Best practice hide or delete?

53 0 2



What is Best practice SEO wice when it comes to prodcts or collections you dont use anymore - hide them or delete them? 


Kind regards


Allt the best Peter
Community Manager
Community Manager
211 0 18

Hi, Peter!

I’m Melissa, a Shopify Guru. You can delete products or collections but that would then usually generate a 404 error page if found.

If products are out of stock you could have them grayed out as an option using this guide . I'd recommend keeping the page up with an out of stock or let people sign up to be notified when it will be available again if it is a small group of products.

So if they no longer exist, if deleted it would normally go to a 404 page if someone has the link. what you could do here is set up a 301 redirect to a related product collection (either on the same page or redirecting to a collection, etc.) as a possible workaround. You can do this in the admin using the guide 'Add an URL redirect'.

This would be a possible workaround for maintaining the links and current SEO. However, other forums members may have some further insight into this and a better way of setting this up. 


Have a great day!

Melissa | Shopify Guru   

42 0 1

Hi Peter!

I agree with Melissa, If you are never going to have the product in stock again - create a 301 redirect to a collection of similar products, or a replacement product.

Hope that helps!


Shopify Expert Verified Shopify Experts
Shopify Partner
4 0 0

Hi Melissa, or someone else :)

If a product no longer exist, I would like to make a 301 redirect to the product collection.

But I would like to automate this. Is that possible?


We have around 6000 products a year that is discontinued :)

4 0 1


If you have e-commerce site or store I advise you not to delete them. Because we don't know how many places we shared the URL and build backlinks for the specific URL.

So if you delete it, users will get 404 or if you redirect the URL it will leave the bad impact so Simply You can put OUT OF STOCK label.

And if possible show the related products so that user gets what he or she is looking for.


I hope this helps.

1 Like
16 0 1

I'm just wondering, does the deleted collection URL will also be removed from the sitemap?

And would Google Seach Console still crawl the URL?

And also is it hurt to redirect the deleted collection URL to let's say the homepage in terms of SEO?