The idea and the plan

The idea: renamed products, deleted collections and old platform URLs leave Shopify stores full of 404s. Visitors hit dead ends, and search engines drop the pages. We wanted every 404 found and fixed, mostly without the merchant lifting a finger.

The plan we started from:

• Shopify’s own 301 redirects, so every fix works for every visitor and crawler, and stays if the app is uninstalled.
• A tracker that runs only on the 404 page, recording the broken path but never the person: no cookies, no IP addresses.
• A match for every broken URL, with a confidence score and a reason, and strong matches redirected automatically.
• Free to track, with paid plans for the tools that big catalogs and migrations need.