The "404 Page Not Found" message displayed when someone tries to access a page that does not exist.

For those moving their store to Shopify from another platform, URL redirects are very useful. Your old store may have one format for the addresses of products, collections, etc. Your new store in Shopify will probably have another format.

With URL redirects, you can redirect those visitors that go to an old address (through bookmarks, links, search engines, etc.) to the new address in your store. This is also particularly useful for ensuring that the search engines transition to your new website quickly.

What are URLs and paths

A URL is a just a technical word for an address on the web. A web address consists of two parts:

1. The address of the website - for example "//www.behance.net".
2. The path to a specific page on that website - for example "/massju".

Putting in place a URL redirect

So let's say that you are migrating your store to Shopify from another platform. The format for the addresses of collections are different for the two platforms. For example:

• Old address: //www.example.com/trees/trees.html
• New address: //www.example.com/collections/trees

To put in place a redirect from the old address to the new address:

• Click on Navigation in the navigation panel of your admin.
  
• If you don't have any redirects in place yet, you will notice a link Add your first URL redirect at the bottom of the page.
  
• If your first redirect is already in place then you will see a button Add URL redirect. Click on this link or button to get started.
  

• In the popup that appears, fill in the path for the old address in the "/old-path" text box. In the example, I filled in "/trees/trees.html" for the old path.

• Then fill in the path for the new address in the "/new-path" text box. In the example, I filled in "/collections/trees".

• Click on the button Add URL redirect and the page will refresh to show you the new redirect now in place.
• Confirm that the redirect works as expected. Try and open the old address on your website and see if it redirects successfully to the new address.

If you ever want to delete a redirect, you can do so by clicking on the trash icon to the far right of the redirect you want to delete.

Summary

In this section we looked at collections and navigation, two essential elements of your online store. We looked at how to create the two types of collections: those where you select manually the products to be included; and those where the products are included automatically based on conditions you set. For the navigation, we learnt how to create and manage links lists and also how to put in place a dropdown navigation in your store. Finally we looked at URL redirects.

In the next section we will look at how to create pages and a blog for your store.