EU Launch Pack

Guide · EU-2

hreflang with Shopify Markets.

Search engines should send a German shopper to your German page, not your English one. hreflang tags tell them which page is which. On Shopify you rarely write them yourself: you set up the languages and markets, and Shopify adds the tags.

Last checked: 10 November 2026

What hreflang does

Each page lists its versions in other languages, in the page head. For one product it looks like this:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/products/merino-sweater">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://example.com/de/products/merino-sweater">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.com/products/merino-sweater">

Every version lists all the others, itself included. If one side is missing, search engines may ignore the pair.

What Shopify does for you

Once a language is published and added to a market, Shopify serves it on its own URLs and adds the hreflang tags to the head of each page. Your translated meta titles and descriptions become the search snippets for those URLs. That is why we translate the SEO fields with the rest of the store.

Pick a URL structure

Subfolders
example.com/de or example.com/de-de. One domain, nothing to buy, the simplest to run. A good default for a first market.
Country domains
example.de. A clear local signal and a familiar address for shoppers, but one more domain to buy, connect and renew per country.
Subdomains
de.example.com. Possible, rarely needed. Choose it only if you have a reason to.

Changing structure later means redirects. Choose before you publish.

Set it up

  1. Import the translations

    Fill the language first, while it is unpublished. See export and import the translation CSV.

  2. Publish the language

    In Settings › Languages, publish it. An unpublished language has no public URLs and no hreflang tags.

  3. Add it to a market

    In Settings › Markets, open the market (for example Germany), choose its domain or subfolder and add the language. A market can have several languages; Switzerland, for instance, often gets German and French.

  4. Check the source

    Open a translated product page, view the page source and search for hreflang. You should see one line per language and market, each pointing to a page that loads.

  5. Tell Google

    Submit your /sitemap.xml in Google Search Console and inspect a few translated URLs. Indexing takes days to weeks; nothing on your side speeds it up much.

Mistakes to avoid

Hand-written tags
Adding hreflang lines to theme.liquid on top of Shopify's creates duplicates and conflicts. Remove old ones from earlier apps or themes.
Automatic redirects
Redirecting visitors by IP address or browser language can hide pages from search engine crawlers. Offer a language and country selector, or a suggestion banner, instead.
Half-translated pages
A published language with English descriptions or English SEO titles looks like a duplicate of your main site. Publish once the whole export is translated.
Translated handles
We leave URL handles as they are, so existing links keep working. If you translate them later, check that the old URLs redirect.

Official sources