes link equity transfer.

Before importing, check that your destination URLs are live pages, not themselves redirected. You can do this by exporting your existing redirects and cross-referencing.

Shopify doesn’t automatically flatten chains — you have to do it manually.

Redirect Loops

If you accidentally create A → B → A, Shopify will catch some of these, but complex loops can slip through. Browsers and Googlebot both handle loops by giving up after a set number of hops, resulting in an error for the user.

The 100,000 Redirect Limit

Shopify caps stores at 100,000 active redirects. For most stores this is irrelevant, but stores that have been running for years and accumulating redirects carelessly can approach this limit. When you hit the cap, new redirects fail silently.

Regular audits — removing redirects where the source URL has been dead for years and nobody links to it — keep your redirect list lean.

Duplicate Redirects

If you import a redirect for a URL that already has one, Shopify overwrites the existing redirect with the new destination. This is useful for corrections but dangerous if you’re not careful — importing a poorly prepared CSV can overwrite correct redirects with wrong ones.

The Bigger Problem: Redirects Don’t Fix Your Content

Here’s the part that most bulk redirect guides skip.

When you set up a redirect from /products/old-boots to /products/womens-ankle-boots, you’ve told Shopify what to do when someone requests the old URL. But you haven’t fixed the places in your store that still link to /products/old-boots.

Your blog posts still have <a href="/products/old-boots">. Your product descriptions still reference the old URL. Your pages still point to it. Those are broken links — and while the redirect means visitors end up in the right place, the broken links still exist in your content.

From an SEO perspective:

• Every internal broken link is a wasted crawl budget slot
• Redirect hops accumulate over time if you never fix the source links
• If you ever need to remove the redirect (URL is being reused, redirect limit concerns), all those links break again

The proper fix is to update the links in your content to point directly to the correct URLs — not just to paper over them with redirects.

Relink scans every product description, blog post, page, and collection in your Shopify store and finds every internal broken link. Instead of just adding redirects and moving on, you can fix the source — update the link in the blog post itself — so your internal link structure is clean, not just redirect-masked.

Bulk Redirect Workflow for a Clean Migration

If you’re doing a major restructure and need to use bulk redirects, here’s the right approach:

1. Export all existing redirects — know your baseline
2. Prepare your URL mapping in a spreadsheet: old URL, new URL, source (where is this URL linked from?)
3. Cross-reference destinations — make sure none of your new URLs are themselves redirected
4. Import to Shopify and review the import report
5. Scan for internal broken links — use Relink or a crawler to find every place in your content that still links to the old URLs
6. Update those links directly in your content
7. Verify in Google Search Console over the following weeks — coverage report should show old URLs dropping and new ones being indexed

Steps 1-4 are what most guides cover. Steps 5-7 are what separates stores with clean SEO from stores that accumulate silent broken links over years.