Shopify Glossary Terms

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one URL to another. It tells search engines and browsers that a page has permanently moved to a new location. The old URL passes its search ranking authority (link equity) to the new URL, which is why getting redirects right is critical during platform migrations.

In ecommerce, 301 redirects matter most during platform migrations. When you move from Magento to Shopify Plus, every product, category, and content page URL changes. Without 301 redirects, search engines can't find your pages, customers hit dead ends, and years of accumulated search rankings evaporate.

Shopify Plus handles redirects through its URL Redirects feature in the admin, or via the Redirects API for bulk imports. During migrations, we build comprehensive redirect maps covering every indexed URL in the source platform's sitemap, then validate them post-launch by monitoring crawl errors in Google Search Console.

Think: the safety net that stops your rankings from disappearing when your URLs change.