Do a 301 redirect if there is no products in the current category

Question

As a part of the SEO optimizations, when a customer go to a category page and if there is no products in the category, can we redirect it to a 301?

Eg: As a part of -ve testing, if we load the category page with a non valid page number, then magento will show the message as "We can't find products matching the selection.". So instead of this i want to either redirect to 301 OR redirect 404 is also fine in this case. Do we have any solution for this?

Answer 1

I think you should implement this functionality with 302 instead of 301 because it's a permanent redirect.

Here is the implementation with 302 redirects:

1. Create a module Vendor_Module

2. Create registration.php:

   <?php
   
   use Magento\Framework\Component\ComponentRegistrar;
   
   ComponentRegistrar::register(
       ComponentRegistrar::MODULE,
       'Vendor_Module',
       __DIR__
   );
   

3. Create etc/module.xml

   <?xml version="1.0"?>
   <config xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="urn:magento:framework:Module/etc/module.xsd">
       <module name="Vendor_Module"/>
   </config>
   

4. Create etc/frontend/di.xml

   <config xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="urn:magento:framework:ObjectManager/etc/config.xsd">
       <type name="Magento\Catalog\Block\Product\ListProduct">
           <plugin name="redirect_empty_category" type="Vendor\Module\Plugin\ListProduct"/>
       </type>
   </config>
   

5. Create Plugin/ListProduct.php

   <?php
   
   declare(strict_types=1);
   
   namespace Vendor\Module\Plugin;
   
   use Laminas\Http\Response;
   use Magento\Eav\Model\Entity\Collection\AbstractCollection;
   use Magento\Framework\App\ResponseInterface;
   use Magento\Framework\UrlInterface;
   
   class ListProduct
   {
   
       /**
        * @param ResponseInterface $response
        * @param UrlInterface $url
        */
       public function __construct(
           private readonly ResponseInterface $response,
           private readonly UrlInterface $url
       ) {
       }
   
       /**
        * @param \Magento\Catalog\Block\Product\ListProduct $subject
        * @param AbstractCollection $result
        *
        * @return AbstractCollection
        */
       public function afterGetLoadedProductCollection(
           \Magento\Catalog\Block\Product\ListProduct $subject,
           AbstractCollection $result
       ): AbstractCollection {
           if ($result->getSize() === 0) {
               $this->response->setRedirect(
                   $this->url->getUrl('your-redirect-url'), // change this to the URL you want to redirect to.
                   Response::STATUS_CODE_302 // even though this is set to 302, if you decide you can go with 301 as well.
               );
           }
   
           return $result;
       }
   }