Key Takeaways
- A custom 404 page improves user experience for visitors who land on dead URLs — it doesn’t reduce the number of dead URLs
- Every 404 a customer hits represents a broken link somewhere — in your content, on an external site, or in an email campaign
- Customising your 404 page is a 30-minute UX task; fixing the broken links causing 404s is the actual SEO work
- Do both, in the right order: find and fix your broken links first, then make your 404 page useful for the ones you can’t control
If you search “Shopify 404 page,” most results are about how to customise the design. Change the headline, add your logo, link to popular collections. These guides aren’t wrong — a good 404 page is better than a bad one. But they’re answering the wrong question.
The question worth asking is: why are customers landing on your 404 page at all?
What a Custom 404 Page Can and Can’t Do
What it can do
A well-designed 404 page:
- Gives visitors somewhere useful to go instead of hitting the back button
- Maintains your brand experience during an error state
- Reduces the immediate bounce rate when someone hits a dead URL
- Includes search so customers can find what they were looking for
All of this is genuine UX value. A visitor who lands on a helpful 404 page with a search bar and links to popular collections is more likely to stay and find what they need than one who sees a blank “Page not found” screen.
What it can’t do
A 404 page cannot:
- Fix the broken links that sent the visitor there
- Recover the link equity lost when Google crawls those broken URLs
- Prevent Googlebot from recording 404s and reducing crawl efficiency
- Stop Google from eventually de-indexing URLs that consistently return 404
This is the gap most merchants don’t address. The 404 page is the error state. The broken links are the underlying problem.
How to Customise Your Shopify 404 Page
Shopify renders your 404 page from a template file called 404.liquid inside your theme. Every Shopify theme includes this file.
Access via Shopify Admin
- Go to Online Store → Themes
- Click Actions → Edit code on your active theme
- In the Templates folder, find
404.liquid - Edit the HTML/Liquid to customise the page
What to Include on a Good 404 Page
Search bar — the most valuable element. If someone was looking for a specific product, letting them search is the fastest path back to what they need.
Navigation to popular collections — give visitors a clear path to your main product areas without requiring them to go back to your homepage.
A clear, honest message — something like “We can’t find that page” or “This page has moved or been removed.” Don’t be overly apologetic or clever at the expense of clarity.
Links to recent or featured products — if you have a product grid you can render, showing a few products keeps the shopping experience alive.
What Not to Include
An automatic redirect to your homepage. This is the most common 404 page mistake. Adding window.location.replace("/") or a meta refresh to your 404.liquid creates soft 404s — Google sees the redirect to an irrelevant page and treats the original URL as a soft 404. You replace a visible problem (hard 404) with an invisible one (soft 404) that’s harder to detect and fix.
Excessive apologies or humour. A brief, brand-appropriate message is fine. A paragraph of apology or an elaborate joke slows the visitor down from finding what they need.
The More Important Work: Finding and Fixing Broken Links
A 404 page is what you show visitors when a URL doesn’t exist. The question you should be asking is: what’s causing the broken URL?
Internal Links
The most common source of 404s on Shopify stores is internal links that were never updated. A blog post links to a product that was later deleted. A product description links to a collection that was restructured. A page links to another page whose URL handle changed.
These links are in your content right now. Every time a visitor or Googlebot follows one, they land on a 404. Fixing these is straightforward once you know where they are — you go to the blog post, update the link to point to the correct URL, and the 404 stops happening for anyone who follows that link.
External Links You Can’t Control
If another site links to a URL on your store that no longer exists, you can’t change that link. What you can do is set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the most relevant live page. This recovers the link equity from that inbound link and gives visitors a useful destination.
Old Campaign URLs
Shopify merchants regularly create temporary pages for sales, campaigns, and promotions. When the campaign ends, the page gets deleted — but the URLs were shared in emails, social posts, and ads. Set up redirects for campaign URLs that had significant traffic before archiving them.
Changed URL Handles
When you edit a product’s URL handle in Shopify, it automatically creates a redirect from the old URL to the new one. But this only covers the product page URL itself — any internal links in your content that used the old URL still point to a broken destination, even though the redirect exists at the product level.
The Right Order of Operations
Step 1: Scan your store for broken internal links. Find every blog post, product description, page, and collection that links to a URL that returns a 404. Fix those links to point to the correct destination. This eliminates the most controllable source of 404s.
Step 2: For URLs that have inbound links from external sources or were previously indexed by Google, set up 301 redirects to the most relevant live pages.
Step 3: Customise your 404 page for the 404s that remain — the ones you can’t control (old campaign links, external links to deleted pages, bookmarks).
Most merchants reverse this order. They spend 30 minutes making their 404 page look nice and never do steps 1 and 2. The result is a well-designed 404 page that continues to be hit thousands of times a month by visitors following broken internal links that could have been fixed.
Relink handles step 1: it scans every page, product, collection, and blog post in your Shopify store and surfaces every broken internal link, showing you exactly which content needs updating. Fix those links, and your 404 page becomes a safety net for the unusual case rather than the default destination for broken internal navigation.
A Simple 404 Page Template
Here’s a clean starting point for 404.liquid that covers the essentials:
<div class="page-width">
<div class="error-page">
<h1>Page not found</h1>
<p>The page you're looking for has moved or been removed.</p>
<form action="/search" method="get">
<input type="text" name="q" placeholder="Search our store" />
<button type="submit">Search</button>
</form>
<nav>
<a href="/collections/all">Shop all products</a>
<a href="/">Back to homepage</a>
</nav>
</div>
</div>Style it to match your theme. The key elements are there: a clear message, search, and navigation. No auto-redirect, no apology paragraph, no clever copy that gets in the way of the visitor finding what they need.