How to Find Broken Links on Your Shopify Store

Key Takeaways

• Google Search Console finds broken links Google has already crawled — but misses many more
• Screaming Frog is the most thorough free manual option, but requires technical setup
• Automated Shopify apps are the only method that catches new broken links as they appear
• For stores with 100+ products, manual methods don’t scale — the catalog changes too fast

Finding broken links on a Shopify store sounds simple until you try to do it at scale. Most merchants discover they have far more than expected — and that the methods they assumed would catch everything have significant blind spots.

This guide walks through every method available, what each one catches, and what each one misses.

Why Finding Broken Links Is Harder Than It Sounds

A typical Shopify store has broken links scattered across dozens of different places: product descriptions, blog articles, navigation menus, page content, metafields, and more. No single method reliably finds them all.

The challenge compounds because broken links aren’t static. Every time you delete a product, change a URL, restructure a collection, or update your blog, new broken links can appear. A store that was clean last month may have accumulated dozens of new broken links this month.

With that context, here are the methods available — from simplest to most thorough.

Method 1: Google Search Console (Free, Limited)

Google Search Console is the first place most merchants look, and it’s a reasonable starting point — but it has a significant limitation.

How to use it:

1. Log in to Google Search Console for your store
2. Navigate to Pages in the left sidebar
3. Look for pages with status “Not found (404)” or “Soft 404”
4. These are URLs that Googlebot has attempted to crawl and found broken

What it catches:

• URLs that Google has already discovered and attempted to crawl
• Both internal broken links and broken external links pointing to your store

What it misses:

• Broken links on pages Googlebot hasn’t crawled recently
• Broken links that Google hasn’t followed yet (low-priority pages)
• The source location of each broken link — GSC shows you the broken URL but not always where the link lives in your content
• Broken links on newly published content

Best for: Getting a quick overview of your most-visible broken links. Not suitable as your only method.

Method 2: Screaming Frog SEO Spider (Free for up to 500 URLs)

Screaming Frog is a desktop application that crawls your website the same way Googlebot does — following every link it finds and reporting the response code for each URL.

How to use it:

1. Download Screaming Frog SEO Spider
2. Enter your Shopify store URL and click Start
3. Let it crawl (large stores may take 10–30 minutes)
4. Filter by response code: look for 404, 410, and redirects (301/302)
5. Export the results and look at the “Inlinks” tab to see where each broken URL is linked from

What it catches:

• Every internal link across your store’s crawlable pages
• Broken links in product descriptions, page content, navigation, and footers
• Redirect chains (links that go through multiple redirects before resolving)

What it misses:

• Content loaded via JavaScript that Screaming Frog can’t render by default (requires paid version with JavaScript rendering)
• Links inside Shopify metafields not surfaced in the crawl
• Real-time changes — you have to re-crawl to find new broken links

Best for: A thorough one-time audit of a store under 500 URLs (free). Larger stores need the paid version ($259/year).

Important note for Shopify: Some Shopify themes load content dynamically. If your product descriptions or page content is rendered via JavaScript, Screaming Frog’s free version will miss those links. Enable JavaScript rendering in Configuration > Spider > Rendering to catch them.

Method 3: Ahrefs or Semrush Site Audit (Paid)

Both Ahrefs and Semrush include site audit tools that crawl your store and report broken links as part of a broader technical SEO report.

What they add over Screaming Frog:

• Cloud-based (no desktop app required)
• Scheduled re-crawls (daily, weekly, or monthly)
• Broader SEO context — broken links reported alongside other issues
• Monitoring for changes over time

What they miss:

• Still limited to what’s crawlable — same JavaScript rendering limitations
• Expensive ($99–$199+/month) if you don’t already subscribe for other SEO work

Best for: Merchants who already use Ahrefs or Semrush for keyword research and want broken link detection as part of their existing workflow.

Method 4: A Shopify-Specific Scanning App (Most Thorough)

General web crawlers don’t have access to Shopify’s internal content APIs. They can only see what’s visible in HTML. A Shopify app, by contrast, has authenticated API access to your store — which means it can scan content that web crawlers can’t reach.

What Shopify apps can scan that crawlers can’t:

• Product descriptions (even complex, dynamically-rendered ones)
• Page and blog article content via the Admin API
• Content stored in metafields
• Draft products and pages not yet published

How it works with Relink:

1. Install from the Shopify App Store — no configuration required
2. Run a scan from the dashboard
3. Relink uses Shopify’s API to read all your product descriptions, pages, and blog posts
4. Every link found in that content is checked against your live store
5. Broken links are listed with their source location, the broken URL, and an AI-suggested fix

What makes this approach different:

• Catches broken links in content that web crawlers miss
• Knows your store’s full URL structure — can confirm whether a URL actually resolves
• Can be scheduled to run daily so new broken links are caught as they appear
• Suggests the correct fix using AI rather than just reporting the problem

What it doesn’t cover:

• External links pointing to your store from other websites (use GSC for that)
• Theme code — if a broken link is hardcoded in your theme’s Liquid files, that requires a developer

Comparing the Methods

What To Do After You Find Them

Finding broken links is half the job. The other half is fixing them in a way that preserves your SEO authority.

The key principle: don’t just delete the broken link — redirect it or fix it.

• If the destination page was deleted, set up a 301 redirect to the most relevant live page
• If the URL changed (e.g., a product handle was updated), fix the link in the source content or add a redirect
• If the content linking to the broken URL is editable (a blog post, product description, page), update the link directly

For stores with many broken links, fixing them manually is time-consuming. Apps like Relink can apply fixes in bulk, or automatically apply AI-suggested fixes without requiring manual approval.

Building a Broken Link Monitoring Process

The most important insight about broken links: they’re not a one-time problem. They reappear constantly as your store evolves.

A sustainable process looks like this:

1. Initial audit — find and fix all existing broken links using one of the thorough methods above
2. Ongoing monitoring — either schedule regular crawls or use an app that scans automatically
3. Pre-change checklist — before deleting products or changing URLs, identify what links to them and set up redirects first

Stores that maintain this process have consistently better technical SEO health than those that treat broken links as something to fix when they notice a ranking drop.

Relink’s automated scanner checks your entire store — products, pages, and blog posts — and reports every broken link with an AI-suggested fix. Install free on Shopify.