How to Fix 404 Pages in Shopify (2026)

Key takeaways

• Find your 404 errors in Google Search Console under Pages → Not found (404).
• Add redirects in Shopify: Online Store → Navigation → URL Redirects → Add redirect.
• Bulk redirects can be imported via CSV — useful when migrating products or redesigning your store.
• 404s from deleted products with backlinks should always be redirected. Lost backlinks = lost ranking power.

A 404 error means someone (or a search engine) tried to visit a page that no longer exists. These happen naturally as you run a store — you delete products, rename collections, change URL slugs. Every time you do, any links pointing to the old URL now hit a dead end.

For SEO, the critical ones are 404s on pages that had backlinks or were ranking in Google.

Why 404s hurt your Shopify store

Lost backlinks. If a product page had links from other websites and you delete it without a redirect, those links now point to a 404. The SEO value from those backlinks is effectively gone.

Crawl waste. Google’s crawl budget is finite. Crawling 404s instead of live pages wastes crawl budget that could be spent indexing new content.

Poor user experience. Real shoppers following links from social posts, emails, or Google arrive at a dead end and usually leave.

How to find your Shopify 404 errors

Google Search Console

The most reliable source for 404s that Google has found:

1. Open Google Search Console
2. Select your property
3. Go to Indexing → Pages
4. Click “Not found (404)” in the “Why pages aren’t indexed” section
5. Export the list of affected URLs

These are pages Google tried to crawl and found broken. Prioritize any that had significant traffic or backlinks.

Shopify Analytics

Go to Analytics → Reports → look for a 404 report. Shopify’s native analytics doesn’t have a dedicated 404 report, but some Shopify themes log 404s, and third-party analytics tools (GA4, etc.) can report on page-not-found events.

An SEO crawl tool

Tools like Screaming Frog or Ahrefs’ Site Audit will crawl your store and flag all internal 404 links (links within your own site pointing to dead pages).

How to add URL redirects in Shopify

Adding a single redirect

1. Go to Online Store → Navigation
2. Click URL Redirects
3. Click Add redirect
4. Enter the Redirect from path (e.g., /products/old-product-name) — use only the path, not the full URL
5. Enter the Redirect to path (e.g., /products/new-product-name or /collections/category)
6. Click Save redirect

Shopify creates a 301 (permanent) redirect. This passes link equity from the old URL to the new one.

What to redirect to

Deleted product with an equivalent replacement: redirect to the replacement product.

Deleted product with no replacement: redirect to the most relevant collection.

Deleted collection: redirect to the parent category or homepage.

Changed URL slug: redirect old slug to new slug. This happens automatically for Shopify products when you change the URL handle — but only if the product still exists.

Bulk importing redirects via CSV

For large migrations or site redesigns where you have hundreds of old URLs to redirect:

Step 1 — Prepare your CSV. Create a spreadsheet with two columns: Redirect from and Redirect to. Each row is one redirect. Save as CSV.

Step 2 — Import. Online Store → Navigation → URL Redirects → Import.

Step 3 — Upload your CSV and confirm the import.

Tip: Shopify has a limit of 10,000 redirects. If you’re migrating a very large catalog, prioritize pages with the most backlinks and traffic — use Ahrefs or Google Search Console to identify these.

Common 404 situations in Shopify

Deleted products. When you delete a product (rather than archiving it), the URL returns a 404. Always redirect deleted products, especially if they were selling well or had backlinks.

Renamed collections. Changing a collection’s URL handle breaks any existing links to that collection. Add a redirect from the old URL to the new one.

Blog posts that were removed. Blog posts can accumulate backlinks over time. Deleting a post without a redirect wastes that link equity.

Variant URLs. Shopify product variant URLs (e.g., /products/shirt?variant=12345) can 404 if a variant is deleted. These are harder to manage — prioritize the most-linked variant URLs.

What to do about a large number of 404s

If you find hundreds of 404 errors after a store migration or redesign:

1. Export the full 404 list from Google Search Console
2. Filter for pages that had impressions (these were ranking) — export the impressions column
3. Sort by impressions, descending
4. Work through the list top-down, redirecting high-impression pages first
5. For low-traffic 404s with no backlinks, a lower-priority cleanup is fine

Don’t be paralyzed trying to fix every 404. Focus where the SEO and traffic impact is real.