Cyro – The Shopify App for Clean Cyrillic URLs

As a Shopify Partner team that has worked with stores across Cyrillic-speaking markets for years, we kept running into the same issue over and over again. Merchants were spending unnecessary time fixing messy URLs manually, while customers were stuck sharing links filled with long strings of encoded characters.

Why Shopify URLs fail in Cyrillic in the first place

Shopify supports Cyrillic content, but URLs still rely on ASCII-compatible encoding behind the scenes. Because of that, Cyrillic characters often get converted into long percent-encoded strings. So instead of seeing something clean like: myshop.com/products/lyatna-roklya your customers end up seeing something like: myshop.com/products/%D0%BB%D1%8F%D1%82%D0%BD…

Search engines can understand those links just fine, but people usually can’t. When you share them on social media, in emails, or through messaging apps, they instantly look cluttered and difficult to trust. And once your catalog starts growing, the problem becomes much harder to manage.

A lot of merchants try to solve this by editing every URL handle themselves.

You create a product, change the handle manually, add a redirect, check the links again, and then repeat the same process for the next product. That might be manageable when your store has five products. It becomes exhausting when you have five thousand. If your store relies on large imports or frequent product updates, it’s very easy to end up with inconsistent URLs, missing redirects, and avoidable 404 errors.

What does Cyro do to solve this?

Cyro takes care of the entire workflow automatically.

Whenever you create or update content in Shopify, our app transliterates Cyrillic titles into clean Latin handles for your products, collections, pages, and blog posts. At the same time, Cyro automatically creates 301 redirects, so your existing links continue working even after a URL changes. That means you can keep your store URLs clean and readable without worrying about broken navigation or losing SEO value. If you already have a large catalog, you can also process thousands of existing handles in bulk.

We tested the system on stores with tens of thousands of products to make sure it performs reliably at scale. Every URL change includes automatic 301 redirects, helping you preserve rankings and avoid dead links. You can also review your change history and roll back updates whenever needed.

Because transliteration rules vary between languages, Cyro includes support for several regional standards, including Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Serbian, and Macedonian.

Try Cyro

You can find Cyro: Cyrillic URLs & Handles on the Shopify App Store.

We’ve also put together a short walkthrough video so you can see how the app works in a real Shopify store.