How to Hide Your Shopify Store

As a Shopify store owner, you may occasionally find yourself needing to temporarily hide your storefront. Perhaps you’re in the midst of building your store, or maybe you’re implementing design and functionality enhancements that aren’t quite ready to go live just yet.

When you need to keep things under wraps, follow this step-by-step guide to ensure a great shopping experience for customers.

» Do you manage multiple stores? Check out this app to streamline your inventories.

5 Steps to Hide Your Shopify Store

Step 1. Edit Preferences

• Navigate to your Shopify Dashboard.
• Click Sales Channels > Online Store > Preferences.



Step 2. Restrict Access

• Scroll down to the very bottom of this page.
• Select the “Restrict access to visitors with the password” check box in the Password Protection Section. 



Step 3. Leave a Message

• Input a message to your visitors such as “Our website is temporarily under construction. We will be back live on XYZ date”.
• Click Save in the bottom right-hand corner.

It is important to leave a message for your site visitors so they understand why your storefront is not live and when they can expect it to be live.



Step 4. Go to Your Theme Editor

• Customize the design of your page by going to your theme editor.
• Online Store > Themes > Customize.

It's always best to customize this page in line with your current website design.



Step 5. Update the Design

• Go to the top menu in your theme editor and select Other > Password.
• Make design updates to this page.
• Click Save.



Expert Tips When Hiding Your Store

Restrict Purchases, but Keep it Live

Another approach you could take is to disable the storefront only (that is, prevent customers from buying products while keeping the website active). If you want to keep your website live you can take the following steps:

1. Log in to your store as the store owners.

2. From your Shopify admin, click Settings > Plan.

3. Click Deactivate store > Pause and build plan.

4. Carefully review the plan details, then click Switch to Pause and build.

5. Add a notice on your collection and product pages to inform customers that the storefront is currently disabled and add a time/date it will be back live if applicable.

Communicate with Your Customers

Transparency to your customers is key! Whether you are hiding your storefront or the entire website, it is important to communicate to site visitors and customers why your website is hidden and when they can expect it to be back live.

» Hiding your store for maintenance? Use sample data to test its functionality.

Simple Sample Data for When You're Building Your Store

One reason you might want to hide your store is to do updates or some testing of features behind the scenes. You might even be building it from scratch. Either way, you'll need sample data to test your store's user flows and functionality before real customers start exploring.

Egnition's Simple Sample Data helps you test your store by filling it with the choice of three different sample datasets.

• Generate realistic datasets
• Generate customers and orders to analyze flows
• Easily remove sample data when you're done