Shopify enforces a URL structure and you cannot change it. Products live under /products/, collections under /collections/, pages under /pages/, blog posts under /blogs/.
People spend a lot of energy worrying about this. It is close to irrelevant — stores rank perfectly well with it, and anyone selling you a workaround is selling you risk.
What you can control
The handle. The slug itself. Make it describe the product in the words people use, keep it short, and do not stuff it.
Whether you change it. Changing a handle changes the URL. Shopify creates a redirect automatically when you edit a product handle, but not in every path — verify rather than assume.
The duplicate issue worth fixing
Shopify can serve the same product at more than one URL — notably the /collections/:collection/products/:handle form as well as the clean /products/:handle one.
Canonical tags handle this and most themes emit them correctly. Worth verifying on your own theme, because a theme that does not is quietly splitting signals across two URLs for every product in every collection.
Tag-generated collection URLs
Filtering by tag generates a URL. On a store with many tags this produces a large number of thin, near-duplicate pages. Most are canonicalised or noindexed by default; a theme that does neither can put thousands of low-value URLs into the crawl.
Check Search Console's page indexing report for how many URLs Google has found versus how many are in your sitemap. A large gap usually means tag or filter URLs are being crawled.
Trailing slashes and host variants
Pick one host — www or apex — and make everything else redirect to it in a single hop. Same for http to https and trailing slash to no trailing slash. Those redirects will show in Search Console under "Page with redirect" permanently, and that is correct rather than a problem to fix.
If you are migrating
Every old URL mapped to its closest equivalent before anything is built, and redirects tested before cutover rather than after.
Talk it through
Send us your current URL list.
We will tell you what is duplicated, what is thin, and what would need redirecting if you moved.
Get a readA real read within one business day — not a sales call.
About the author
Manpreet Singh
Founder of Proscube. Leads the studio's Shopify, headless and CRO engineering, and works directly with founders rather than through account managers.
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