How can I alter the default blog URL structure?

[Ronald2]

Hello

Thanks for reading and I hope you are making lot of money online

I am trying to change blog url, For example

Current URL structure:
https://domainname.com.au/blogs/category-name/how-to-make-nice-photo-frame

From the url all the parts are clear, Except one. The word “Blogs” in the URL, I am looking a way to remove that or change the text.

Any idea how can I do it ?

Thanks

[Ava]

Hi, Ronald!

My name is Ava, I’m one of Shopify’s Gurus and I’m here to help

I’m afraid there would be no way to remove the ‘blogs’ section of the URL path. The ‘domain.com/blogs’ would be the root part of the URL structure, and part of Shopify core, so you would not be able to edit this. This URL path structure is there in order to tell the domain which direction to point when directing to different sections for your store, so the same would be true of other URL’s within Shopify. For example, you would not be able to remove the ‘products’ section of ‘domain.com/products/product-name’.

You would be free to edit anything in the URL after the root though! In the example you shave given above that would be the “category-name/how-to-make-nice-photo-frame”.

There is a guide here on how to change the URL, if you scroll to ‘Change a blog’s web address’, you can see instructions there!

You do have an alternate option though! If you wanted, you could host your blog on a third party site (for example, WordPress). That way, you could link your blog in the navigation section of Shopify to redirect to the third party hosting site. This way you would have more creative control of the Blogs URL structure!

Let me know if you have any more questions, happy to help!

Ava

Social Care Guru | support@shopify.com

[Ronald2]

Hello Ava

Thanks for the wordpress suggestion, it opens door to new possibilites.

Cheers

[Ronald2]

Can I add Wordpress Blog on Shopify domain ?

For example If user opens www.ShopifyDomain.com/Blog, Instead of shopify blog it opens Wordpress blog and that too without redirecting to another domain.

Thanks

[Ava]

Hi again, Ronald!

It would not be possible to open a WordPress blog on Shopify domain without it redirecting to another domain. There is an option to add a Wordpress iframe though! An iframe is used to display a web page within a web page. There is a tutorial here that goes through how to add a piece of code to your blog template that will allow your WordPress blog show up inside your Shopify blog post.

This would be quite custom, so it would be outside of the scope of support we would be able to offer here. However, if you are having some difficulty, I would suggest reaching out to a Shopify Expert. You can post a job on the Shopify Experts Page and see what feedback and quotes you get. You can find where and how to do this here.

Let me know if that works for you!

Ava

Social Care Guru | support@shopify.com

[Heena_Sehgal]

Hello, I have shopify expert i can redirect blog URL with custom code and private app making contact heenasehgalpta@gmail.com
Thanks,
Heena S.
Cyruswebtech.com

[nblout]

Hi Ava, analog to Ronald’s question regarding changing the name of the root part of the URL, I would also like to see the word “/blog” instead of “/blogs”. This is for the reason the word is most commonly used as an “uncountable” noun, as in, “hey have you read their blog?”, or “great blog post”, etc. Same goes for words like “gas” “milk” “rice” “information” etc. Thanks for your help and taking this into consideration on the Shopify core as it lends for a more professional presentation.

[Ava]

Hi, @nblout !

That’s a good point, I’ve clarified this with our Theme Support team for a more in-depth reason as to why the URLs are set up this way. The team let me know that it is ‘blog’ and not ‘blogs’ because you can have multiple types of blogs with articles within one URL. For example, you could have news, recipes, daily updates, etc which all have articles within them.

I can definitely submit this to our internal team to be reviewed as a possible future feature of the admin though. As our platform is constantly growing and improving, our team love to get feedback from our merchants on what features/edits they need to improve their workflow. So once I submit this as a feature request on your behalf, our team can review the request. So hopefully, this can be something that is available in the future.

There is never a guarantee that a request will get a Green Light, or make it to a product launch, but we really do appreciate you reaching out with your suggestion, as I’m sure you’re not the only merchant with this request.

While we would not have a specific timeline for how long that might take, you can definitely keep an eye on our announcements page. We will post any new updates or developments there!

Let me know if you have any more questions, happy to help!

Ava

Social Care

[jcwords]

Hi, Ava —

You mentioned that it was possible to change the “category-name/title” part of a URL, and I am able to see and change the title part. I would like to totally eliminate the category name, as it makes the URL look less professional. Is that possible? If not, I hope you can ask the developers to enable that option. It’s on every other blogging software I’ve used (which makes me assume it’s not all that difficult), and it makes for much cleaner URLs. Thank you!

Janice

[Ava]

Hi, @jcwords !

I’m afraid that is not possible at the moment. It is possible to change the words used in the category-name/title part of the URL, but it is not possible to add to/remove from/re-organize the URL structure. I will definitely raise this request up to our development team though! I believe it is a common request, so hopefully, it is something that can be made available in the future.

As I mentioned, While we would not have a specific timeline for when it may happen, you can keep an eye on our announcements page for updates.

Thanks for your patience!

Ava

Social Care

[NSheppard]

Simply add a URL redirect: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/sell-online/online-store/menus-and-links/url-redirect

If you add /blog to go to your /blogs/blog URL, it works.

Ie. I added a redirect from curlshoppe.ca/blog to curlshoppe.ca/blogs/blog

[ZeroWasteCo]

There’s a real serious problem here that Shopify needs to address asap. This is because, as I’ve just found out from my Google Ads guys is that last year Google stopped crawling pages where the URL contained the word blog. This was a decision taken by Google in order to prevent sites that are using this to increase their status on Google search by posting loads of blogs, etc. It’s part of their trying to return only quality search results.

This is a serious issue as I’m sure all can appreciate that Google is not crawling our blogs, so we need to be able to have the ability to change the URL from blog to something different or have blog taken out from the URL equation all together so that if you wanted to see news it would be domain.com/news not domain.com/blogs/news as Google won’t crawl the latter!

[Kjankko-US]

Hi Friends,

Could it be possible to change URL structure in blog pages. I mean: mydomain.com/blogs/news/awesome-images-for-kids

Is it possible to remove that “news/” from the URL in somewhere editing code?

-TSA

[ZeroWasteCo]

You can it’s the name of the blog section - so you can call it something
else. Just go to Online store > blogs > manage blogs and you should have a
“news” section there.

[Kjankko-US]

Okey, thank you for the quick reply @ZeroWasteCo .

[PoolCEO]

The ideal way to do what your looking to do is the following:

1. Use a ‘sub domain’ - such as “https://Blog.AquaSupercenter.com” —> which you can make that be a fully customizable Wordpress.org blog.
2. The other way is to just not get caught up in the ‘minor details’ due to perfectionism. The amount of time and energy you will use trying to figure out a good solution and to be honest; the more you dig and learn the more you will just put your head in the sand and never do anything… (I’ve been doing this a very long time, so I’m speaking from experience from friends who own ECOM sites or myself who owns multiple 7-8 figure Shopify sites).

Just remember that doing a ‘sub domain’ - Google looks at that as a 100% separate site than your core domain ‘AquaSupercenter.com’. In my experience most people don’t create blogs to just write letters and expecting no benefits out of them… The point behind a blog and your question is to help build authority, links, audience, etc.

So trust me; this will get very confusing. I suggest choosing a path and focusing on GOOD content (30%) and focus on marketing and sharing that content (70%) and again - trust me by the time you figure out a plan you will get much farther with Shopify’s default option. I can say that I have blog posts showing up on page 1 of Google for very very competitive search terms.

IF you use a ‘app’ or ‘iFrame’ to get around the default structure; you will likely loose all SEO value or a major amount of it. Redirects do not pass thru 100% of the redirects. Google does not index inside of a iFrame as far as my knowledge and Google’s best practices. They actually do not recommend iFrames for content on a page.

I’d be happy to talk to you on the phone about this and share my experiences (I wish someone gave me this advice a LONG time ago to be honest with you). Feel free to email me at SmithCOVentures@Gmail.com.

Good Luck & Happy Selling!

[PoolCEO]

I hate to call anyone out; but for this post - I can say with first hand experience that Google is not doing that. Maybe thats their future ‘plan’ and with Google its common that they test it with 1% of users or a specific geographic area and pretty much 80% of Google’s ‘plans’ end up just being scrapped after a short testing period. 20% end up live and even when that happens; they allow years of explaining this before they start to ‘ding’ sites for this.

Remember the major ‘whole website SSL’ recommendation Google gave us in 2017(?) or earlier… It wasn’t until late 2018 which they started putting some ‘https’ sites ahead… 2019 was the year where the browser went live that changed the game and therefore everyone had to be https or they would look bad on Google Chrome browsers. Yet, even then; we had competitors with ‘http’ links ranking over our ‘https’ links in 2020.

Point is like my other post I wrote in this topic, don’t focus on things like this. There has been ONE core thing that Google says and has been saying for over 15 years now and yet everyone focuses on minor changes/tests vs the most important ranking factor. Google recommends that you create a blog post with GOOD content, written well, they want to see customers staying on that page for long periods and not bouncing off the page due to poor content. Google also wants to see people sharing the blog post as the content is AMAZING. The facts are very very basic and once this is done and done well - THEN fine tune details like ‘blog’ vs ‘blogs’ in the URL or no ‘blog’ at all in the URL. The facts are there is more content written in 1 day than if you took every word written in history as we know it… So imagine just how much content that is that’s posted daily… Google is all for content being good and written for the users; the users are your #1 benefit and they will share good content.

The ironic thing if you just Google “Blogs” or “Top Blogging Tips” = Some of the most competitive keywords on the web right now and the majority of them included /blog/ in their URL and were in the top 3 ranked in google for organic listings…

Sorry! I really hate going against a fellow Shopify User & Partner but I don’t want to put things in people’s head to get them over thinking simple things then they should be focusing on writing the most amazing piece of content there is about the topic your writing about… Then market it and share it on ALL social media channels, boost the post w/ $10, invite comments and shares. Go on Fiverr or Odesk and hire someone to create a video for $15 + $15 professional voice over and insert the video in the post as well as have the blog video transcribed and posted on YouTube, Vimeo, Etc. Linking back to original blog… Again, remember how much content is out there - you MUST market your blog post to win… The LEAST thing you should be worried about is your URL to be honest at this point unless your site has authority where your posting a blog post and your on top 5 pages of Google within a month; then the little details will matter but I guarantee your blog post isn’t on Google unless you posted a sitemap to Google Search Console after a month…or it may show up but on page 8,250… Facts are 90% of users never go to page 2 even…

I hold us ‘professionals’ ‘ ‘Shopify Partners’ in a different light as its our job to give best advice to our customers; so this is not meant to say “your wrong” - I feel my job is to put other Shopify Ecom Sites best interest #1. Thats my only goal with this.

[Rob_Lent]

So, as an ecommerce site, “blogs” doesn’t exactly sound professional. It would be great to change it to “articles” or something similar, but blogs just has that casual feeling to it… any way to change the name of “blogs” overall?

[Josh_Carr]

3 years on since OP first posted this issue, any fix?

I too would like my blog URL to be www.mysite.com/blog

P.S. Why have more than one blog anyway? I would have a guess that 1 in 100 sites have more than one blog.

[Ryan_B_1]

@ZeroWasteCo I’d love to see a source proving this claim that Google stopped crawling pages containing “blog” is true.

I’m sure it’s NOT true.

One example, of thousands, is Ahrefs blog. They use /blog/ in their URL structure. They have a hugely successful blog and are one of the most prominent names in SEO, and their blog web pages are definitely crawled/indexed in Google.

Having “blog” in the URL is a non-issue.