How to set up 301 redirects
If you are moving your site from another provider to the ShopWired platform, or if you have changed a particular set of product, category or page URLs manually, when a user visits the old link directly they will be shown a ‘page not found’ message. Leaving these types of pages active on your website can hurt your sales as they can lead to people leaving your site quickly. They can also negatively affect your site’s performance in search engines as they detect the ‘page not found’ messages and then delist the page. If that page previously had a high ranking you would lose all benefit of it.
To prevent these negative effects you can set up 301 redirects which will automatically send a visitor to your new page if they visit the old page. Search engines will also pick up the redirects and change their index of results automatically (although this could take a few weeks as search engines don’t check every website every day).
301 redirects can be set up on the ‘Your Domain Name’ page which is accessed by selecting from the menu.
• Creating the spreadsheet for redirects
• Uploading the spreadsheet
Creating the spreadsheet for redirects
To set up your redirects you will first need to create a spreadsheet containing two columns:
Old URL
New URL
Place each individual redirect in a new row, placing the old URL and the new URL in the appropriate columns. You do not need to include the whole domain name of your website, just the last part, as seen in this example:
Please note!
URLs cannot contain special characters (for example: ø, ü, é), so if your URL does contain a special character you will first need to change that character to the URL code for it. To obtain the URL code for special characters you can use a tool such as https://graphemica.com/. On their site select the special character you need to use, and under 'Code' copy the 'url escape code'. Then for every instance of the special character in your URL, you will need to replace it with the url escape code.
Once you have finished creating your spreadsheet save it as a CSV file.
Please note!
Do not include any file extensions for the old URLs as the system automatically removes these (e.g. .asp, .html, .php). The system also automatically removes -p or -c from the end of the URL.
Uploading the spreadsheet
Once you have saved the spreadsheet go to the ‘Your Domain Name’ page and find the ‘301 Redirects’ section:
Select Choose file and attach the spreadsheet from your computer’s hard drive.
If you’ve previously set up redirects and you want your new redirects to replace the existing redirects, place a tick in the box beside ‘Should we replace your existing redirects?’.
Then select upload your redirects and allow the system to process your file.
You can download existing redirects that you have set up by selecting the link:
Once you have uploaded new redirects, check they are working by visiting the old URL to make sure it redirects to the new one.
We can help!
If you need any assistance in setting up your redirects, or if they are not working, please contact us.