Fix kit A: redirects

Every old address should land somewhere useful on the new store. One generated file decides where each goes, and every other file in this kit is built from it.

01

The rule that causes the problem

Shopify will not create a redirect from any path that begins with /shop, /apps, /cart, /orders or a few others, and its redirects fire only from addresses that are otherwise broken. The old WordPress store kept every product under /shop.

On 13 October, 307 of the 631 old URLs sat under /shop. Moving www to the store without a layer in front would leave all of them unanswered.

Fifteen of the sixteen old paths tried on the store host answered "not found".

Source: Shopify Help, URL redirects.

02

The numbers

631 rows
MatchRows
exact273
hyphenation10
token21
page map45
taxonomy map123
search152
manual7

305 of 306 old products map to a store product by an exact or near-exact handle; zero wait for a person to confirm, and one have no counterpart and go to their category.

03

Try an old URL

04

Two paths

Path A keeps the store on shop. and answers old URLs from a Pages project on www. Path B makes www the store; Shopify answers old pages and a Worker answers old /shop paths. PATH A · STORE STAYS ON SHOP.PATH B · WWW BECOMES THE STORE www → Pages: _redirects (301) shop.liquidyachtwear.com Simplest. Old forms stop on www. www/shop/* → Worker (301) other old paths → Shopify import One host. Needs the zone on Cloudflare.

Path A suits a store that keeps its shop. address; path B suits a store that takes over www. Either way the crosswalk is the same file. A no-code alternative to the Worker, a Cloudflare Bulk Redirects list, ships beside it.

05

Files

  • crosswalk.csv: Every old URL, its target, how it was matched and its review status
  • _redirects: One 301 per old URL, for a Cloudflare Pages project on www (path A)
  • shopify-redirects.csv: Shopify's import file for the old paths outside /shop (path B)

The Worker, the Bulk Redirects list, the old-site banner text and the verifier live in the repository. Built for this review; nothing runs on any Liquid Yacht Wear system.

06

Runbook summary

  1. Two weeks before: choose the path, confirm who controls DNS, export top pages from Search Console.
  2. One week before: freeze the old catalog, finish the crosswalk review, lower the TTL on www.
  3. The day before: run the verifier on a staging host, back up WordPress, save the old sitemaps.
  4. Cutover: switch DNS, import the Shopify file under path B, run the verifier on production, submit the new sitemap.
  5. First month: review not-found reports daily for a week, then weekly, and add rows for real misses.
  6. Keep the redirects for at least a year. Rollback is one DNS change inside the lowered TTL.
07

Matches awaiting review

0 rows

None: every row has been reviewed.