What are broken links on a Shopify store?
A broken link is any URL on your store that returns a 404 error instead of a working page. Links can break for many reasons — usually because the target page was deleted, renamed, or moved without a redirect being put in place.
Unlike a dead link you control (like a typo in your own navigation), many broken links come from outside your store: search engines, social media posts, other websites, email campaigns, or bookmarks.
Where broken links come from
- External backlinks — other websites linked to a product or page you later removed
- Google search results — Google indexed a page that no longer exists and continues to show it in results
- Social media shares — posts linking to a product that has since been deleted or had its handle changed
- Email campaigns — marketing emails pointing to seasonal or discontinued products
- Paid ads — landing page URLs that silently break when you update your catalog
- Bookmarks — returning visitors with bookmarked URLs that no longer work
How broken links affect SEO
When search engines crawl a broken link, several things happen:
- The link equity (ranking power) that other sites passed to that URL is wasted
- Google may see a pattern of broken pages as a sign of poor site maintenance
- Internal links that break create poor crawl paths through your store
- Visitors who land on 404s often bounce immediately, which can affect user experience signals
How to monitor broken links on Shopify
Monitoring broken links requires tracking what visitors actually encounter:
- Real-time 404 tracking — instead of crawling your site looking for broken internal links, monitor which URLs real visitors try to access and get a 404
- Visit prioritization — focus on broken links with the most visits first; a link that 50 people hit is more urgent than one that a bot scanned once
- Referrer awareness — knowing where the traffic came from (Google, social media, a specific website) helps you decide whether to create a redirect or reach out to fix the source
Viloko Redirect Manager automatically tracks storefront 404 visits and shows you which broken links have the most traffic, so you can prioritize fixes.
How to fix broken links
- Create a 301 redirect — point the broken URL to the most relevant existing page (similar product, parent collection, or store homepage as a last resort)
- Use bulk redirects — if many similar URLs broke (e.g., after a product migration), use bulk redirect tools to fix them in one action
- Use wildcard redirects — for URL patterns like
/old-blog/*, create pattern-based redirects - Fix external sources — if you control the referring site, update the link at the source too
- Ignore noise — bot scans and random path probing don't need redirects; mark them as ignored to keep your workspace clean
