Bitrix 301 Redirect: Where to Set It Up and What to Avoid

When a Bitrix site needs a redirect

The triggers are almost always the same. If you recognise your situation below, plan the redirects before you touch the site, not after.

Online shops feel this most. A Tashkent store that gets orders from its website, from search and from marketplace listings will see lost traffic show up in sales quickly.

• moving to https
• choosing a main version: with or without www
• one trailing-slash format and no index.php duplicates
• a changed section or product code
• several pages merged into one
• a redesign or new site structure

301 or 302: which code to use

A 301 is permanent. The search engine passes the old page’s signals to the new one and eventually replaces the address in its index. A 302 is temporary, so the old URL stays in search results.

For any lasting move, use 301. Keep 302 for a short promotion or maintenance work. A common mistake is leaving a 302 in place after a permanent change, so search engines keep treating the old page as the main one.

Where to configure a redirect in Bitrix

Server level. Site-wide rules such as https, www and trailing slash belong in .htaccess. They run before Bitrix even loads, so they are fast. If the site runs on nginx without Apache, the same rules go into the nginx configuration. Ask your hosting provider or administrator which setup you have.

urlrewrite.php and the URL processing rules are not redirects. They decide which component renders a page for a friendly URL. Changing them changes addresses but does not create a redirect from the old ones. Edit urlrewrite.php by hand with care, because a mistake can break an entire section.

For a single page, the LocalRedirect function with a 301 code works, but that is a developer’s job. Marketers usually prefer a module from the Bitrix marketplace that keeps an “old URL – new URL” table editable from the admin panel.

Planning a Bitrix redirect map for a catalog move

When hundreds of addresses change, improvising does not work. A reliable order:

• export every old section and product URL with a crawler
• match each one to its new address
• redirect page by page, not everything to the homepage
• fix links in menus, text and breadcrumbs so crawlers do not travel through redirects
• rebuild the sitemap
• watch errors in Search Console and Webmaster tools

Example: renaming a section

An appliance shop decides that /catalog/stiralki/ should become /catalog/stiralnye-mashiny/. In Bitrix you change the section’s symbolic code and every product inside gets a new address. Export the old URLs first, change the code, then add a redirect from the old section URL to the new one.

For the products, one pattern rule is enough: the old path prefix is replaced by the new one and the rest of the URL stays. After that, spot-check a sample of old URLs and look at Webmaster reports a week later for new 404s. If a pattern is impossible, write the redirects as a list. It takes longer, but it is safer than sending everything to the category page.

Chains, loops and other common mistakes

A chain is when URL A points to B and B to C, and a crawler may give up before the end. A loop is when URLs keep sending each other back and the page never opens. Both usually appear because some rules live in .htaccess, some in a module and some in code, and nobody wrote them down.

• sending every deleted product to the homepage, which search engines may treat as an error
• using 302 for a permanent move
• leaving old URLs without a redirect after changing friendly URLs
• keeping rules in several places with no single list

How to verify the result

Open an old URL in a server response checker or run the site through a crawler. You want exactly one hop: the old URL returns 301 and lands on a final page that returns 200. Also confirm that internal links point straight to the new addresses.

Keep global rules at server level, one-off rules in a single chosen tool, and maintain a list of redirects so that a year later it is clear where each came from. If you are planning a migration or a new catalog structure, markdev can help build the URL map and carry out SEO optimisation in Uzbekistan without losing rankings. Tell us about your project and we will talk it through.