Remove /pages and /products from slug url

[hannahdossary]

Hello, i hope someone can help:

How can I completely remove /pages and /collections from all slugs? This is really bad practice for SEO and really annoying when linking to a page.

I.e For a page that is: /pages/about I would want it to be about

For products, instead of products/item1 I would want it to be /item1

And for collections, instead of /collections/featured I would want it to be /featured

I'm using the Highlight theme FYI , so theme code setup might be different to other themes. 

Thanks so much!

Hannah

[Lucid_Polygon · Accepted solution]

• In Shopify, you cannot remove the default pages/collections/products etc.
• Of course, SEO needs a shorter URL, but also remember that Shopify is a popular platform with millions of websites built in this structure and google recognizes that. 

[hannahdossary]

I understand and it makes sense for /collections and /products. but not for /pages. Do you know how i can bypass the slug having /pages in it? so it shows directly to that page name?

[Lucid_Polygon]

Unfortunately, you cannot do that. I just did a test to confirm 😞

[sleepydev]

What do you do if you're migrating a site and you want to do it so that the URL matches somewhere you had an older URL for SEO purposes? Because for us we are trying to reindex but now the URL is domain/pages/subject instead of domain/subject.

[Shay]

Hey @sleepydev 

In this situation you would want to set up URL redirects in your store admin. You can find this option in your admin under Online Store > Navigation. The option to see your URL redirects will be a button in the upper right corner of the window. 

You can learn more about this feature in our Help Center: Shopify Help Center | URL redirects.

[Shay]

Hi @hannahdossary 

I just wanted to confirm what @Lucid_Polygon shared in the thread here. At this time the URL structure for all Shopify stores is the same and that can't be changed. 

Our platform is optimized with SEO in mind and I want to assure you that the URL structure used across our millions of storefronts does not negatively impact your store's search engine optimization. 

That being said, this is a frequent request from our merchants and it is feedback we continue to share with our developers for consideration. I will be happy to add your feedback on this as well. 

[hannahdossary]

thank you @Shay - good to know that its something that may be considered. 

I wondered if redirects work for the time being, more for url vanity? I.e if i redirected domain.com/shop to domain.com/pages/shop. 

[Lucid_Polygon]

• You meant vice versa I guess. domain.com/pages/shop to domain.com/shop. 
• It won't work because domain.com/pages/shop this exists.
• domain.com/shop this does not exist.
• When you redirect you need the recipient page to exist.
• (This is the test I said I did earlier 😊)

[hannahdossary]

@Lucid_PolygonAhh yes i forgot that a page cant exist to redirect.

But yes, I did mean redirect /shop to /pages/shop. I.e when someone clicks on a link that goes to domain.com/shop, it actually opens up domain.com/pages/shop.

i just tested it out and it works! but annoyingly Shopify won't let you redirect /shop. So i had to make it /shop-all to test it.

You can't redirect URLs that begin with the following prefixes: /apps, /application, /cart, /carts, /orders, /shop, or /services.

[Lucid_Polygon]

• I am curious why you want to redirect /shop to pages/shop
• As /shop is same as / 
• /shop page is already a canonical to the homepage /
• I thought you were talking about reverse redirection

[hannahdossary]

It doesn't make any sense why /shop goes to home as a default and that this can't be changed.

For my site, home shows main info about the business and some featured products with a link to the full shop (all products). So ideally I want /shop to link to a collection or page of all products. Not home.

It's fine for me to create a new slug, like /shop-all for now but it just makes no sense to me why Shopify make it so hard for us to have more control with this.

[Lucid_Polygon]

Now that makes sense. You have a different home page. Cool. I was thinking of a possible use case.

Agree, Platforms come with some silly restrictions. 

[hannahdossary]

Agree! but i guess its all to make them easier to use overall.

Thanks again for your help and patience!!

[goodera]

Is there an update on this? I am trying to do the same thing. 

[lindashantz]

Me too! Completely blindsided that it can't be edited. I have the URL printed and displayed in multiple places so that /pages/ is totallymessing me up! Had no idea such stupidity would exist when I decided to switch platforms. 😞

[JChanTSS]

Agree, it so unnatural for such directory pathway to exist for SEO, extra folder to open for Google crawler, and it's not just one category, it's for major pages, following this thread.

[Gubb]

Hello @Shay 

Is there an update regarding the implementation of shorter URLs? Because of the URL folder /pages/ we cannot use the Shopify CMS.

[MRamzan]

Here is the solution to remove /pages /products /collections and create a custom URL structure.

[theSEOFairy]

With all due respect, if you didn't know the situation with Shopify with this, or how to do this, then you possibly should clarify if your understanding on bad URLs is actually canonical. I hope you are not selling that as a service right now. We all have a learning journey, but I can assure you, that having collection in the url is not the problem. (Nor /pages/)


But if you're so concerned, simply open a Wordpress instance and park your blog pages there. Then you can set permalinks to what you like and use a proxy redirect to pull the Shopify URLS, masked with what you like.

Google cares  a lot more about taxonomy, authority, experience and the content of the page, than it cares about a folder name for a slug, or websites like Booking.com, Trip Advisor or Kayak would never get any traffic.

This is the answer