How to Create and Customize Shopify Collection Pages that Convert

Shopify collection pages are meant to do more than only showcase products.

They’re a golden opportunity to bring in more traffic and boost sales by guiding customers to find what they want, and more.

Back to the beginning

Shopify collection pages enable merchants to organize products into curated groups. Similar to walking into a store, shoes for men and women are kept in separate sections, and the same typically goes for discounted or seasonal ones.

Online, however, there are no shopping assistants. No signs or people to guide shoppers. It’s up to you to build and optimize the collection page to help customers find the products.

This might be the first collection you are creating, so let’s start from the beginning.

How to set up collections in Shopify

Setting up collections is very intuitive. Log in to your Shopify dashboard, then navigate to “Products” on the left-hand menu and finally select “Collections.”

As shown in the screenshot below, you will see all the collections of your store listed, and on the far right, a button labeled “Add collections” that takes you to the collection creation dashboard.

Step 1: Pick the collections you need

Before getting hands-on with the dashboard, we need to decide on what collections your Shopify store needs and why. Here’s a set of questions that will unlock the answers:

Why would a shopper want to see this collection?

You could be solving a time-based need with a “back to school’’ collection, offering products for a special occasion/ event, or as simple as solving a direct problem by focusing on the specific utility with “six-string electric guitar flat wound strings” or “noise-cancelling headphones.’’

Think about why a customer would visit your collection. Luckily, you can combine different collections to answer multiple needs.

How does this collection reflect your or your product’s brand?

Not only do your brand and the brands you sell dictate collection names, but they also directly determine which collections make sense to publish.

For premium brands, buyers expect perks, exclusivity, craftsmanship, and heritage, among others. For instance, with electric guitars, a “made in the USA” collection speaks directly to customers. High-value buyers would immediately skip all other collections and go where it’s best for both them and you.

There’s nothing wrong with having the standard ‘Summer’ or ‘Best Seller’ collections – yet there’s more you can put in between. Boutique stores often create collections based on their brand identity alone.

How does this collection help the business?

Experienced merchants often use collections to solve core business problems. The key is knowing where to use and not overuse them.

For example, a “last chance to buy” collection is often a way of getting rid of extra stock or moving slow stock faster. The sense of urgency it induces, blended in with a hefty discount, can lead to higher conversions.

The opposite is also true. Customers will lose trust in your brand if they’re pushed too much without being given any apparent benefit. (discounts, high quality, exclusive product)

Collections often do the heavy lifting in cross-selling. Grouping related products into bundles makes it easier for customers to discover complementary items and increase average order value. (AOV) Again, only if done at the right time and with the right perks.

Will this collection be found?

Lastly, collections are created to help your store rank higher in search results. This does not mean stacking up keywords and grouping items randomly.

For some industries (fashion or electronics), it makes sense to have many collections based on attributes, as shoppers look for those attributes specifically. For niche and premium brands, often fewer work best.

Create collections around any criteria

Here is a list of the most commonly used ones. Save it for later, as some likely apply to your store.

Step 2: Write a compelling collection title and description

Similar to adding products to Shopify, the first thing you’ll need to do is add a title and description.

Keeping in mind step one, your collection title and description should be clear, directed to the audience’s intent, and crafted to drive action. Some stores opt not to have a collection described at all, as the name and image speak for themselves. Others keep only a short tagline.

It’s a good SEO practice to write it in the back end and then, if needed, hide it with theme customization.

Step 3: Pick between manual or smart collections

Manual collections that allow you to hand-pick the products you want to add.

Smart collections automatically group products based on a selected criterion, such as the product’s title, price, vendor, inventory stock, or other variables, as shown in the image below.

Smart collections are necessary for stores with extensive inventories. In contrast, manual collections serve a role for stores with small and curated collections or when you need to hand-pick what goes into the “limited edition.”

Use product metafield to group collections

Metafield comes into play if your products can’t be grouped by any of the default conditions Shopify offers. Let’s say you want to group your products based on flavor, as shown in the image below.

To do this, create the product metafield (Settings > Metafields and metaobjects > Metafield Definitions > Products – Add Definition) and select it as a condition for a brilliant selection.

It might take longer to get the hang of all the intricacies behind metafields, which we will cover in another post.

For now, you won’t need to jump into them directly.

How to use Shopify collection metafields

Often, merchants confuse collection metafields with product metafields. The main difference to keep in mind is that the collection metafields are not used to organize collections; they describe or enrich the collections on the front end and provide more space to play with SEO.

Without getting into too many details, here are the main differences between product and collection metadata and when to use each.

Some best practices for using collection metafields are:

• Collection-specific banners: Use an image metafield to add a banner to the collection page, such as adding a “up to 40% off’ banner on the winter jacket collection only.
• Trust badges or guarantee text: Add a short text or icon metafield to show unique perks such as “Made Locally” or “Free shipping over $100.”
• Extended SEO descriptions: Add FAQs to the collection page as a list metafield. It not only helps with conversions but also boosts SEO by hunting for questions users typically write on Google. There is also a way to have your product show on Google’s product carousel.
• Related collections: Must have for cross-selling and improving navigation
• Lifestyle media: Embedding relevant video content on a landing page has been found to increase conversions by as much as 86%. Incorporate product review videos and influencer showcases in your collections page.

Step 4: Optimize for search intent

Here is where some SEO comes into play, and it’s not as technical as you’d think, but more or less intuitive. Shopify lists four main types of search intent as:

• Informational: where a person wants to learn about something. For example, when they search ‘what to do if my electric guitar strings are rusted.’
• Navigational: In this case, the person knows exactly the website they want to go to. In our example, let’s say they type “Guitar Center” in Google.
• Transactional: When a person wants to take action and searches for something like ‘buy Elixir guitar strings’
• Commercial: Different than transactional, they are in the search phase of the buying process. In this case, they would typically type “D’Addario vs Elixir strings” or “which guitar strings last longer?”

There is a reason why collections often appear above product pages in search results, which, of course, depends on the product and the overall site. Still, if we exclude the technical aspects that affect your Shopify store’s ranking, as well as the common SEO mistakes merchants make, we deduct the following:

Users are more likely to find a product when they know what they want and what to purchase (transactional and commercial), and find categories when exploring options or simply gathering information (Informational and navigational).

It’s not solid science, as it varies greatly depending on the product, yet you give your store more of a chance when your collections and products use different yet related keywords or long tail keyphrases.

Step 5: Choose the right image

A collection image needs to say more than what 1000 words can. Back to step one, the purpose of the collection and brand will dictate the best image to use.

Step 6: Optimize collection page UX

A collection page is the middleman between the home page and product pages, and they account, on average, for a significant 35% of your site’s navigation.

Think of a collection page as your shopping assistant. It guides customers to the collection meant for them, briefly highlighting each product until they find the perfect fit, much like a concierge in a boutique jewelry store who takes the time to show you all the perks of a vintage watch.

It not only makes the customer feel appreciated but also helps attract people to the store and convert them into customers.

Other practices that are less intriguing, but work for every industry, brand, and product are:

• Prioritize site speed: Display no more than 20 products at a time, and include a ‘Load More’ button. Your bounce rate, conversions, and site visits are proven to benefit if you follow the basics of improving site speed.
• Use a clear visual hierarchy: Highlight popular or seasonal products on your page first. Best sellers and new products should often take priority.
• Add a testimonial or any other kind of social proof: Photos of users, a ‘Bestseller’ badge on a few of the products, and a trust-building indicator such as ‘ ’20 people viewed this in the last hours.’
• Make filtering intuitive: Choose your filters based on the buyer’s intent, and also apply one or two tricks. One of them is to save filter preferences per session among collections so that the options (size, color, etc) are already set when they look for other products.
• Prioritize mobile: Over 60% of visits to eCommerce sites in 2025 came from mobile devices; not optimizing is no longer an option.
• Guide users. Adding a progress bar to indicate the number of products left to view, and including a hover effect over products keeps users engaged.

Step 7: Organize collection hierarchy

By default, Shopify has no sub-collections, which can confuse merchants who want to organize their products.

Let’s say we follow the example of Just Candy with ‘shop by occasion.’ Next, we will head to ‘football party’ and pick a team. Everything takes us to another collection that feels like a sub-collection of the first.

However, even though these collections feel nested or hierarchical to the user, in Shopify, they are all separate collection pages. The hierarchy is primarily visual/navigation-based, not structural. This is good news, because each page has a separate title, URL, and description – giving more space for optimizing your store’s SEO.

Step 8: Highlight collections on the homepage

Most stores display collections on the homepage, but there’s a big difference in simply showing a collection and presenting it in a way that drives conversions. It’s the same difference that good merchandising makes in driving sales in a supermarket.

Capture high-intent search with collection pages

Collection pages are a seriously underrated opportunity to drive SEO results.

You can only have as many product pages as you have products, and blogs or other original content are hard to get up to a standard. The only limit to adding collection pages, on the other hand, is how detailed you want to go.

A popular approach among enterprise-level merchants that smaller stores can take advantage of is granular collections. This approach entails creating separate collection pages for many, or each of the attributes of a product.

• Target specific long tail searches

Going back to search intent, a user who reaches ‘light blue halloween cinderella costume’ has already made up their mind on what they want, or is very close to it. If they land on your separate collection page based on colour (light blue), character (Cinderella), and occasion (Halloween), you will likely convert them.

• Boost your overall site authority

The more quality traffic comes in on your store, the more Google will be convinced that your website is the one to push up the ranks.

It works, but there’s a catch

When taken to the extreme, the strategy is akin to flooding the internet with content, hoping someone will stumble upon it if you overdo or forget to optimize.

Your product’s unique value diminishes with granularity, unless you have something different to offer. You don’t want to end up creating problems with hierarchies, order of filters/attributes, and duplicate content. If Google recognizes your pages as such, it might decide not to index them.

Ensure there’s a reasonable demand for the products and attributes that match a buyer’s intent to justify the numerous collections. Follow this with a keen eye on details; changing images, alt descriptions, and meta descriptions for collections.

The inventory management side of things can also quickly turn into a logistical nightmare if you don’t implement a consistent SKU pattern.

Recap: don’t cut any corners

Shopify provides you with quick solutions with templates and an intuitive backend. But that’s not only you. All merchants have equal access.

To stand out, you need to do more.

We covered various ways to optimize your collection pages and demonstrated how other brands utilize the same tools at your disposal. Take action now; if you don’t see results, it might be worth revisiting the strategy drawing board.

F.A.Qs on Shopify Collection Pages