Key Takeaways
- Redirecting 404s to your homepage creates soft 404s — Google ignores the redirect and still penalises the broken URL
- Link equity from the original URL is not transferred when you redirect to an unrelated page like your homepage
- The right fix is to update the broken link at the source, or redirect to the most relevant live page
- Blanket homepage redirects mask the problem rather than solving it — your broken links still exist, you just can’t see them
If you’ve gone looking for a quick way to clean up 404 errors on your Shopify store, you’ve almost certainly found this advice: redirect all your 404s to your homepage. It shows up on Shopify forums, in YouTube tutorials, and in agency blog posts. It sounds reasonable. You have broken URLs, your homepage is the most useful page on your site — problem solved.
It’s not solved. In fact, this approach actively makes your SEO worse while giving you the impression that everything is fine.
How to Redirect 404s to Your Homepage on Shopify
Before explaining why this is a bad idea, let’s cover the mechanics — because you may have already done this, or you’re trying to understand whether to.
Method 1: Via Shopify’s URL Redirect Tool
Shopify’s built-in redirect system only handles specific URL-to-URL redirects. You can’t use it to create a wildcard “redirect all 404s to homepage” rule. For that, you need the theme approach.
Method 2: Via Your 404.liquid Theme Template
Shopify themes have a 404.liquid template that renders when a URL returns a 404. The common advice is to add a JavaScript redirect in this template:
{% comment %} 404.liquid {% endcomment %}
<script>
window.location.replace("/");
</script>This makes visitors who land on a 404 URL get immediately bounced to your homepage. From a user experience standpoint, the 404 disappears — they never see an error page.
Method 3: Via a Shopify App
Some redirect apps offer wildcard rules or “redirect all 404s” settings that do the same thing at the server level rather than via JavaScript.
All three approaches have the same fundamental SEO problem.
Why Redirecting 404s to Your Homepage Is an SEO Mistake
Google Treats It as a Soft 404
This is the core issue. When Google sees a redirect from /products/old-jacket to your homepage, it doesn’t think “great, this URL has been fixed.” It thinks “this page was supposed to exist at this URL, but it’s sending me to an unrelated page instead.”
Google’s documentation explicitly identifies this as a soft 404 — a URL that returns a success or redirect response but doesn’t serve relevant content. Soft 404s are treated similarly to hard 404s from a rankings perspective, but they’re harder to detect and fix because they don’t show up as errors in the same way.
Link Equity Still Dies
A 301 redirect only transfers link authority when the destination page is relevant to the source URL. Redirecting a specific product URL to your homepage doesn’t preserve the authority that URL had accumulated — it dissipates it.
If /products/old-leather-jacket had backlinks from three fashion blogs and a press mention, redirecting that URL to your homepage doesn’t move those backlinks’ value to your homepage. Google recognises the irrelevance and discounts the transfer.
The Illusion of a Clean Slate
The most dangerous thing about this approach is that it works at a surface level. Your 404 errors stop showing up in monitoring tools. Visitors stop seeing error pages. It feels like you’ve cleaned things up.
But the underlying broken links still exist. Every blog post, product description, and page that links to a deleted product URL is still pointing to a dead end — Shopify is just covering it with a redirect before anyone notices. The moment you remove that redirect, all the breakage is visible again.
More importantly, you’ve lost the ability to identify which pages in your store need their links updated. The data is gone.
Crawl Budget Waste
When Google crawls a URL that redirects to your homepage, it follows the redirect, crawls your homepage, and notes that the original URL redirects there. Over time, if many URLs redirect to your homepage, Googlebot may start deprioritising crawls of your homepage — it’s already seen it, repeatedly, via these redirects.
For large Shopify stores, this can meaningfully affect how quickly new content gets indexed.
User Experience Is Poor
A customer who clicks a link to a specific product and lands on your homepage has no idea what happened. They’ll either search your site for the product or leave. Neither outcome is as good as landing directly on a relevant product page or collection.
What to Do Instead
Fix the Broken Link at the Source
This is the correct approach. The problem isn’t just that a URL returns a 404 — it’s that something in your store is linking to that URL. A blog post, a product description, a page. Find that link, update it to point to the correct URL, and the problem is solved at the root.
This is what Relink does: it scans every page, product, collection, and blog post in your store, finds every broken link, and shows you exactly which piece of content is linking to what broken URL. You fix the link itself rather than masking it with a redirect.
Redirect to the Most Relevant Live Page
When a product has been permanently deleted and you can’t update every link pointing to it, a redirect is appropriate — but it should go to the most relevant live destination, not your homepage.
- Deleted product → redirect to the closest alternative product or the parent collection
- Deleted blog post → redirect to the most related live article
- Deleted page → redirect to a page with equivalent content
This way, the redirect carries some link authority, and users land somewhere useful.
Use a Real 404 When Nothing Relevant Exists
If a URL is broken and there’s no relevant page to redirect to, returning a genuine 404 is the honest and correct response. Google understands that content is sometimes removed. A clean 404 is better than a soft 404 generated by redirecting to an unrelated page.
Customise your 404.liquid template to be helpful — include your search bar, links to popular collections, and a message explaining what happened — but don’t redirect away from it.
Audit Your Internal Links Regularly
Most 404s on Shopify stores are caused by internal links that were never updated after a product handle changed or a page was deleted. A regular audit catches these before they accumulate.
When Redirecting to Homepage Is Acceptable
There are narrow cases where a homepage redirect makes sense:
- You’re redirecting an old domain to your new one and have no URL mapping
- An external link points to a URL that has no relevant equivalent anywhere on your site
- You’re cleaning up a temporary campaign page that was only ever meant to last a short time
These are exceptions. For the day-to-day 404s that Shopify stores accumulate — deleted products, changed URL handles, restructured collections — redirecting to your homepage is not the answer.
The Right Mental Model
Think of a 404 not as an error to hide but as a signal pointing to a broken link somewhere in your store. The redirect-to-homepage approach hides the signal. The right approach is to find the broken link, fix it, and then decide whether a redirect is also needed for any external links you can’t control.
Relink surfaces every broken link in your Shopify store — the internal links that your blog posts, product descriptions, and pages are pointing to — so you can fix the source rather than papering over the symptoms.