The verdict
Shopify forces /products/ and /collections/ into your URLs and will not let you remove them. Clients are told constantly that this is holding them back. It is not. The cost is cosmetic and the cost of changing it would not be. This post exists to stop you spending money on it.
Shopify forces /products/, /collections/, /pages/ and /blogs/ into your URLs and will not let you remove them. This comes up in almost every Shopify conversation I have, usually as something the client has been told is holding them back.
It is not. Leave it alone. This post exists to stop you spending money on it.
What Google actually says about URLs
Read Google’s URL structure documentation and notice what is absent from it. The guidance is about crawlability and human readability. It warns that “overly complex URLs, especially those containing multiple parameters, can cause problems for crawlers by creating unnecessarily high numbers of URLs that point to identical or similar content” and recommends using as few parameters as you can.
There is no claim anywhere on that page that a descriptive word in a URL path improves ranking. The document is about not creating crawl problems.
/collections/mugs creates no crawl problem. It is one clean, static, readable path per collection. It is precisely the sort of URL that page is asking for.
The real cost of the segment
Honestly assessed: a few characters of length, and a word in the path that describes the platform rather than the product.
That is it. Against that, consider what changing it would involve if you could: every URL on the store redirected, every internal link updated, every backlink now pointing through a redirect, and a period of instability while Google works out what happened. You would be taking real risk to remove a cosmetic imperfection.
Which is the whole argument. Not that the segment is good, but that the ratio of cost to benefit is terrible, and the effort has better places to go.
Where I do recommend changing URL structure, and why that is different
I should be consistent about this, because I have given the opposite advice.
On a WordPress site I audited, 1,082 blog posts carried a /blog/ segment in their URLs and I recommended removing it. Same cosmetic issue, opposite recommendation. The difference is not the segment. It is that on WordPress it is a permalink setting and a redirect rule: cheap, reversible, and done in an afternoon by one person.
On Shopify it is not available at any price. So the question never gets to a cost-benefit calculation; it stops at “you cannot.”
The general principle underneath both: URL tidiness is worth doing when it is nearly free and never worth a migration.
What actually deserves the attention instead
On Shopify stores, in rough order of how much they cost:
- The URLs the platform generates that you did not ask for. Tag pages, 659 on one store I audited, plus filter combinations and sort parameters. That is a real URL problem with real volume, and unlike the path segment it is something you can decide about.
- Collection pages that are bare grids. The page most likely to rank, usually with nothing on it.
- Whatever the theme is doing to your headings. On one store every product name in the grid was an H2 and 1,562 URLs had no H1 at all.
Any one of those is worth more than the entire URL question.
None of this is niche, either. The 2025 Web Almanac found ecommerce on 19.2% of mobile sites and Shopify at 25.3% of those, so the platform’s defaults are shaping a meaningful share of the commercial web, and the defaults worth arguing with are the ones generating URLs, not the ones printing a word in the path.
The slug you can change, and should
One clarification, because “you cannot change Shopify URLs” is not quite true.
The part after the segment, the product or collection handle, is yours. That one is worth getting right at creation, because it is the descriptive part, it is free to set, and changing it later means a redirect. Set it deliberately when you create the product and then leave it alone.
The short version
- You cannot remove
/products/or/collections/. Stop trying. - Google’s URL guidance is about crawlability, not ranking words. A clean static path is what it asks for.
- The cost is cosmetic. The cost of changing it would not be.
- I do recommend removing
/blog/on WordPress, because there it is a setting, not a migration. - URL tidiness is worth it when nearly free, never worth a migration.
- The handle is yours. Set it deliberately at creation, then leave it.
- Tags, filters, collections and headings all matter more.
If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. Shopify SEO covers what the platform lets you change and what it doesn’t. If you’re not sure which of several plausible problems is costing you, that’s what an SEO audit is for.
