How to find and fix broken links on a Shopify store
This is a practical walkthrough for finding broken links and missing images on a Shopify store and fixing them, using free tools first.
Step 1: Check the obvious places by hand
Open your store in a private browser window and click through:
- every item in your main menu and footer menu,
- your announcement bar and homepage sections,
- a few of your best-selling products, including the links and images in their descriptions.
This takes ten minutes and catches the links that every visitor sees.
Step 2: Run a crawl of your public pages
A crawler does the same clicking at scale. Our free checker reads your sitemap, opens up to 50 public pages, and checks the links and images on them that point to your own store or Shopify's image CDN. It lists each broken item with the pages it appears on.
What it can't do:
- It only sees public pages. Draft products and anything behind a password are invisible to it.
- It checks up to 50 pages per run, so on a large catalogue it's a sample, not a full audit.
- It doesn't check links to other websites, to keep the scan quick and polite.
- It respects your robots.txt, so pages you've blocked from crawlers are skipped.
If your store is password protected, the checker will tell you so and stop.
Step 3: Look at Google Search Console
If your store is verified in Search Console, open Indexing → Pages and look for "Not found (404)". These are URLs Google tried to visit. Many will come from links on other sites or from old sitemaps. They are good candidates for redirects.
Step 4: Fix what you found
For each broken item, decide which of these it is:
| What you found | Fix |
|---|---|
| Link in your menu or theme | Edit the menu item or theme setting |
| Link in a product description, page or blog post | Edit the content and replace the URL |
| Old URL other sites link to | Add a URL redirect in Shopify |
| Image file deleted | Re-upload and update the reference |
| Image hotlinked from another site | Upload to Shopify and swap the URL |
| Page listed in your sitemap returns an error | Check the product or page is active and loads |
To add redirects in bulk, Shopify lets you import them from a CSV file on the URL redirects page.
Step 5: Re-check
Run the checker again after you've made changes. Results are only as fresh as the last scan, and theme edits or catalogue clean-ups can introduce new problems.
When to use an app
The manual approach works well for small stores and occasional clean-ups. It gets tedious when:
- you have hundreds of products with links and images in their descriptions,
- links break because of regular catalogue changes,
- you need to check products that aren't public yet.
That's what we built AssetGuard for. It runs inside your Shopify admin, scans products, collections and blog articles, shows exactly where each broken link or missing image is, and repairs the content in place rather than adding redirects. There's a free plan on the Shopify App Store.