A store owner running Google Ads discovered that customers are landing on shopifypreview.com URLs instead of their actual domain, despite being on a paid Shopify plan. Analytics show multiple sessions arriving at these preview URLs with random alphanumeric strings.
Key findings:
The preview URLs display the site correctly but appear unprofessional
Initial troubleshooting confirmed no obvious technical issues with the store itself
Root cause identified:
Another user experienced the same problem and traced it to internal hyperlinks accidentally using preview URLs. When creating links between pages, they had copied URLs from the address bar while in Shopify’s preview mode, embedding the preview domain into the site’s navigation.
Solution:
Review all internal hyperlinks and replace any containing shopifypreview.com with proper domain URLs. Once corrected, visitors should land exclusively on the actual domain. The issue stems from content editing rather than a platform-level problem.
Summarized with AI on October 31.
AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
I have been putting up Google Ads and notice in my “Shopify > Analytics” page under the “Top landing pages by sessions” block that many of my visitors are landing on pages like:
When I check the link, my site shows and everything seems to work fine. But it’s not my domain.
Is there somehow I can stop this “shopifypreview” from being broadcasted? Make it redirect? It doesn’t look professional and I also wonder if it is a security issue.
Oh and I am on a paid Shopify plan - I’m not on the 3-day trial.
Sorry you are facing this issue,
It would be my pleasure to help you.
Please share your site URL,
I will check out the issue and provide you with a solution here.
@KetanKumar Sorry I have a geo blocker on as I don’t ship to other countries. I have unblocked India as it shows access was blocked around the time you posted. If that is not your location please let me know which country to unblock and I will do it.
Yes my main domain works fine. As stated in my first post, many visitors are landing on a “shopifypreview” link for unknown reasons. My main domains work fine though.
I will attach a screenshot of the block I am talking about:
It’s not every time but sometimes they land on some weird .shopifypreview.com link. Why is this happening and how do I stop it. It is clearly something to do with Shopify.
EDIT: I tried to put a redirect of *.shopifypreview.com to / but it just made it: /*shopifypreview.com
@cmp2 I had the same issue I FINALLY figured it out. On one of my pages I put a hyperlink to one of my other pages. The method advised by Shopify is to nagivate to the page you want to link to and copy the url in the address bar. In my haste I copied this address but didnt notice that it was actually an url with 'preview and some other gibberish" in there.
So each time I nagivate my website and I nagivate to via the link I would still get to the page I linked but the url would actually be on a page that has preview in the url. Then any further navigation onwards stays in a kindoff weird “preview mode”. They only way out is to manually type in your domain url into th address bar. I resolved this by correctly pasting the url of the page I wanted to link to in the hyperlink.
