How to Remove /blogs/ From Shopify Blog URLs (and Whether You Should Bother)

You cannot remove /blogs/ from a Shopify blog URL. Not on Basic, not on Plus, not with a theme edit. That segment is part of how Shopify routes every blog post on every standard store, and there is no setting that turns it off.

If you came here hoping for a toggle, that is the honest answer, and it is better to hear it in the first paragraph than after installing something. Most owners find this out the same way. They publish a first post, look at the address bar, see yourstore.com/blogs/news/post-name, and wonder why it does not read yourstore.com/blog/post-name like the sites they admire.

There is still real work you can do here. You can rename the "news" part. You can clean up each post's own handle. You can also go headless and get any path you want, at a cost that rarely makes sense for a store in its first year.

This post covers all of it: what is fixed and what is editable, what each popular workaround really does, whether the prefix affects your rankings (short version: it does not), and a checklist for the case where you decide a Shopify blog URL structure change is worth doing anyway. By the end you should know whether this deserves an afternoon or zero minutes.

Can you remove /blogs/ from a Shopify blog URL?

No. A Shopify blog post address has four parts, and the prefix is the one part you cannot touch.

Shopify uses the same pattern for everything else on your store. Products sit under /products/, collections under /collections/, and standalone pages under /pages/. The prefix tells Shopify which kind of content to load, so it is doing routing work, not decoration.

The plural trips people up. Shopify lets one store run several blogs, so the prefix names the group (blogs) and the handle names the one you are in (news). If you want the longer version of how the pieces fit, including the tag pages that come with every blog, I covered it in how Shopify blog URLs and tag pages work.

What you can change: the blog handle and the post handle

Every Shopify store starts with one blog called News, which is why so many first posts live at /blogs/news/. That handle is editable, and so is the blog's title.

How to rename the blog handle

In your admin, go to Content, then Blog posts, then Manage blogs. Open the blog, find the search engine listing preview, and click the pencil icon. The URL handle field holds the part that comes after /blogs/. Shopify's blog documentation notes that when you change it, an option to create a URL redirect is already selected. Leave it selected.

Two details catch people. Changing the blog's title does not change its handle, so a blog renamed "Journal" can still sit at /blogs/news/. And the handle cannot contain spaces, so use hyphens between words.

What to pick

Pick a word that describes what the blog is for and that you will not outgrow: journal, guides, learn, or your category, such as skincare or coffee-guides. Skip /blogs/blog/, which reads like a stutter. Keep it to one or two words, because you will be typing it into internal links for years.

The post handle matters more

The last segment is the one a reader and a search engine both read. Shopify builds it from your title, which is how you end up with /10-amazing-tips-you-need-to-know-about-cleaning-linen-in-2026/. Trim it to the topic before you publish: /how-to-clean-linen/. Once a post is live and getting visits, leave its handle alone.

The workarounds people suggest, and what each one really does

Search for a way to remove /blogs/ from a Shopify URL and you will find the same five suggestions repeated across forums and app listings. Here is what each one produces.

A page swaps /blogs/news/ for /pages/, which is one prefix for another. There are good reasons to publish something as a page, and I went through them in when a page is the better container, but a tidier URL is not one of them.

Vanity redirects only point one way

Shopify's redirect tool has a rule that most forum answers skip. Shopify's URL redirect documentation says you can redirect only from URLs that are already broken. If the URL still loads a valid page, the redirect will not work.

So you can create /blog/how-to-clean-linen, which does not exist, and forward it to the real post. That gives you a short link for a flyer or a social bio. The moment someone lands, the address bar shows /blogs/news/how-to-clean-linen again.

You cannot do the reverse. Forwarding the live /blogs/ URL to a cleaner one fails, because the live URL loads a page and Shopify ignores the redirect. Google also indexes the destination, not the vanity link, so nothing about your search listing changes.

Blog apps trade one prefix for another

Several apps host your blog outside Shopify's native blog and serve it through what Shopify calls an app proxy. The app proxy documentation lists the only prefixes allowed: a, apps, community, and tools. Your posts would live at something like /a/blog/post-name or /community/post-name.

That is a different URL, not a cleaner one. You also take on a monthly fee, a second editor, and a dependency: if you uninstall the app, every one of those URLs stops working at once. For a store with fewer than 50 posts, I would not make that trade for the sake of a path.

The headless route and what it costs

Headless means Shopify keeps running your products, checkout, and admin, while a separately built site handles what visitors see. Because that site is custom code, its developer decides every path. /blog/post-name is easy. So is /post-name.

Shopify's own framework for this is Hydrogen, hosted on Oxygen. The Hydrogen documentation says Oxygen is available at no extra charge on paid Shopify plans, so hosting is not the expense. The build is. You are replacing your theme with a custom application, which means paying a developer to build it and again to change it, and giving up the theme editor you use today.

I can describe this trade from the inside. This site's posts sit at /journal/post-name/ because studioniza.com is hand-coded HTML, not a Shopify theme. I get clean paths, and in exchange I maintain every page and every navigation link by hand. That is a fair deal for a studio whose product is this kind of work. It is a poor deal for a store whose product is candles.

Headless earns its cost when a store has a reason beyond URLs: a custom buying experience, several storefronts on one backend, or a content system a theme cannot support. A nicer blog path alone does not get there.

Does the /blogs/ prefix hurt your rankings?

No. This is the part worth slowing down for, because the worry behind most "remove /blogs/" searches is that the prefix is costing traffic.

Google's SEO Starter Guide lists keywords in the domain or URL path under things you should not focus on. It says that from a ranking perspective they have hardly any effect beyond appearing in breadcrumbs. That is Google describing its own system, in a guide last updated in December 2025.

Look at what that means for the prefix. The word "blogs" is not a keyword you are trying to rank for, so even the small effect Google describes does not apply to it. Every Shopify store with a native blog carries the same segment, including stores that rank well for competitive terms.

What the prefix does affect

Two things, both cosmetic. First, the breadcrumb line above your title in search results can show the path, so a searcher may see your domain followed by "blogs" and "news". A handle like journal or guides reads better there than news does, for a store that publishes no news.

Second, the URL is a few characters longer when someone copies it. That is the full list.

Where the ranking difference really comes from

The post handle, the title, the content, and the links pointing at the post. A post at /blogs/news/how-to-clean-linen with a clear answer and three internal links has every advantage over a post at /blog/linen with thin content.

Should you change your Shopify blog URL structure at all?

It depends on how many posts are already live, because the cost of a Shopify blog URL structure change grows with every post you publish.

The reason for caution on an established blog is in Google's guidance on moving a site with URL changes. It tells you to expect ranking fluctuations while pages are recrawled and reindexed. With clean redirects those settle, usually within a few weeks. Without them, the old URLs return 404 errors and the rankings attached to them fade.

So you would be accepting a few unsteady weeks in exchange for a different word in the breadcrumb. For a blog that already brings in visitors, I would not do it. If a client asked me to rename the handle on a blog with 60 indexed posts, I would talk them out of it and put the hours into the posts.

One case needs the same care as a rename: moving posts between blogs. If you split one blog into three, each moved post gets a new URL, because the blog handle is part of its address. Every moved post needs a redirect from its old URL.

The migration checklist if you change handles anyway

If you have weighed it and still want the new handle, do it once and do it in this order. Plan on about an hour for a blog with fewer than 30 posts.

Do not assume the rename redirected every post

Shopify documents the redirect option on the blog itself. It does not promise a redirect for each article inside that blog, and reports from store owners differ on what happens to those article URLs. I have not found an official statement either way, so test instead of trusting. Step 4 takes one minute and tells you which situation you are in.

If old post URLs return a 404, the fix is a CSV file with two columns, old path and new path, imported under Content, then Menus, then View URL redirects. A standard store can hold up to 100,000 redirects, so a blog will not come close to the limit. I walked through the file format in the bulk CSV method for redirects.

Internal links and canonical tags

Redirects catch visitors arriving from outside. Your own links should point straight at the new URLs, so nobody passes through a redirect on the way. Google's site move guidance also warns against chains, where one redirect leads to another. If you ever rename the handle a second time, update the first set of redirects to point at the final address.

Shopify themes set each post's canonical tag automatically, and it should follow the post to its new URL on its own. It takes two clicks to check the canonical tag on a moved post, and it is worth doing once after any URL change.

Wrapping up

You cannot remove /blogs/ from a Shopify URL on a standard store, and the more useful finding is that you do not need to. Google says the words in a URL path have hardly any ranking effect, and the prefix is the same on every Shopify blog you compete with.

The parts you can edit are the blog handle and the post handle. If your store is new and still on "news", renaming it today is free. If you have a library of posts with traffic, the rename buys a nicer breadcrumb and a few nervous weeks, and I would skip it.

The workarounds mostly move the prefix instead of removing it. Vanity redirects forward into the real URL, pages swap in /pages/, and blog apps swap in /a/ or /apps/. Headless is the one route to a custom path, and it replaces your theme with a development project.

If you do change handles, the redirects are the whole job. List the old URLs first, test after the rename, fix anything that returns a 404, update your own links, and keep the redirects running.

The work that moves a blog is less visible than its folder name: choosing topics people search for, writing a clear post handle, answering the question in the first paragraph, and linking each post to the products it supports. That is where an hour pays back.

Or email contact@studioniza.com if you have a specific question about your store. I read every one.

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