How to reduce crawl depth on Shopify
Shopify crawl depth is shaped by two things merchants rarely think about: pagination inside collections, and the fact that every product is reachable at several URLs but linked meaningfully from only one. Shopify's structure is cleaner than most platforms — the URL patterns are fixed and predictable — which makes the depth problem easier to reason about than on WooCommerce, but also harder to fix, because you cannot change the routing. What you can change is the linking, and on Shopify that is almost entirely a collections question.
Run the Crawl Depth Checker on your site — free, no account.
How Shopify decides depth
Shopify gives every product two canonical-ish addresses: /products/handle and /collections/collection-handle/products/handle. The first is what should be canonical, and the second is what your collection templates often link to.
- Homepage → featured collections. Usually 3 to 8 collections get a homepage link; everything else starts a hop further back.
- Collection → paginated product grid. Shopify paginates at your theme's setting, commonly 24 or 50 per collection page.
- Product. Depth equals the collection's depth plus the pagination hops needed to reach the page it sits on.
So the arithmetic is simple: a product on page 9 of a collection that is itself linked from the main menu sits at roughly depth 10 if pagination is sequential, and roughly depth 3 if pagination is numbered. Nothing about the product changed.
/collections/all Most themes expose /collections/all, which lists every product. It flattens depth in principle, but it is a single enormous paginated series with no topical grouping, so the links it provides carry almost no meaning. Treat it as discovery insurance, not as an architecture.
Measure before restructuring
- Crawl the storefront and read the depth distribution — the Crawl Depth Checker runs it without an account.
- Pull your best sellers from Shopify analytics and check the depth of each. This is the list that matters; catalogue-wide averages are not actionable.
- Note which collections those products live in and how many products each collection holds. Long collections are where depth accumulates.
A useful sanity check: if your top ten products by revenue are all at depth 2 or 3, you do not have a depth problem worth a project, whatever the average says.
The changes that work on Shopify
1. Numbered pagination in the collection template
Shopify's paginate tag supports numbered links, and many themes render them; some render only Previous/Next. Check your collection template and make sure the numbered variant is used. This is the single largest depth reduction available and it changes no URLs.
2. More products per collection page
Raising the paginate limit shortens every series proportionally. Shopify caps it at 50 per page, which is usually enough to bring most collections under four pages.
3. Smaller, more numerous collections
This is the Shopify-specific move. Instead of one 400-product collection, build several focused ones — by use case, material, occasion, price band — and link them from a collection index. Each is short enough to need little pagination, each is a page with genuine topical meaning, and products gain multiple relevant inbound links instead of one paginated listing.
4. Link products from content
Shopify blogs are typically shallow and typically link nowhere. A buying guide that links to the products it discusses both reduces their depth and gives them a contextual link, which carries meaning a grid link does not — see contextual vs navigation links.
5. Keep the canonical on /products/
Shopify canonicals collection-scoped product URLs to /products/handle by default. Verify it is still true after theme edits — losing it means the same product competes with itself across every collection it belongs to.
The Shopify-specific traps
- Tag-filtered collection URLs (/collections/x/tag-y) multiply quickly and are usually thin. They add depth below the collection and rarely earn anything — restrict which tags are linked from the storefront.
- Apps that add sidebar filters often generate large numbers of crawlable URLs. Check what your filter app exposes before assuming your URL count is your product count.
- Infinite scroll themes sometimes drop paginated links entirely. Without them, everything past the first screen is unreachable, which is a discovery problem rather than a depth one.
- Menu-stuffing every collection into the header flattens the whole store and makes internal authority uniform — the failure mode described in ideal click depth.
Watch for the fake fix After changes, re-crawl. If nearly every page is suddenly at depth 1, the fix was a mega-menu rather than an architecture, and your depth numbers now describe your template instead of your store.
Depth and orphans are the same job here
On Shopify a product that belongs to no collection is linked from nothing except the sitemap and possibly /collections/all. That is an orphan in everything but name, and it is common after bulk imports or when a collection's automated rules stop matching a product.
Run an orphan check alongside the depth check — orphan pages on Shopify covers the platform-specific causes, and the smaller-collections fix above resolves both at once.
FAQ
How many products per page should a Shopify collection show?
As many as the page can carry without becoming slow — Shopify allows up to 50 per paginated page. Combined with numbered pagination, 50 brings most collections under four pages, which puts every product within about three clicks of the collection.
Does /collections/all help crawl depth?
A little, and mostly for discovery rather than authority. It is one long paginated list with no topical grouping, so the links it provides carry very little meaning. It is worth keeping as insurance against orphaned products, not as your architecture.
Should I use /collections/x/products/y or /products/y URLs?
Link to /products/handle. Shopify canonicals the collection-scoped variant to it by default, but linking to the collection-scoped version spreads your internal links across URLs that all consolidate to one place, which weakens the signal you are trying to send.
Do Shopify tag filters create crawl depth problems?
They add crawlable URLs below the collection page that are usually thin and rarely earn traffic. Limit which tags are linked from the storefront, and check what your filter app exposes — apps often generate far more crawlable combinations than merchants expect.
Is it better to have one big collection or several small ones?
Several small ones, for depth and for relevance. Short collections need little pagination, each one is a page with genuine topical meaning that can rank on its own, and products end up with several relevant inbound links rather than one position in a long grid.
Why are some Shopify products not being crawled?
Most often they belong to no collection, or they sit deep in a long paginated series. A product with no collection is linked from almost nothing on the storefront, so despite being in the sitemap it receives no internal authority and is crawled rarely.
Put this into practice
Run the Crawl Depth Checker to see this on your own site, or run the full structural audit for the complete picture — both free, no account required.