URL Redirect

You can use the URL Redirect to redirect an old URL to a new one; this will ensure your SEO isn’t affected. This is an effective feature if you want to forward multiple existing sites to your new Architect site, or if you’re switching to a new domain.

Note: the redirect can be confusing for users; ensure you provide information to alert them you are redirecting.

To set up this redirect, select Settings from the left menu.

Select URL Redirect and this will open up the settings.

Click the “Add new redirect” button to create your own URL redirect.

Here you can enter the original page URL, e.g. if your old site was “mysite.com/example.html,” enter the “/example.html”

Then select the redirect location, which could be a page on your site or an external URL.

Once the redirect is added and you can edit/delete from the menu.

Bulk Redirects

You may also upload bulk URL redirects in a CSV file.

• Click Import Multiple Redirects to import multiple redirects.
  
• Before uploading your CSV, ensure your formatting is correct. Download our CSV template by clicking the Download CSV Template link. The CSV file you intend to upload should match the structure of our template, where the first column is the old URL and the new column is the new URL.
• Click Upload CSV.
  
• Select your CSV file, and click Open.
• Click Done.

Dynamic Redirects allow you to automatically redirect any subpage of a site that is no longer an active page of that site; to a specific page, instead of the traditional 404 page. This removes the need to add each page individually as its own redirect. There are two types of dynamic redirects: wildcards and variables. Continue reading below to learn more about both types.

Wildcards

Wildcards allow you to define the redirect URL rule based on the structure of the URL, instead of adding each individual URL one by one. Wildcards are defined with a single asterisk (*) or double asterisk (**) symbol.

Single asterisk (*) matches any text between the current slashes.

For example:

Creating a redirect for www.website.com/genre/*/ that should redirect to the home page would then make it so that anytime a user went to a subpage of the /genre page that contained one slash, they would then be redirected to the home page.

This means that whether a user went to the URL www.website.com/genre/comedy or if they went to www.website.com/genre/drama, both instances they would be redirected to the home page.

Double asterisk (**) matches any text in multiple slashes.

For example:

Creating a redirect for www.website.com/genre/**/  to redirect to the home page would in turn mean that anytime a user went to a subpage of the /genre page (that contained multiple slashes), they would be redirected to the home page.

This means that a user that goes to the URL www.website.com/genre/comedy/2017 or to www.website.com/genre/drama/2019 would be redirected to the home page in both instances.

If we look at a real-world scenario, imagine that your previous site has multiple subpages under /cookbooks/ that are no longer present on the current site.

For example:

Instead of being required to manually create a redirect for each of those URLs, you could simply use a single Wildcard Dynamic URL to automatically redirect any subpage for the /cookbooks page.

To do this, you would simply create a redirect by navigating to Settings > URL Redirect. For the Source URL, you would use a single asterisk in place of the page name (ie: /cookbooks/*).

So if you wanted to automatically redirect every subpage for /cookbooks (ie: www.website.com/cookbooks/baking, www.website.com/cookbooks/bbq, etc) then you would add the source of the redirect URL as /cookbooks/*, and then set which page to redirect those subpages to.

After republishing the site, anytime a subpage for /cookbooks is entered that is no longer an active page on the site (such as the list of URLs above), the site will automatically redirect to whichever page you set as the destination page in the URL redirect panel; instead of a traditional 404 page.

Variables

Variables define a URL rule that is the same for many pages with the same structure but with different content. They can be added between the source URL and the target URL. This is helpful when redirecting all store products from one format to another. 

Variables are defined within curly brackets { } both in the source URL rule and in the target rule.

For example:

If you had an old store with the product URL structure of www.website.com/product/p-1234-umbrella, and the new URL structure for store products is now www.website.com/product/umbrella, then to properly redirect the old product URL to the new product URL using variables, you would create a URL redirect that looks like this:

Source URL: /product/p-*-{productname}

Target URL: /product/{productname}

Note: It is important to use the exact same variable spelling within the curly brackets, in both the source URL rule and target rule

Now with this new redirect created, anytime a site visitor enters a URL for a product using the old product URL structure, they will automatically be redirected to the new product URL structure.

For example, whether a user enters a URL or clicks on an old link to that URL, such as www.website.com/p-1234-umbrella or www.websites.com/p-1A2B3C-umbrella they will now be automatically redirected to: www.website.com/product/umbrella

This variable rule automatically covers every URL that uses that same format. So if a user enters the old product URL for a different product other than the umbrella – such as www.websites.com/p-5678-spatula, then they will automatically be redirected to that product using the new URL structure of www.website.com/product/spatula