How to find and fix broken links in your Shopify store

A broken link is a URL on your store that leads nowhere — a 404 “page not found” instead of a product, collection or article. One is harmless; a few hundred scattered across your menus, collections and content quietly leak SEO value and send shoppers into dead ends. Shopify has no built-in scanner that crawls your whole store and lists them, so most go unnoticed. To find them you connect Google Search Console, spot-check by hand, or run a crawler. To fix them you create a 301 URL redirect when a page moved or was deleted, or correct the link when it’s simply wrong. Here’s how to do both properly.

Why do broken links matter?

Two costs, both gradual:

• SEO. Internal links that 404 waste the crawl budget search engines spend on your site and leak the link equity that should be flowing to your real product and collection pages. External links or menu items that dead-end signal a poorly maintained site.
• Sales. A shopper who clicks through to a 404 is a shopper you’ve lost mid-intent. They rarely hunt for the right page — they leave.

How do 404s happen on a Shopify store?

Most broken links on Shopify come from one place: a URL that used to work and no longer does. The common causes:

• Deleted products. When you delete a product, Shopify does not create a redirect — the old /products/handle URL starts returning 404 immediately, and any collection link, bookmark or Google result still pointing at it breaks.
• Archived or hidden products. Same effect: the storefront URL stops resolving, with no automatic redirect.
• Changed URL handles. Rename a product or page and Shopify shows a “Create a URL redirect for [old handle]” checkbox — ticked by default. Leave it ticked. Untick it or miss it, and the old URL 404s the moment you save.
• Removed collections, pages or blog posts, and apps that create then remove URLs.

The pattern: Shopify protects you only on a handle change (via that checkbox). Deletes and archives leave 404s behind silently, which is why they pile up unnoticed.

How do I find broken links in Shopify?

Shopify’s admin has no scanner that lists every broken link, so you have three options, from quickest to most complete:

• Google Search Console. The Pages report — the “Not found (404)” rows — shows URLs Google crawled and got a 404 on. It’s free and worth connecting, but it only covers what Google has already tried, not every link on your site.
• Spot-checks. Click through your main menu, footer and top collections. Catches the obvious ones, misses the rest.
• A full crawl. A crawler starts at your homepage and follows every internal link, flagging each one that breaks. This is the only method that finds links buried three clicks deep in a collection or inside page content — which is where most broken links actually live.

How do I fix a broken link in Shopify?

There are two different fixes, and using the wrong one leaves the problem in place:

• The destination moved or was deleted → redirect. Create a 301 URL redirect from the old path to the nearest live page, under Content → Menus → URL Redirects → Create URL redirect (the old “Online Store → Navigation” path was moved under Content). Put the broken path in Redirect from and the live one in Redirect to, then Save redirect. The old link now resolves and the SEO value it carried flows to the live page. Two Shopify rules to know: you can only redirect from a URL that’s actually broken (a live page can’t be redirected), and reserved paths like /products, /collections, /cart and /checkout can’t be redirected.
• The link itself is wrong → fix the link. A typo, or a link to something genuinely deleted with no replacement — edit or remove the link at its source. A redirect can’t fix a link that was never meant to go where it points.

Redirect when the destination moved; fix the link when the link is wrong.

A 404-scan rarely travels alone, either — the same crawl that finds dead links also surfaces images with no alt text, which cost you Google Images traffic and accessibility. For that side of a store-health pass, see how to add alt text to Shopify product images.

The fix: Healthly

The slow part isn’t knowing what to do — it’s finding every broken link and then fixing them one at a time. Healthly runs one scan across your whole storefront and lists every broken link, 404, missing image alt text and meta-tag issue in one place. From the findings you fix them in reversible, audited clicks — create the 301 redirect for a 404, set the missing alt or meta — so you always know what it touched and can undo a fix that wasn’t right.

It’s honest about its limits. The free plan scans and fixes, with caps on bulk fixes and the number of active redirects. Pro (€24/mo) adds scheduled automatic re-scans so new 404s get caught as they appear, plus IndexNow re-crawl pings for the specific URLs it fixes — so Bing and other IndexNow engines re-crawl a corrected page quickly, on top of the product and collection updates Shopify already pings natively. It turns an afternoon of manual crawling and clicking into a scan and a review.