Key Takeaways
- A 404 error means a URL returns “not found” — Googlebot records this and stops passing authority through any links pointing there
- Shopify has both “hard” 404s (deleted pages) and “soft” 404s (pages that return 200 but show error content)
- Google Search Console is your best starting point for finding 404s, but misses newly broken links
- Every 404 should either be redirected to a relevant live page or have the linking content updated
If you’ve ever seen a “Page not found” message on a Shopify store, you’ve encountered a 404 error. For customers, it’s a minor frustration. For search engines, it’s a more significant problem — and one that accumulates silently in the background of most stores.
This guide covers what 404 errors actually are, how Shopify generates them, how they affect your rankings, and the practical steps to fix them.
What Is a 404 Error?
HTTP status codes are numbers that web servers return to describe the result of a request. When a browser or search engine requests a URL, the server responds with a code:
- 200: Success — the page exists and loaded correctly
- 301: Moved permanently — this URL has a new address
- 404: Not found — no page exists at this URL
A 404 on your Shopify store means someone (a customer, Googlebot, or another crawler) requested a URL that doesn’t have a corresponding page. The store’s default behavior is to show a “Page not found” page and return a 404 status code.
Hard 404s vs Soft 404s on Shopify
Shopify has two types of 404-like situations:
Hard 404: The URL genuinely doesn’t exist. Shopify returns a proper 404 HTTP status code. This is what happens when you delete a product, collection, or page without setting up a redirect.
Soft 404: The URL returns a 200 (success) status code, but the page content signals to Google that it’s not a real page. On Shopify, this can happen when a product is out of stock and redirected to a generic out-of-stock page, or when theme customizations cause placeholder pages to be indexed.
Soft 404s are trickier because they don’t appear in the same place as hard 404s in Google Search Console. Google has to infer them from page content, and they can suppress rankings without being immediately obvious.
How 404 Errors Appear on Shopify
Deleted Products and Pages
The most common cause. When you delete a product, collection, page, or blog post without a redirect, the URL immediately returns a 404. If that URL was ever linked to from anywhere — internally or externally — those links are now broken.
Changed URL Handles
Shopify automatically redirects the old URL to the new one when you change a product handle — but only for the product page URL itself. Any internal links in your content (product descriptions, blog posts, pages) that used the old URL are now broken and will return a 404.
Old Campaign and Promotional Pages
Stores often create temporary pages for sales, events, or campaigns. When the campaign ends and the page is deleted, any links that were shared — in emails, social posts, or other marketing — become 404s. If those links got any SEO traction, the authority is lost.
Discontinued Collections
When you restructure your collection taxonomy, old collection URLs break. A collection at /collections/summer-sale-2023 that was popular may have had blog posts linking to it, external sites featuring it, or customers with it bookmarked.
Theme Migration Artifacts
When switching Shopify themes, custom URL structures sometimes break. If your old theme had pages at /pages/our-story and your new theme reorganized that content, a 404 is the result.
How 404 Errors Hurt Your Rankings
Crawl Budget Drain
Googlebot has a limited crawl budget for your store. Every 404 it encounters uses a crawl slot — a slot that could have been used to crawl and index a live page. Stores with many 404s have important pages crawled less frequently, meaning updates and new content take longer to appear in search results.
Link Equity Loss
Any links — internal or external — pointing to a 404 URL are not passing PageRank anywhere. The authority those links carry evaporates. This is particularly damaging for external inbound links from other sites, which took time and effort to earn.
Index Pollution
URLs that return 404s may stay in Google’s index for weeks or months after the page is gone. During that time, search results may still show these URLs, sending customers to error pages. Once Google removes them from the index, any ranking those pages had is gone.
User Experience Signals
When customers click a search result that leads to a 404, they immediately go back to Google. This is a negative engagement signal. Over time, pages that frequently result in quick return-to-SERP behavior rank lower.
How to Find 404 Errors on Your Shopify Store
Google Search Console
- Open Google Search Console and navigate to Pages
- Click on “Not found (404)” in the list of page statuses
- This shows URLs that Google has attempted to crawl and received a 404
This is the best starting point because it shows 404s that Google actually knows about. However, it’s incomplete — it only shows URLs Google has attempted to crawl, not all broken internal links that haven’t been crawled yet.
For each 404 URL in GSC, click on it and then view the linking pages to understand where those URLs are being linked from.
Shopify-Specific Scanning
For internal broken links, a dedicated Shopify scanning tool is more thorough than GSC. These tools check every link in your product descriptions, pages, and blog posts against your store’s live URL structure — surfacing broken links that Googlebot hasn’t discovered yet.
How to Fix 404 Errors
Option 1: Set Up a 301 Redirect
A 301 (permanent) redirect tells browsers and search engines that a URL has permanently moved. It preserves approximately 90% of the link equity from inbound links.
In Shopify: Online Store → Navigation → URL Redirects → Add URL redirect
- Redirect from: The broken 404 URL
- Redirect to: The most semantically relevant live page
Choose the destination carefully:
- Deleted product → most similar live product, or the parent collection
- Deleted collection → parent category or homepage
- Old promotional page → current equivalent page, or homepage
Don’t redirect everything to your homepage. A homepage redirect for a deleted product page is better than a 404, but a relevant product or collection redirect is significantly better for preserving authority.
Option 2: Restore the Page
If the page was deleted by mistake, or if you plan to bring a product back, restore it. In Shopify, deleted products can sometimes be restored from your activity log if the deletion was recent.
If you archived the product rather than deleting it, restoring is straightforward.
Option 3: Fix the Source Links
If the 404 error is caused by internal links pointing to the wrong URL (for example, after a handle change), fix the links at the source:
- Update product descriptions that link to the old URL
- Update blog posts referencing the old URL
- Update custom page content
This is particularly important for links in high-traffic content, where you want the link to go directly to the destination without a redirect hop.
Preventing New 404s
The most effective approach is upstream prevention:
Before deleting any product or page: Set up a redirect first. Make this a standard step in your workflow — redirect, then delete.
Before changing a URL handle: Update any internal links in your content first, then change the handle.
After theme migrations: Run a full link scan to catch any URLs that broke during the migration.
Regular monitoring: A monthly scan of your store for broken links (using GSC, a crawler, or a Shopify app) catches new 404s before they accumulate into a significant problem.
Stores that treat 404 prevention as an ongoing process rather than a reactive fix maintain better crawl health, stronger link equity, and more consistent rankings over time.
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