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Shopify 404 Page: Redirect Broken Links and Customize It

Updated , first published · 4 min read

A Shopify 404 page appears when someone opens an address on your store that does not exist: a deleted product, a renamed collection, an old link from your previous platform. Fix the cause first with a URL redirect for every broken address that still gets visitors, then make the 404 page itself useful in the theme editor, with search, popular collections and a way to contact you.

Facts come from the Shopify Help Center page on URL redirects and the theme editor, read on October 23, 2026. Points from the Shopify Community are marked as such.

Find and redirect broken URLs

Typical sources are products or pages you deleted or renamed, links from your old platform after a migration, and mistyped links on other sites or in your own emails.

  1. Collect the broken addresses. Google Search Console lists pages it found as “Not found (404)”. Your own site audit tool or a crawler shows broken internal links.
  2. Pick a target for each. The closest live page: the replacement product, the collection it belonged to, or the blog post that replaced an old one. Avoid sending everything to the homepage.
  3. Create the redirect under Content > Menus > View URL Redirects > Create URL redirect: enter Redirect from (the old path) and Redirect to (the new path, or / for the homepage), then Save redirect. Redirects start working immediately.
  4. Check Shopify’s rules. A redirect works only from a broken URL; if a page still loads at that address, the redirect is ignored. You cannot redirect paths starting with /apps, /application, /cart, /carts, /orders, /services or /shop, or the fixed paths /products, /collections and /collections/all. The limit is 100,000 redirects, or 20,000,000 on Shopify Plus.
  5. For many redirects at once, Shopify suggests a third-party app.

One trap from Shopify’s troubleshooting notes: a redirect from /404 to / makes the theme editor show your homepage instead of the 404 page. Remove that redirect if you want to edit the 404 page.

When we rebuilt our own blog in 2026 we kept more than 2,300 old addresses alive with redirect maps built from search data and the old sitemap, and the same method works on a Shopify store. Moving a whole store is covered in Shopify migration redirects.

Edit the 404 page in the theme editor

  1. Go to Online Store, click Edit theme on your theme.
  2. Use the page menu at the top of the editor to open the 404 page template.
  3. Add sections the same way as on other templates: a featured collection, a text block, a search bar, a newsletter signup, depending on what your theme offers.
  4. Click Save, then open any made-up address on your store to see the result.

Changes on the template apply to every 404. Our guide to customize Shopify without code explains templates and sections in more detail.

Change the 404 text without code

The “Page not found” heading and the message under it usually come from your theme’s language strings, not from the template. Merchants on the Shopify Community change them in the theme’s default content editor (from the theme’s actions menu, then search the strings for “404”). Write something plain: what happened (“This page doesn’t exist anymore”), and what to do next.

What to put on a 404 page

  • A search box, so the visitor can look for what they came for.
  • Links to your top collections or best sellers, chosen by you rather than random products.
  • A link to the homepage and to your contact page.
  • One sentence in your brand’s voice, not a joke that wastes the visitor’s time.
  • No popup. A visitor who just hit a dead end does not need another obstacle.

Track 404s after you fix them

Check Search Console’s “Not found (404)” list monthly, and after every catalog clean-up. Each new 404 with traffic gets a redirect; old addresses with no visits and no links can stay gone. Broken links and other technical checks are part of the Shopify SEO hub; store operations in general sit in the running a store hub.

Frequently asked questions

How do I edit the 404 page in Shopify? Open Online Store > Edit theme, choose the 404 page template from the page menu at the top of the theme editor, add or change sections, and save. The heading and message text are usually theme language strings, edited in the theme’s default content.

Can I redirect all 404s to the homepage on Shopify? Shopify’s redirects work one address at a time, from a broken URL to a target you choose, so there is no single “all 404s” setting. Sending every broken link to the homepage also leaves visitors where they did not want to be; redirect each important address to its closest replacement.

Do 404 pages hurt SEO? A 404 for a page that never existed or has no replacement is normal. The loss comes from pages that had rankings or links and now return a 404; give those a 301 redirect to the closest live page.