How can I change my shopify url Structure

[Gal_Yish]

Current url

https://www.website.com/collections/category/products/item1

how can I change it to

https://www.website.com/products/item1

or

https://www.website.com/category/item1

is this possible?

[Lisa]

Hi, Gal Yish!

Lisa here from the Shopify Support Team. 

Are you wanting to condense the URL? If the customer accesses the product, through a collection, it will show the breadcrumbs of how the customer got there through the URL. 

Whereas, if the customer directly goes to the product from an original link, it will not show the breadcrumbs of how they got there. It would just show: https://www.website.com/products/item1

Although it will still have the additional fields, you can customize your product and collections URL to help reduce the length of the URL. 

To do this, click into the product or collection scroll down to 'Edit Website SEO' and click on the link, to update the product or collections name. 

If this was still really bothering you, you could always try adding URL redirects to condense the links. Here's how to add a URL redirect. 

Hope this helps to clarify! Please let me know if you have any questions.

- Lisa ?

[Kardush]

really bad support. Im thinking to migrate my theme just for that... how cant you allow us to change our internal urls..?

[ShanMawji]

This is a big issue from an SEO standpoint. We have started to migrate our client's accounts away from Shopify for this reason. To impose extra URL strings on to every user is not ideal. The Perfect URL structure should be:

Sitename/category/product.

Not

sitename/collection/collection-name/product/product-name

It's a massive difference and makes for extremely messy URLS.

Sure you can setup a redirect. If you're a small business. Selling less than 100 products. My clients have over 6000 products in their store. I'm sure they don't want me blowing their entire monthly marketing budget on setting up redirects for every single new product they upload to the website on a DAILY basis.

Shopify, you need to fix this. It's unacceptable and ABSOLUTELY is crucial for SEO friendly URLs.

[ShopIntim]

There's other, more efficient, ways to trace how the customers get to the product.

Shopify, please let us choose the structure our selves, all shopify sites are ranking lower than they could have been. Partly because google interprets the duplicated links as duplicated content.

Kind regards

[MJ2021]

HI All

Is there an answer on how to update the entire URL structure and not just a single product URL?

Thanks

[PascalDegut]

I have a related issue with that

The URL strcuture of Shopify is this:

nameofsite.com/collections/nameofcollection/products/nameofproduct

I want it to be 

nameofsite.com/nameofcollection/nameofproduct

It provides better SEO and better customer experience since shorter URL

Moreover since my website is in France, it has no sense to display the words "collections" and "products"

How could I play with that? (I'm fine playing with the code)

Let me know thanks!

[blauke]

That's something most Shopify users want. If you google 'charge url structure Shopify' you'll see that there are countless threads on forums, blogs and social media asking the same thing. I went above and beyond to explain Shopify support that this is really important and being able to change that would be so beneficial in many ways. 

Unfortunately, no luck! They keep saying that this has no value towards SEO, even thou Google specifically mentions that they favor short URLs. Furthermore, they don't really care that it's not user-friendly.

So there's not much that you can do, except change CMS.

[HIC-Cynthia]

I totally agree that Shopify needs to provide a simple way for us to configure to use shorter URLs. This is critical for SEO - it's been said and proven. Shopify, please put this on your queue to address. 
Thanks,

cynthia

www.HandmadeInConifer.com 

[Lionel77]

UP. Shopify : We pay your service, we need something SEO friendly ! 

[blauke]

And this is just one of Shopify's many limitations. Easy Pinterest integration is another one and being able to edit the code of the Checkout page is another. Shopify is limited in so many ways, and their Support, even though they're polite, they're incompetent. In all my support tickets I never got a solution to my problem

[SparKing]

Looking for the same change, may anyone got a solution to this. 😉

[garyvela]

Any luck on this?

[mkz2]

No luck whatsoever. I think going headless is the only solution.

[Liquify]

As a long term Shopify expert I'd say this is up there on one of the most annoying things about Shopify which has never been addressed. 

There's a bunch of use cases for needing to modify the core url structure. Migrations and not wishing to lose SEO positions  / languages being main 2.

There's a few mixed threads going on here. So I'll clarify as things stand and will stand for a long time.

having all product urls without the collection path in them is easy but may present some issues with related products.

e.g. you can have all links going to 

https://www.website.com/products/item1
and not

https://www.website.com/collections/category/products/item1

that takes 5 mins in the theme and is a doddle for any Shopify developer.

what you can't do is for example if you're a German store is:

https://www.website.com/producte/item1

or if portuguese
https://www.website.com/productos/item1

or if you sell bling

https://www.website.com/bling/sick-treads

you can't do that natively on Shopify and don't hold your breath for that one.  Been asking for it for ever.

You can do it by going headless but this is not at all sensible in most cases (cost being main factor - it's prohibitively expensive for most merchants to build and maintain). This is the only option for modifying the core URL structure.

You can also have custom urls without using headless by using app proxies to render any non system url. But again - this would involve a lot of cost / dev time time and your canonicals would always be /products or /collections etc so it wouldn't be suitable in most contexts. The core structure would remain the same but you could have some aesthetic urls. We're doing this right now but for rendering some content which just doesn't fit /pages or /posts etc.

so for example you could create a url like this

https://www.website.com/a/bling/sick-treads
but the canonical would be https://www.website.com/products/sick-treads

so yeah, there's a couple of options if you have budget / time
but they don't suit most cases where people simply want to change /products/ or /pages/ etc and move on with life
that ain't happening 😥

[Daaniel]

Has this issue still been taken care of? Im also running a non-English online store, and it is weird that it says in the url about products or collections. I want to get rid of them.

[Maiy]

I really looking for sollution for this as well. Running shop with foreign language, and /collection and /product just looks ridiculous in non English URL.    Redirections are not the option. If Shopify can really be international, it really needs to tackle this issue.  

[Grownop]

Crazy this hasn't been solved hope it does soon.

[l_floyd]

Hello,

This is an issu for us too. I see that the last post was in 2019. Is there any news about this?

Thank you!

[Hakim_H]

Same problem here. That's ridiculous to be stuck with this shitty url structure, and especially with a non-english website

[EstebanO]

Somebody think in the user experience for the foreign languages user.... Shopify: You need to be inclusive, we all are paying your service as equals...

[ShanMawji]

That's not what this thread is about. 

It doesn't solve the URL issue. That's a domain change only.

[Mdost]

Almost 3 years now and still no good solution.

The URL structure is indeed very important, shorter the better, especially for Google. Why hasn't Shopify added this feature yet, and how difficult can it be to implement?

A better structure would be:
sitename/category/product.
Not
sitename/collections/collection-name/product/product-name

Some of my websites are in Spanish and or Dutch. Having the word 'collections' would not make sense in the URL

Just give us the option to change the name of 'collections' in the URL.

[beardfactor]

Try this

https://paulnrogers.com/how-to-change-the-product-url-structure-in-shopify/ 

[Devon_Meadows]

Thanks! Worked for me over at Awake Happy.

[MartinG]

how is the work around to handle /collections/  ?

[dagansmith1]

Thanks @beardfactor - the Paul Rogers advice worked perfectly 

[KuznetsEnvy]

Hi, Shopify experts. I'd like to hear your advice.

We have a store with less than 5 products. We want short URLs for products like mysite.myshopify.com/my_product.
We think we can pull it through with this technique:
1. Create a product. Default URL would be mysite.myshopify.com/products/my_product
2. In Shopify admin set up redirect mysite.myshopify.com/my_product -> mysite.myshopify.com/products/my_product
3. In product pages template add JavaScript
<script>
/* Pretty URL manipulation */
function makeProductUrlPretty() {
let product_handle = window.location.href.split('/').pop();
let pretty_url_for_product = window.location.protocol + "//" + window.location.host + '/' + product_handle;
window.history.pushState({path:pretty_url_for_product},'',pretty_url_for_product);
}
makeProductUrlPretty();
</script>

Same concept can be applied to blog articles and pages.

Downsides I see:
– Necessity to manually set up redirects for every product/article/page
– If the product has variants, it can be troublesome to manage the ?variant=123456789 parameter to be handled correctly with this short URL

Is there any reason to think Google could penalize us for this? Which could be the arguments why it's good or bad for SEO?
Any thoughts are welcome.

[mkz2]

I wouldnt use this for products, but for blogs. I have seen Shopify shops with blog URL structures like the following: example.com/blogs/blog/article-handle

This looks extremely silly and is a surefire way to prevent real people from remembering the real URL of a blog article. Was it example.com/blog/blogs/article-handle? Or was it blogs/blog?

Furthermore, for some Shopify pages example.com/blogs results in a 404. Sure, you can set up redirects, but those all have to be set up.

Ideally Shopify would offer the option to use URLs that are made with humans in mind: example.com/blog/article-handle

It is hard to believe that something that is so obviously useful and at the same time so very basic is not possible unless you go with a headless Shopify shop.

[Giant_Sports]

Yes, I need this for my website too, but specifically for the blog part. I migrated my website and now all my article URLs are broken. They all have SEO juice flowing through them and they now stopped. I don't want to add over 100 redirects when this should just be a feature.

[Pratik30]

Hello Everyone, 
I got the solution.
https://paulnrogers.com/how-to-change-the-product-url-structure-in-shopify/
I found this article which is very useful. 
===========
if you have this type of link 
https://www.website.com/collections/category/products/item1 
and want to convert this link to this one...
https://www.website.com/products/item1
==========

Suggestion: if you didn't find the file name: product-grid-item.liquid
then try to find other files related to this name, and try to find this code "{{ product.url | within: collection }}"

[yalnik]

@Pratik30 I'm not able to locate the code "{{ product.url | within: collection }}" anywhere in my shopify store. Can you help?

[Bliqui]

2023... any updates?

[marvic]

Shopify still makes ridiculous URLs.

I just discovered, when using one product as a template for another (Bath Salt A for Bath Salt B) the URL of Bath Salt B is "copy-of-bath-salt-A". Seriously? 

[ShanMawji]

That’s a standard automatic URL from most CRMs. You probably copied the
first page to build the second, just edit that URL in the SEO settings and
you’ll be good to go. This thread is more about how it adds /collections or
/product to each URL.

Your example is more of an SEO issue where you need to modify the URL in
the settings and it will work as expected then 🙂

[jirichovanec]

Thanks god I just found this out before using Shopify... I see zero support in six years for such crucial feature. 

Better to use another platform.