Redirect checker
Find the redirect risks before old URLs disappear.
Paste old and new URLs to spot missing destinations, duplicates, homepage redirects and weak migration mapping.
Work through the list before launch. Redirect problems compound — they are harder to fix after the old site is taken offline.
Why redirect quality determines whether migration traffic recovers
When a Shopify store migrates from WooCommerce or WordPress, the old URLs that Google has indexed need to point cleanly to the equivalent new page. If they do not — if they 404, redirect to the homepage, or redirect to a loosely related page — Google interprets the new site as a different entity from the old one. The search equity built over months or years on the old URLs cannot transfer to pages that Google cannot find.
The most common redirect failure in a Shopify migration is not missing redirects — it is weak redirects. A redirect from /product-category/leather-wallets/ to the Shopify homepage is treated very differently by Google than a redirect from the same URL to /collections/leather-wallets. Both are 301 redirects, but the homepage redirect tells Google that the specific content no longer exists, while the correct collection redirect tells Google exactly where the equivalent page now lives.
This checker identifies four specific risk patterns in a redirect list: missing destinations (old URLs with no mapped new URL), duplicate destinations (multiple old URLs pointing to the same new page), homepage redirects (old URLs pointing to the root domain), and structural mismatches (old category URLs redirecting to product pages or vice versa). Each pattern needs a different resolution.
The four redirect risk types
Missing destinations. An old URL that appears in the crawl export but has no corresponding entry in the redirect map. These will 404 after the old site goes offline. The priority order for fixing missing destinations: highest-traffic pages first, then pages with the most inbound links, then category and hub pages, then individual products.
Duplicate destinations. Multiple old URLs mapped to the same new URL. This is sometimes intentional — for example, an old product page and an old category page that both map to a new unified collection. But it frequently reveals a mapping error where the operator ran out of close matches and pointed everything remaining to the nearest category. Duplicate destinations with high traffic on both old URLs need individual review.
Homepage redirects. Old URLs mapped to the root domain or /. Unless the old URL was a top-level navigation page that has no equivalent on the new site, homepage redirects are almost always a mistake. They are the most common signal that a redirect map was built quickly and incompletely. Review every homepage redirect in the map before launch.
Structural mismatches. Old category or collection URLs that redirect to individual product pages, or old product pages that redirect to the homepage collection. These mismatches often happen when the new site restructures the product taxonomy — for example, consolidating many small categories into fewer large collections. When this happens, the redirect destination should be the closest matching collection, not a single product within it.
When to run this check
Run the redirect checker three times in the migration process. First during planning, when the redirect map is being built, to catch gaps before any URLs are live. Second on staging before launch, to confirm that the map has been implemented correctly in the Shopify URL redirects or via an app. Third after launch, to confirm that the live site is returning 301 responses on the expected old URLs and not generating unexpected 404s.
The checker works on the data you provide — it does not crawl the live site. For live validation after launch, use Screaming Frog or a similar crawler against the new Shopify domain to confirm redirect chains are resolving correctly.
Do not paste private customer data, full order exports or anything sensitive into browser tools. Use only the URL paths from your redirect map CSV.