The problem:
When you delete a product, collection, or page in Shopify, the URL immediately returns a 404 with no warning, no prompt, and no option to redirect. The redirect has to be created manually — before or after the fact — with no guidance for merchants who don’t know to do this.
Separately, when a product or collection is deleted, any navigation menu items pointing to that URL break silently. There’s no alert in the admin, no indicator that a menu link is now dead. Customers hit a 404 and there’s no way to know without manually auditing every menu or waiting for a complaint.
What Shopify already does well (and should extend):
When you change the handle of a product or page, Shopify shows a checkbox: “Create a URL redirect from the old address.” That’s exactly the right UX. It just needs to exist at deletion too.
The ask:
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Add a deletion dialog that says something like: “This URL may have existing traffic or links. Would you like to redirect it before deleting?” with a destination field or dropdown.
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Add a navigation check at deletion time: “This URL appears in your navigation menus. Would you like to remove or update those links?”
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Bonus: a menu audit tool that surfaces broken internal links across all navigation menus — even outside of deletion events.
Why it matters:
Stores evolve. Products get discontinued, collections get reorganized, seasonal pages come and go. Every deletion that doesn’t get a redirect is a potential 404 that erodes SEO, breaks customer journeys, and accumulates silently. For merchants without an SEO background, this is an invisible problem until it’s a big one.
The infrastructure is already there — redirects work, the handle-change checkbox works. This is a UX gap at the deletion step, not a technical lift.