WordPress and Shopify power a huge share of the sites that actually make money online, and both accumulate broken links in predictable ways. WordPress sites break links through permalink changes, plugin and theme updates that move media, and years of blog posts referencing pages that no longer exist. Shopify stores break links through discontinued products, reorganised collections and old campaign pages. In both cases the URLs keep receiving traffic from search engines and external links long after the destination is gone.
A 404 broken link checker finds those dead ends before your visitors do. This guide walks through a practical workflow for both platforms: how to scan, how to read the results, how to fix each category of error inside the platform, and how to keep the count near zero going forward.
Why platform matters for link checking
The crawl itself is platform-agnostic. A checker requests URLs, reads status codes and page content, and reports what fails. What changes between platforms is where the broken links come from and how you fix them. Knowing the typical failure patterns for your platform lets you predict most of the report before you run it, and knowing the fixing tools available inside the platform makes the cleanup far faster.
Part 1: WordPress
Where WordPress 404s come from
Permalink changes. Switching from ?p=123 to /post-name/, or adding and removing the category from the URL, changes every post address at once. WordPress handles some of these transitions automatically but not all, and internal links written with the old structure break.
Media library moves. A hosting migration or a change to the uploads path breaks every image, PDF and download that was linked with an absolute URL.
Deleted posts and pages. Removing an old post is easy. Finding the twelve other posts that linked to it is not.
Theme and plugin changes. Shortcodes from a deactivated plugin render as raw text. Assets from an old theme return 404 when the theme is removed.
Author and taxonomy pages. Staff leave, categories get merged, and the archive pages that once existed become soft 404s or real ones.
Scanning a WordPress site
You have two options. A web-based checker scans the site from outside, exactly as a search engine would. A plugin scans from inside wp-admin and can tie every broken link to the specific post it lives in. The best setups use both: the web scan for a complete outside view including external links and assets, and the plugin for fixing.
Before scanning, make sure your XML sitemap is live. WordPress core generates one at /wp-sitemap.xml, and most SEO plugins generate their own. A checker that reads the sitemap first will find orphan posts that no menu or internal link points to.
Set exclusions for the URL patterns WordPress generates in bulk: /tag/, /page/, /feed/, /author/ if you do not use author archives, ?s= for search, and /wp-admin/. Turn on query-parameter collapsing so tracking variants of the same post are tested once. Enable image, script and document checking so broken media is caught.
Fixing WordPress broken links
Sort the report by source post. Open each post once and fix every broken link in it rather than bouncing between posts.
Internal links to moved posts: update the link to the new slug. If external sites also link to the old URL, add a 301 redirect via your SEO plugin or a redirect plugin so that backlink value is preserved.
Internal links to deleted posts: redirect to the most relevant surviving post, or remove the link. Do not redirect everything to the homepage.
Broken images: check whether the file still exists at a different path. If the uploads folder moved, a single search-and-replace on the database fixes every reference. If the file is gone, re-upload it.
Soft 404 archive pages: delete empty author or category pages, or configure your SEO plugin to noindex and return a proper status for empty archives.
External 404s: find the moved page on the destination site, link to an archived copy, or unlink.
With the Broken Link Checker plugin installed, this whole process happens inside wp-admin. The plugin lists the exact post and anchor text for every dead link and lets you edit or unlink from the report itself, so each fix takes seconds rather than requiring a manual search through the editor.
Part 2: Shopify
Where Shopify 404s come from
Discontinued products. This is the big one. When a product is deleted, its URL returns 404. But that URL is still in Google's index, still linked from old blog posts and social media, and still in customers' bookmarks. Every visit is a lost sale.
Reorganised collections. Renaming or deleting a collection breaks every link to it, including navigation links in themes and blog posts.
Old campaign and landing pages. Seasonal pages get deleted after the season, but the ads, emails and posts that pointed to them remain.
Variant URLs. Links that include a specific variant ID break when that variant is removed even if the product survives.
Theme changes. Switching themes can change asset paths and break hardcoded links in custom sections.
Scanning a Shopify store
A web-based checker will scan any Shopify store today. Enter the store URL, enable sitemap following (Shopify generates /sitemap.xml automatically), and turn on external link and asset checking. Shopify stores tend to have a manageable page count, so most fit inside a free scan limit.
Useful exclusions for Shopify include /collections/all variants, ?variant= parameters if you want to check each product once, /search, and /cart. Query-parameter collapsing handles most of the variant noise automatically.
A dedicated Shopify app that scans products, collections, pages and blog posts from inside the admin is in development at the time of writing and will specifically target discontinued product URLs that still receive traffic.
Fixing Shopify broken links
Discontinued products: Shopify has a built-in URL redirect tool under Online Store > Navigation. Redirect the old product URL to the closest replacement product or to its collection. Never let a product URL that still ranks return a 404.
Deleted collections: redirect to the parent collection or the most similar one, and update navigation menus.
Old campaign pages: redirect to the current equivalent, or to the relevant collection if there is no direct replacement.
Blog post links: edit the post in the Shopify admin and update or remove the link.
Theme asset errors: check the theme code for hardcoded paths that changed, or re-upload the missing asset.
Part 3: The workflow that keeps both platforms clean
Fixing once is not the goal. Staying fixed is. The routine below works on either platform.
1. Redirect before you delete. Make this a rule. Before any product, post, page or collection is removed, set its redirect. On WordPress that is a line in your redirect plugin. On Shopify it is an entry in the URL redirect tool. This single habit prevents the majority of internal 404s.
2. Scan every new page before publishing. A single-page check takes seconds. A Chrome extension that scans the page in your current tab and highlights broken links in place makes this painless. It catches typos in pasted URLs and links to draft content that was never published.
3. Run a full-site scan monthly. Weekly if you publish often, launch products frequently, or link out heavily. External links rot without any action from you; Pew Research found roughly 8 percent of pages only a year old were already gone.
4. Automate it if you can. Scheduled daily or weekly re-scans with email alerts mean new problems reach your inbox within a day. On a store where a broken product link costs sales every hour, this is the feature most worth paying for.
5. Fix in batches by source page. Open each page once, fix everything in it, move on. Then rescan to confirm.
6. Watch for patterns. Twenty 404s sharing a path prefix means a migration was not redirected. Several soft 404s on the same template means the template needs a real status code. Fix the cause, not just the instances.
What to look for in a checker for these platforms
Beyond the basics of status-code detection, the features that matter most on WordPress and Shopify are sitemap-first crawling, soft 404 detection, asset checking, query-parameter collapsing, exclusion patterns, live results with source page and anchor text, shareable reports, scheduled monitoring, and platform integrations that put the fix where you edit.
Broken Link Checker covers all of these. The free web scan handles 250 pages per crawl with no account, allows two scans a day, streams results live, and finds 404s, faulty redirects, soft 404s and SSL problems. A free account lifts the limit to 50 scans a month and unlocks image, script and document checking. The free WordPress plugin brings the report into wp-admin for in-editor fixing, the free Chrome extension handles single-page checks in your tab, and a Shopify app is on the way. Paid plans add scheduled re-scans, email alerts, AI-assisted link fixes and a Pro WordPress plugin, and the same account includes a wider suite of SEO tools such as rank tracking, an internal link optimizer, an SEO and AEO audit and an uptime monitor.
Start with one scan
If your WordPress site or Shopify store has never been checked, the first scan will be revealing and probably a little uncomfortable. That is normal. Work through the report by source page, redirect what moved, remove what is gone, fix the templates behind soft 404s, and put a monthly scan on the calendar or on a schedule. Within a couple of sessions the count drops to near zero, and it stays there as long as the routine does.
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