How to Fix Broken Links and 404 Pages on Shopify

Every time you delete a product, rename a collection, or change a URL handle in Shopify, the old URL doesn't disappear. It turns into a 404 page — a dead end that frustrates customers and tells Google your site has problems. Knowing how to fix broken links and 404 errors on Shopify is one of the fastest SEO wins most merchants never bother with.

Most merchants don't notice until the damage is done. Traffic drops. Backlinks stop passing value. Customers who clicked a saved link or a Google result land on an error page and leave. According to research from SEO Sandwitch, 77% of visitors who hit a broken link leave the site entirely — they don't try to find the right page. And sites with more than 1% broken links are 30% less likely to rank on Google's first page.

The good news: Shopify has built-in tools to find and fix every one of these broken links. You don't need an app. You don't need a developer. You need 20 minutes and a system.

Why Does Shopify Create Broken Links?

You're not creating 404 errors on purpose. They accumulate from normal store operations:

• Deleting a product — the /products/your-product URL stops working, but Google still has it indexed and customers may have it bookmarked
• Changing a URL handle — editing a product or collection's URL in the SEO settings creates a new URL but doesn't redirect the old one
• Restructuring collections — renaming or removing collections breaks every link pointing to the old collection URL
• Removing pages — deleting a blog post or static page leaves external links pointing nowhere
• Third-party links — other sites, social posts, or email campaigns linking to URLs you've since changed

Shopify does automatically create redirects when you change a URL handle if you check the "Create a URL redirect" box. But most merchants either miss that checkbox or delete products outright, which skips the redirect entirely.

Find Your Broken Links With Google Search Console

Before you can fix anything, you need to know what's broken. Google Search Console is the fastest free way to find 404 errors on your Shopify store.

1. Open Google Search Console and select your store's property
2. Go to Pages (under Indexing in the left sidebar)
3. Click on "Not found (404)" in the reasons list
4. You'll see every URL Google tried to crawl that returned a 404

Sort by the most recent discovery date to catch new issues quickly. The URLs at the top of this list are actively losing you traffic — Google is still trying to send visitors there.

If you don't have Search Console set up yet, do that first. Go to search.google.com/search-console, add your domain, and verify ownership. It takes 5 minutes and gives you ongoing visibility into crawl errors, indexing status, and search performance. For a broader SEO foundation, see our Shopify SEO checklist for new stores.

Run a Full Site Crawl for Internal Broken Links

Google Search Console shows what Google found, but it won't catch every internal broken link on your site. For that, you need a crawl tool.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free for up to 500 URLs) is the standard. Point it at your store's URL, let it crawl, then filter by "Response Codes > Client Error (4xx)" to see every internal link that leads to a 404.

For stores with fewer than 500 pages, the free version covers everything. The report shows you exactly which pages contain the broken links and where they point — so you know what to redirect and what to update.

Check for broken links in these specific places that merchants commonly overlook:

• Navigation menus (main menu and footer)
• Blog posts linking to products you've removed
• Collection descriptions with hardcoded product links
• Email templates with old product URLs

Set Up 301 Redirects in Shopify Admin

A 301 redirect tells browsers and search engines: "This page moved permanently. Go here instead." It transfers most of the SEO value from the old URL to the new one, so you don't lose ranking power.

Setting one up in Shopify takes 30 seconds:

1. Go to Online Store > Navigation in your Shopify admin
2. Click "View URL redirects" at the top
3. Click "Create URL redirect"
4. In "Redirect from", enter the broken URL path (e.g., /products/old-product-name)
5. In "Redirect to", enter the destination URL path (e.g., /products/new-product-name or /collections/relevant-collection)
6. Click Save

One important limitation: you can't redirect Shopify's fixed paths like /products, /collections, or /collections/all. Redirects only work for specific URLs under those paths.

When choosing where to redirect, pick the most relevant destination. A deleted running shoe should redirect to your running shoes collection — not your homepage. The closer the match, the better the experience for both visitors and search engines.

Use Bulk CSV Import for Multiple Redirects

If you have 10+ broken links to fix, entering them one by one is tedious. Shopify supports bulk redirect imports via CSV.

1. Create a CSV file with two columns: Redirect from and Redirect to
2. Enter only the URL paths, not the full domain (use /products/old-name, not https://yourstore.com/products/old-name)
3. Go to Online Store > Navigation > View URL redirects
4. Click "Import" and upload your CSV

This is especially useful after a large catalog cleanup. If you removed 50 discontinued products in one afternoon, a CSV import fixes all 50 redirects in under a minute.

Keep the CSV file saved somewhere. It becomes a record of every redirect you've created, which is useful when troubleshooting redirect chains later.

Prevent Future 404s With a URL Change Checklist

Fixing existing broken links is the urgent task. Preventing new ones is the system that saves you from repeating this work every quarter.

Before you delete any product, collection, or page:

1. Check for inbound links — search for the URL in Google Search Console's Links report to see if external sites link to it
2. Check for internal links — search your store content for the URL handle to find blog posts, collection descriptions, or menus that reference it
3. Create the redirect first — set up the 301 redirect before you delete, so there's zero downtime
4. Update internal links — change any blog posts, menus, or descriptions to point directly to the new URL (redirects work, but direct links are better)

When changing a URL handle instead of deleting, always check the "Create a URL redirect from [old-url]" checkbox that appears in Shopify's SEO settings section. It's easy to miss, and missing it means anyone with the old link hits a 404 immediately.

Audit Monthly to Catch Problems Early

A single audit fixes today's problems. A monthly check keeps them from piling up again. Research from Broken Link Scan shows that ecommerce sites that monitor links weekly see a 25% increase in conversions compared to those that don't — largely because they catch issues before they compound.

Set a monthly reminder to:

• Check Google Search Console's Pages report for new 404 errors
• Run a quick Screaming Frog crawl if you've made catalog changes
• Review your redirect list for redirect chains (A redirects to B, B redirects to C — fix these by pointing A directly to C)

This takes 10 minutes per month. The alternative is discovering three months later that your best-ranking product page has been sending visitors to a 404 since you renamed it. If you're also working on blog traffic, our Shopify blog SEO guide covers the content side of organic growth.

Start With Your Highest-Traffic 404s

You don't need to fix every broken link today. Open Google Search Console, sort your 404 errors by the pages that were getting the most impressions or clicks, and redirect those first. Five redirects on high-traffic URLs will recover more lost visitors than 50 redirects on pages nobody visits.

Once those are handled, work through the rest and build the monthly audit habit that keeps your store clean going forward.