How to find and fix 404 errors on Shopify.

01 / Why 404s matter

Why 404s matter

A 404 is the page a visitor sees when an address on your store doesn’t exist. One now and then is normal. The trouble starts when the broken address is one people still use: a product someone bookmarked, a collection linked from a blog, or a page that search engines still list.

Each of those visits ends at a dead end instead of a product. And when other sites link to a page that no longer exists, the value of that link is lost too, unless you redirect it to a page that does.

02 / Where they come from

Where broken links come from

• Renamed products and collections. Changing a handle changes the address. The old one breaks unless a redirect is created.
• Deleted or archived items. Seasonal products, sold-out collections and retired pages all leave addresses behind.
• A platform move. Stores coming from another platform bring years of old addresses with a different structure.
• Typos in links. A mistyped link in an email, an ad or a social post sends every click to a 404.
• Old campaigns. Landing pages and discount collections that were removed after the sale ended.

03 / How to find them

How to find them

Shopify doesn’t keep a list of the 404s your visitors hit, so you need to look in a few places:

1. Google Search Console. The Pages report lists addresses Google tried to crawl and found missing (“Not found (404)”). It shows what search engines see, usually with a delay.
2. Your own links. Menus, product descriptions, pages and blog posts can all point to pages that no longer exist.
3. A 404 tracker. An app that records each 404 as it happens, with the page that linked to it, shows you what real visitors hit, today.

Send every broken address to the page closest to what the visitor wanted, not to your home page.

04 / The right fix for each

The right fix for each 404

A redirect sends visitors and search engines from the old address to a new one. Use a permanent (301) redirect, and send each address to the page that is closest to what the visitor wanted:

• Renamed product or collection: redirect to its new address.
• Deleted product: redirect to the closest product, or to the collection it belonged to.
• Deleted collection: redirect to a related collection, or to all products.
• Old platform addresses: build a redirect map, one old address per row, and import it as a CSV.
• Whole patterns of old addresses: use a wildcard rule instead of hundreds of single redirects.
• Nothing similar exists: let it stay a 404, and make your 404 page helpful with search and your main collections.

Avoid sending every broken address to your home page. Visitors land somewhere they didn’t ask for, and search engines tend to treat those redirects as missing pages anyway.

05 / Redirects in Shopify

Redirects in Shopify

Shopify has URL redirects built in, and they are real 301s. You can add them one by one in Shopify admin (search for “URL redirects”), or import a CSV with “Redirect from” and “Redirect to” columns.

When you change a product’s handle in its search engine listing, Shopify offers to create a redirect from the old address. Leave that box ticked.

One detail matters: a Shopify redirect only applies when nothing exists at the old address. If a page is still there, the redirect is ignored.

06 / A weekly routine

A weekly routine

Fifteen minutes on a Monday keeps broken links under control:

1. Open last week’s new 404s and sort them by visits.
2. Redirect the top ones to their closest page.
3. Check where the busiest ones came from and fix the link at its source.
4. Ignore the noise: bots probing for addresses like /wp-admin don’t need redirects.