Creating pages in Shopify: templates, structure and SEO

Creating a page in Shopify takes about a minute: Online Store → Pages → Add page, write a title and content, save. The parts worth thinking about are which pages you need, what template each uses, and the SEO fields at the bottom that almost everyone leaves blank.

The pages every store needs

• Contact, with a form that goes somewhere a person reads.
• About, which converts better than most merchants expect — people check whether you're real.
• Delivery information, separate from the policy. Customers want times and costs, not terms.
• FAQ, written from your actual support inbox.
• Size guide or specifications, if your category needs one.

Plus the four policies, which live under Settings → Policies rather than in Pages and render automatically — policy pages.

Alternate page templates

By default every page uses page.json and looks the same. That's usually wrong: a contact page, an about page and a campaign page have different needs.

Create alternate templates in the theme — page.contact.json, page.about.json, page.faq.json — and assign them per page from the template dropdown in the page editor. Each can have its own sections and layout.

This is the mechanism behind landing pages too, and it's covered generally in JSON templates.

The rich text editor and its limits

The page editor gives you formatting, images and links. It's fine for prose.

It's not fine for anything structured — a comparison table, a specification list, a repeated card layout. Content typed into the editor as HTML is unmaintainable, inconsistent across pages, and breaks in a redesign.

Structured content belongs in sections on an alternate template, or in metaobjects if it repeats across pages. The rule is the same as everywhere: store the data, let the theme decide how it renders.

The SEO fields

At the bottom of the page editor, under "Search engine listing":

• Page title — what appears in search results. Not automatically your page title, and worth writing.
• Meta description — 150–160 characters, written as a reason to click.
• URL handle — the part after /pages/. Set it deliberately; changing it later needs a redirect.

Leaving these blank means Shopify generates something serviceable and generic. On a page you want found, that's a wasted opportunity.

Handles and URLs

Shopify puts pages at /pages/handle. You can't remove the /pages/ prefix, and trying to is a common wasted afternoon.

Keep handles short and human — /pages/delivery, not /pages/delivery-information-and-shipping-times-2026. And don't change them casually once a page has links or traffic; every change needs a 301 — redirects.

Navigation

A page nobody links to is a page nobody reads. Add it to a menu under Online Store → Navigation, or to the footer — navigation menus.

Footer is right for policies, delivery and about. Header is for things people navigate to deliberately, which is usually the catalogue rather than content.

Pages vs blog articles

• A page is evergreen and structural: about, contact, delivery, a guide you'll keep updating.
• An article is dated and part of a stream: news, how-tos, seasonal content — blog setup.

The practical difference: articles have a publish date, an author and tags, and appear in listings automatically. Pages don't. If you're publishing regularly, use the blog; if it's a permanent fixture, use a page.

Keeping them current

Pages rot quietly. Delivery times change, the FAQ falls behind the actual questions, the about page describes a company you no longer are.

Set a reminder to reread every page once a year. It takes twenty minutes and it's the cheapest content work you'll do.

The page editor is the easy part. The decisions worth making are which template each page uses and what the SEO fields say — both of which are one click away and almost always skipped.