The following guide may be used to find and recreate Shopify collections, using historical website data. This article is published in relation to an Orderly Emails Incident
Article Sections
Extract data from a single collection page - How to extract additional data from a single archived collection page, including seo meta title, description, image alt text etc.
Finding Archived Collections Pages
The Wayback Machine Web Archive (web.archive.org) keeps historical snapshots of websites and can contain your collections data from an earlier date. This could be used to recreate the collection list, with the same handle, url, title, image etc.
Note: A list of collection handles can also be found in Google Search Console, Shopify's Session by landing page report and the method described below.
We recommend the below method, as it also helps extract titles, descriptions, image alt text etc.
Option 1
Go to https://web.archive.org
Search for:
https://yourcustomdomain.com/collections.json
Note: Replace "yourcustomdomain.com" with your custom store domain. Use your custom domain if you have one, and not the myshopify.com domain.
Click on the most recent snapshot from before March 29, 2026. If no snapshot exists for collections.json, try Option B below.
If collections.json exists, the text shown contains your collection titles, descriptions, handles, and image URLs in one place. Images will still be available in your Shopify store, and can be re-added to the new collection.
Copy the JSON data, and convert to CSV using a free online tool (https://data.page/json/csv) or similar.
Option B
Open your sites current
/collectionspage in the browser, example: https://yourcustomdomain.com/collections
Note: Replace "yourcustomdomain.com" with your custom store domain. Use the exact domain from your live website, and not the myshopify.com domain.
Copy the full url from the browser address bar (using the exact url with custom domain etc is important in next steps)
Open the archive.org site: https://web.archive.org
In the sites search bar, paste the copied url from Step 2 above and hit enter
In the found snapshots select the most recent one before March 29, 2026. If not recent snapshot exists, try the /collections/all page instead.
Wait for the page to load.
Save the page to a file.
In the browsers "File" menu, choose "Save Page As" (shortcut: Cmd+S or Ctrl+S)
In the "Format" menu, select "Web Page, HTML Only"
Note the filename, then click "Save"
To quickly extract the collections information, open chatGPT or Claude.ai
Attach the textfile to the chat together with the following prompt:
From the attached html source file, create a CSV of each listed Collection page. Extract and include each collection's:
- title
- description (if available)
- url
- image src url
- image alt text
- handle (last part of path, example: summer-sale in /collections/summer-sale)
- url to the archived version of the collection page
10. Once done, you will be provided a csv file with structured collections data extracted.
Extracting Collection Page Metadata
See the Extract data from a single collection page for detailed instructions on how to extract additional information for each listed collection page using the link in the last column of the CSV file. This can be useful for extracting seo meta titles and descriptions, image alt text etc.
Note: If your collections had a featured image, those image files will still be available in your Shopify Admin. They will also be included in the CSV file above when available.
Creating Collections in Shopify Admin
Option A - Shopify Admin
Once you have the collection page data, you can create the collections in the Shopify Admin.
It is important to create collections with the same handle that they had previously. This will restore all previous links, seo or other references to the collection page.
Refer to the Shopify SmartCollections help article for detailed instructions when creating these collections in Shopify.
Option B - Import using Matrixify
If you have many collections to restore, you could use the Matrixify app to import them in bulk via CSV. See their guide here for detailed import instructions.
Related articles:
Extract data from a single collection page - How to extract additional data from a single archived collection page, including seo meta title, description, image alt text etc.