Website health check for your Shopify site
Shopify handles the technical basics well. What it does not handle is the thousand small decisions a growing catalogue creates — and that is where the traffic goes missing.
What we check
The same checks we run on any site, plus the ones that matter particularly on Shopify.
The same product at two addresses
Shopify serves a product at both
/products/thingand/collections/whatever/products/thing. Handled correctly this is harmless; handled badly by a theme it splits one product across two competing URLs.Product descriptions that came from the supplier
If your description is the manufacturer’s text, several hundred other stores have the identical page. Search engines pick one to show, and it is usually not the smallest store.
Collection pages with no words on them
A collection is often just a grid of products with a title. There is nothing for a search engine to understand, so a page that could rank for a whole category ranks for nothing.
Pages Shopify blocks by default
Shopify’s
robots.txtblocks carts, checkouts and some search and filter URLs, which is correct. Theme and app changes sometimes extend that to pages you want indexed.Out-of-stock and deleted products
A discontinued product with links and history pointing at it, now returning nothing. We find them and tell you which are worth redirecting.
Speed with apps installed
Every app adds script to every page. We measure the store as a customer on a phone experiences it and tell you what is weighing it down.
How fixes are delivered
| Fix type | Where it goes in Shopify |
|---|---|
| Product title and description | Products → the product → scroll to Search engine listing → Edit |
| Collection title and description | Products → Collections → the collection → Search engine listing → Edit |
| Page title and description | Online Store → Pages → the page → Search engine listing → Edit |
| Image alt text | Product → hover the image → Alt → describe the product plainly |
| URL changes and redirects | Product → Search engine listing → Edit → URL handle — tick Create a URL redirect |
| Redirects for removed products | Online Store → Navigation → URL Redirects |
robots.txt | Online Store → Themes → Edit code → robots.txt.liquid |
| Store details for search | Settings → Store details |
Shopify’s menus change over time. If a path doesn’t match what you see, tell us and we’ll correct it in your report and on this page.
Shopify’s defaults are good. Your catalogue is the problem.
We say this on every Shopify report because it saves an argument: Shopify does the hard technical work properly. Sitemaps, canonical tags, mobile, HTTPS — all handled, all correct out of the box.
What Shopify cannot do is write four hundred product descriptions, notice that eleven of your collections have no text, or decide which discontinued item deserves a redirect. Those are decisions, and they accumulate faster than anyone keeps up with.
The duplicate-description problem, stated bluntly
If you dropship or resell, your product descriptions probably came from the supplier. So did everyone else’s. From a search engine’s point of view there are now two hundred identical pages and one has to be chosen — and the tiebreakers are size, authority and history, all of which favour the largest store selling that product.
You cannot outrank Amazon on Amazon’s own copy. Rewriting even your top twenty products in your own words is usually the highest-value work available to a small store, and we flag exactly which twenty are worth the effort based on what already gets traffic.
Collection pages are the opportunity nobody uses
Your collection pages are the ones that can rank for the searches that matter — “winter boots Moncton”, “handmade soap Canada”. They are category-level searches, and a collection page is a category-level page.
Most are a heading and a grid of products. Two or three paragraphs of real text about what is in the collection and who it is for turns an empty page into a page with something to rank with. We tell you which collections are worth it and what to cover.
What we can and cannot do
We cannot edit your Shopify store. Access would mean your login, and we will not ask for it. Every fix comes as text plus the path to the field, as in the table above.
For a store, that is usually the right arrangement anyway — product copy is a commercial decision, not a technical one, and it should go through you.
What we don't promise
- No ranking guarantees. Nobody controls Google's rankings. Anyone who guarantees you the top spot is making it up.
- No overnight results. Google has to re-crawl your site after a fix. That takes days or weeks, not hours.
- We don't write your content. We fix what stops Google reading your site. We can't fix a site that has nothing to say.
- No keyword or backlink research. That's not this product. If that's what you need, our comparison pages say which tool to buy instead.
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