Short answer: open Shopify’s Sessions by landing page report, sort it by sessions, and open the addresses at the top that you don’t recognize. Any that show “Page not found” are 404s that real visitors are landing on. Redirect each one to its closest live page under Content › Menus › View URL redirects; Shopify says redirects start working immediately.
What owners usually ask
Owners don’t often ask about 404s by name. More often they ask how the site is doing, or what to look at in Shopify’s reports. One client asked us where to find the data in Shopify, and how to read it.
That’s a good question, and the first useful answer is often maintenance, not conversion: pages people still arrive at that no longer exist. Whether those visitors find anything depends on three things:
- The old addresses still in use, in Google, on other sites, in old emails and in bookmarks.
- A redirect for each one that matters, pointing to the closest live page.
- Shopify’s rule for redirects: they only work when the old address is actually broken.
What’s usually happening
- The store moved and its old addresses stayed behind. A new platform usually means new addresses. Any old address the new store doesn’t have, from category pages to anything ending in .html, shows “Page not found” unless it has a redirect. Google’s advice for a move like this is to map old addresses to new ones first.
- A product or collection was deleted, hidden or set to draft. Shopify says a hidden collection or a draft product returns a 404. If you make it visible again, Shopify deletes any redirect from it automatically.
- Links you don’t control still point to the old page. Other sites, old emails and bookmarks don’t update themselves, and Google says it will probably keep trying a 404 address for some time, less and less often.
- A redirect exists but doesn’t fire. Shopify redirects only from broken URLs: if a live page still loads at the old address, the redirect won’t work. The other usual reasons are a typo, an address Shopify won’t redirect (such as anything starting with /cart or /apps), and a browser still holding an old redirect in its cache.
- The 404 hides in plain sight. The landing page report shows an address, not whether it works. A busy page with no sales can simply be a page that doesn’t load.
How to check, in about ten minutes
- Open the landing page report. In your Shopify admin, go to Analytics › Reports and open Sessions by landing page. It lists the pages your visitors’ sessions start on.
- Set the date range first. The last 30 or 90 days is a good start. Check the range every time you open a report.
- Sort by sessions and read the paths. Look for addresses your store no longer has: old category names, anything ending in .html, odd short paths nobody recognizes.
- Open each suspicious one. Use a private browser window. If you get your store’s “Page not found” page, so do your visitors.
- See where those visits come from. If the report lets you add the referrer, add it. A search engine means it still has the old address. A site you recognize means a link you could ask to have updated.
- Look at sessions without sales. If the report offers conversions, add them, and look at the pages with the most sessions and none. Not every column is available in every report.
- Check Google’s list too. In Google Search Console, the Page indexing report lists addresses under “Not found (404)”. Google says a 404 isn’t necessarily a problem if a page was removed with no replacement; if it moved, use a 301 redirect.
- Look at the redirects you already have, under Content › Menus › View URL redirects. If one is listed but doesn’t work, check it for typos and make sure no live page still sits at the old address.
What we found on one store
A retailer had moved its store onto Shopify a few days earlier. Their marketing manager wanted to know which numbers to watch, and where to find them in Shopify, so we opened the reports together.
We started with the landing page report: date range set, page path kept, sorted by sessions. The page at the top was an old category page, one the new store no longer had. He opened it: a 404. The store’s busiest way in was a “Page not found”.
It wasn’t the only one. Below it were more old addresses, several ending in .html. He wasn’t sure any redirects had been set up for the old addresses yet. When we added the referrer, the visits came from Google, Bing and direct visits with no referring site. People and search engines were still using the old addresses.
What fixed it
- He set up the redirects himself, in the session, while we talked it through. In the Shopify admin: Content › Menus › View URL redirects › Create URL redirect.
- Redirect from: the old address after the domain. He asked whether the end of the address was enough. It was.
- Redirect to: the closest live page. The old category page had no obvious match, so it went to a homepage. That’s fine for one page with nowhere better to go. Google warns against sending many old addresses to the home page, which it may treat as a soft 404.
- Test the first one. He confirmed it worked, then did the next two.
- The rest went on his list: any other dead addresses near the top of the report.
What the evidence shows
- The report showed it within days. Three or four days after the move, the landing page report already listed the dead category page as the top landing page by sessions.
- Three redirects were in place before we moved on, set up by the marketing manager during the session.
We didn’t measure what the redirects did for visits, rankings or sales.
When to bring someone in
Call someone if:
- you moved platforms and the report shows more old addresses than you can redirect by hand (Shopify imports redirects from a CSV file, but someone has to map each one);
- a redirect you created doesn’t work, and the old address doesn’t load a page;
- you’re not sure where an old page should point;
- you’d like someone to read your Shopify reports with you and turn them into a short list of fixes.