The Ultimate Fix for Cyrillic SEO in Shopify: How to Fix %D0%BF URLs
Hi everyone,
Full disclosure right at the start: I'm the head of the Shopify team behind the app I’m about to mention. I'm not here to spam, but to share a solution to a problem we’ve faced personally as a Shopify developer for over 10 years.
If you run a store in a Cyrillic-based market (Bulgaria, Ukraine, Serbia, etc.), you know the "percent-encoding" nightmare. Shopify’s default behavior converts Cyrillic titles into unreadable strings like %D0%BF%D1%80... when shared on social media. It looks unprofessional and hurts SEO.
After years of manually or automated fixing handles and setting up 301 redirects for our clients, I finally decided to automate it and built Cyro.
How we approached the problem with Cyro: Cyrillic URLs & Handles:
- Automatic Transliteration: It converts Cyrillic titles to clean Latin URLs the moment you hit "Save".
- Safety First (301 Redirects): It automatically maps old links to new ones so you don't lose SEO rankings or hit 404s.
- Bulk Scanner: Built specifically for large stores (we’ve tested it on 30k+ products) to fix historical links in minutes.
- Multi-Market Cyrilic Support: We support multiple official transliteration standards for Bulgarian, Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Macedonian, Belarusian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Mongolian markets.
We built this because we were tired of doing this work in different ways. I'm looking for honest feedback from fellow store owners and devs. If you’ve struggled with this, I’d love for you to try it out and tell me what’s missing or what can be improved.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E1gFLQ5-sA
Link to the app: https://apps.shopify.com/cyro-cyrillic-url-handles