Shopify Technical SEO Audit: The Complete Checklist

Most technical SEO audits are written for arbitrary websites and then partly applied to ecommerce. Shopify has its own specific quirks — variant URLs, collection filtering, the fixed URL structure — and the checks that matter reflect those.

This is the version to run on a Shopify store, ordered by impact.

1. Indexation: Is Everything You Want Indexed Actually Indexed?

Check: Google Search Console → Pages. Compare indexed pages against your actual product count.

What failure looks like: significantly fewer indexed pages than you have products, or thousands more (a sign of duplicate URL variations being crawled).

Common Shopify causes:

• Products only in unpublished collections and linked from nowhere
• noindex left on from a pre-launch theme setting
• Password protection still enabled on part of the store
• Thin variant pages crawled as separate URLs

Fix: ensure every product is reachable from at least one published collection, and check Online Store → Preferences for leftover noindex settings.

2. 404 Errors and Broken Links

Check: Search Console → Pages → Not found (404).

Why it matters most on Shopify: discontinued products are deleted routinely, and every one leaves behind links from old emails, social posts, and external sites pointing at nothing.

Fix: Shopify admin → Content → URL Redirects. Redirect each dead URL to the closest relevant live page — the collection it belonged to, or a replacement product. Avoid blanket-redirecting everything to the homepage; that technically resolves the 404 but throws away the link value.

This is usually the highest-return item on the whole list, and the most neglected.

3. Duplicate Content From Variants and Filters

Check: search site:yourstore.com in Google and look for the same product appearing at multiple URLs.

Shopify-specific causes:

• ?variant= parameters creating URL variations
• Collection filtering generating crawlable filtered URLs
• The same product reachable via /products/x and /collections/y/products/x

Fix: Shopify sets canonical tags for the last case automatically — verify yours does by checking a product page's source for rel="canonical". For filtered collection URLs, confirm your theme is not generating crawlable links to every filter combination.

4. Page Speed

Check: PageSpeed Insights on your homepage, a collection page, and a product page. Test all three — they perform differently.

What matters: Core Web Vitals, particularly Largest Contentful Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift.

Biggest Shopify culprits, in order:

1. Too many apps injecting scripts (the usual number one)
2. Unoptimised hero and product images
3. Multiple third-party tracking pixels
4. Heavy sliders and carousels above the fold

Fix: audit installed apps and remove anything unused — uninstalled apps sometimes leave script tags behind, so check your theme for orphaned code. Serve images through Shopify's CDN at appropriate sizes.

5. Mobile Usability

Check: Search Console → Mobile Usability, plus manually browse your store on a phone.

What to look for: tap targets too close together, text under 16px, horizontal scrolling on any page, and — most commonly — a sticky element covering the add-to-cart button.

Most Shopify themes are responsive by default. Customisations are what break it.

6. Metadata Coverage

Check: how many products have a custom SEO title and meta description versus falling back to defaults.

What failure looks like: dozens of products with identical or auto-generated meta descriptions, or none at all.

This is a content problem wearing a technical costume, and it is extremely common on stores that scaled quickly.

7. Structured Data

Check: Rich Results Test on a product page; Search Console → Enhancements → Products for site-wide issues.

Watch for: duplicate schema from a theme and an app both emitting it, price mismatches after a sale, and stale availability.

8. Sitemap and robots.txt

Check: visit yourstore.com/sitemap.xml and yourstore.com/robots.txt.

Shopify generates the sitemap automatically. What is worth verifying is robots.txt — if a previous developer or app added restrictive rules, you may be blocking crawlers you want. Since 2021 Shopify allows editing robots.txt.liquid, which means it can be misconfigured.

Also check: AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended) are not disallowed, unless you have deliberately chosen to exclude them.

9. HTTPS and Redirect Chains

Check: that http:// and non-www versions redirect cleanly to your canonical domain in a single hop.

What failure looks like: a chain — http:// → https:// → https://www. → final. Each hop loses a little value and adds latency.

10. Thin and Orphaned Pages

Check: products with under 50 words of description, and pages not linked from anywhere.

Thin product pages rarely rank and can drag on overall site quality assessment. Orphaned pages get crawled infrequently regardless of quality.

Priority Summary

Check	Impact	Effort	Do it
404s and redirects	High	Low	First
Metadata coverage	High	Medium	First
Indexation	High	Low	First
Page speed	High	High	Second
Duplicate content	Medium	Medium	Second
Structured data	Medium	Medium	Second
Thin content	Medium	High	Ongoing
Mobile usability	Medium	Low	Check quarterly
robots.txt / sitemap	Low	Low	Check quarterly
Redirect chains	Low	Low	Once

When to Re-run It

Quarterly for the full list. Immediately after: a theme change, a new app install, or any URL restructure. Those three events cause the large majority of new technical issues.

Doing the Content Half

Items 2, 6, and 10 — redirects, metadata coverage, and thin content — are what Wrivo AI's SEO tools cover: a free-to-run audit that flags them, a redirect manager for 404s, and generation to fill the metadata and content gaps it finds. The rest of this list is theme and app territory.