If you're migrating your website and are looking for a way to check to see if your 301-Redirects that you put in place are working, then follow these steps below to check for 404 error codes.
As with any migration you should have already migrated each page 1:1 to the new platform you're migrating to. On the new platform, you would add 301-Redirects from the Canonical URL > New URL. In the case of Shopify migrations, the New URL is the page handle. You will need a spreadsheet of the original URLs for this method so the crawler can access that old URL and follow the 301-Redirect hop to the final destination in which is will report back if the page is valid (200 Code) or broken (404 Code).
- Step 1: Open Screaming Frog.
- Step 2: In the menu find "Mode" and click on "List".
- Step 3: In the menu find "Configuration" > "Spider" > "Advanced" tab > Tick "Always Follow Redirects" and click "Ok".
- Step 4: Compile a list of your OLD Site URLs into a spreadsheet.
- Step 5: Click Upload at the top and select "From a File".
- Step 6: The crawler will run and once at 100% go to the menu and find "Reports" > "Redirects" > "All Redirects" and the report will download.
- Step 7: In the report, you will find the original "Address", "Final Address" which is the final hop to the new website URL, and most important is the "Final Status Code" / "Final Status". These fields will tell you if the page hopped to a broken 404 page.
