How to Find 404 Errors in Shopify

Shopify will show a shopper the 404 template and give you almost no list of which URLs they tried. Finding those URLs means looking at the places that still remember them: search tools, your own links, and a monitor that records the visit.

Start with URLs you already changed

Most costly 404s are former pages. A product handle was edited, a collection was deleted, a landing page for a sale was unpublished, or a blog post still links to a path you renamed. Write those old paths down before you open any report. If you know /products/winter-jaket used to exist, you do not need a crawler to tell you it 404s. You need to know whether anyone still requests it.

Google Search Console

Search Console's page indexing report can show Not found (404) for URLs Google crawled. That is useful, and it is slow. It tells you what Google fetched, not that a shopper arrived today from an old Instagram bio or from a collection description on your own site. Export the list, but do not treat every row as equal. A URL Google tried once is less urgent than a URL shoppers still open.

Click your own store

Open the menus, the footer, and a few collection descriptions. Broken internal links never need a search engine. They are in theme navigation, a menu you built under Online Store, or HTML you pasted into a page. Fixing the menu is better than redirecting, because the menu should not point at a dead path in the first place. A redirect still helps bookmarks and search results.

What a visit monitor adds

404Guard's app embed runs on the 404 template and records the path plus the referrer. Overview then sorts by visits. A path with 83 human visits this month outranks a path a scanner hit twice. Sources split Google, other sites, direct visits, and internal pages. Internal referring pages name the collection or article that sent the shopper, which is the edit you can make today.

Turn it on with Enable monitoring. The embed does not crawl the store, so the first day can be quiet. That quiet is the report: nobody hit a missing URL.

Ignore the noise

You will also see /wp-admin, /.env, and other paths that were never Shopify routes. Those are probes. Hide obvious bot traffic is on by default. Ignore the rest if they clutter the open list. Do not redirect them to the homepage. That teaches nothing and can look like a soft 404 to a crawler.