How to edit the meta of collections page?

Technical Q&A

Topic summary

Issue Identified:
Shopify auto-generates a /collections page that inherits the homepage’s meta description, creating SEO duplicate content errors. This page isn’t accessible through the dashboard for direct editing.

Primary Solution (theme.liquid editing):
Multiple users confirmed success by modifying the theme.liquid file (or doc-head-core.liquid in some themes):

  • Locate the existing meta description code block
  • Add conditional logic to target the collections list template
  • Insert custom meta description for that specific page

Critical Implementation Details:

  • Template name varies by theme: 'list-collections', 'collection-list', or check your templates folder for the exact filename
  • Some users needed to use request.path == '/collections' instead of template matching
  • One contributor provided a dynamic solution using settings_schema.json to create a theme settings field, avoiding hard-coded values

Ongoing Challenges:

  • Solution doesn’t work universally; success depends on theme structure
  • Some users report missing H1 headings after implementation
  • Open Graph and Twitter meta descriptions remain unresolved for some
  • Multiple participants express frustration that Shopify doesn’t provide a native dashboard solution for this common SEO issue

Status: Partial resolution with workarounds; no official Shopify fix announced.

Summarized with AI on October 30. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
29

Which piece of code?

Edit your 'theme.liquid" file by looking for

{%- if page_description -%}

that entire section of code should go from

{%- if page_description -%}
      
    {%- endif -%}

to

{%- if page_description -%}
{% if template == 'list-collections' %}

{% else %}

{%- endif -%}
{%- endif -%}

The line where I have “settings.metadescriptioncollections” is because I set a field in the theme settings so it can be managed from there, rather than hard coding it into the theme.liquid file.

1 Like