How to fix redirect chain on Shopify

Steps for Shopify

1. Run a crawl (e.g. Screaming Frog) on your store and export all internal links that pass through redirects. Note each chained URL and its final destination.
2. For links inside page or blog content: go to Online Store → Pages (or Blog Posts), open each affected page in the rich-text editor, select the hyperlinked text, click the link icon, and replace the URL with the final destination URL.
3. For navigation menu links: go to Online Store → Navigation, open the relevant menu (e.g. Main Menu or Footer), click the item whose URL is a redirect, and update it to the final URL. Save.
4. For links hard-coded in theme templates (e.g. header.liquid, footer.liquid, collection pages): go to Online Store → Themes → Actions → Edit Code, locate the template file containing the link, and update the href to the final URL.
5. If you installed an SEO or redirect app (e.g. Redirectify, SEO Manager), open it and review the redirect list — remove or update any redirect that is itself pointing to another redirect rather than to a live 200 page.
6. Re-crawl the store after changes to confirm zero-hop chains remain.

What is redirect chain?

A redirect chain occurs when clicking or following a link takes a visitor (and search engine crawlers) through two or more redirects before landing on the final page — for example, Page A → Redirect 1 → Redirect 2 → Final Page. Each step in that chain is an extra stop the browser and Googlebot must make before reaching the real content. Even a single unnecessary redirect adds latency; a chain of two or more compounds the problem significantly. The fix is straightforward: change the link's href so it points straight to the final URL, cutting out all the middlemen.

Every hop in a redirect chain costs you in three ways. First, PageRank (link equity) is diluted with each redirect — Google has confirmed that it loses some signal at every step, meaning pages at the end of long chains rank lower than they should. Second, each hop adds real load time (typically 100–300 ms per round trip), which directly hurts Core Web Vitals scores like Largest Contentful Paint and Time to First Byte — both ranking factors in Google's page-experience signal. Third, Googlebot has a limited crawl budget per site; chains waste that budget on intermediate URLs instead of your actual content pages, slowing down discovery and indexing of new or updated pages. Fixing redirect chains on your own internal links is entirely within your control and delivers immediate, measurable improvements to ranking potential, page speed, and crawl efficiency.

See the complete Redirect chain guide for every platform and the full background.