Handle

In /products/navy-wool-overcoat, the handle is navy-wool-overcoat.

Where it comes from

Shopify builds it from the title the first time you save: lower case, spaces to hyphens, punctuation dropped. The same happens for a collection, a page and a product option value. After that it stops following the title.

Rename a product from “Navy Overcoat” to “Navy Wool Overcoat” and the handle stays as it was. That is deliberate, and it is the right default.

Changing one costs you

The handle is the URL. Change it and the old address is gone, along with any ranking it had built and any link pointing at it.

Shopify creates a redirect for you when you edit a handle in the admin, and that redirect is the only thing standing between you and a dead link. Do not delete it. An import that rewrites handles in bulk makes no redirects at all.

Where it goes wrong

Handles get a size or colour in them, from a title like “Navy Overcoat Medium”. The product then reads as one variant in its own URL, and the other sizes have nowhere sensible to live.

The other one is duplicate products competing on near-identical handles. Shopify appends a number, so you end up with navy-wool-overcoat-1 on a sales channel somewhere, splitting the traffic between two pages that should have been one.