Shopify 404 Errors: How to Find and Fix Them Before They Cost You Sales

A 404 error is a dead end — for a shopper who was ready to buy, and for a search engine that was ready to rank the page. Most Shopify stores have more of them than the owner realizes, quietly accumulated over months of discontinuing products and renaming collections.

Where 404s actually come from

• Discontinued products — the URL still exists in old links, emails, and search results, but the page is gone.
• Renamed collections or changed URL structures — a theme change or a URL slug edit breaks every link pointing to the old path.
• Old blog posts moved or deleted — especially common after a blog cleanup or a platform migration.
• External backlinks pointing at pages that no longer exist — the most costly kind, because someone else's site is sending traffic straight into a dead end.

Why it matters more than it seems

A shopper hitting a 404 usually leaves rather than searches your site again — that's a lost sale on a page they were actively trying to reach. And search engines that repeatedly crawl broken links treat it as a signal of a poorly maintained site, which can drag down how the rest of your pages are treated too.

Finding them

Google Search Console's Coverage report will show 404s Google has already found through crawling, but it won't catch everything — particularly older backlinks it hasn't recrawled recently. A dedicated site scan that checks your actual internal links and known external backlinks catches more than Search Console alone.

Fixing them: redirects, not deletions

The fix for almost every 404 is a 301 redirect — pointing the old URL at the closest relevant live page. If a product is discontinued, redirect to the collection it belonged to, or to a close replacement, not just the homepage. A homepage redirect technically "fixes" the 404 but loses almost all the value of the original link; a relevant redirect preserves both the shopper's intent and the page's accumulated SEO value.

Set up a habit, not a one-time fix

404s aren't a problem you solve once — they accumulate continuously as products get discontinued and collections get reorganized. The stores that stay clean check on a schedule (monthly is reasonable for most catalogs) rather than only when someone notices broken traffic.

Wrivo AI's SEO tools include an automatic redirect manager that surfaces 404s as they happen, so fixing them is a couple of clicks instead of a quarterly audit project.