How do I turn off the popup on my Shopify store?

To turn off a Shopify popup, switch it off where it comes from: an app embed in the theme editor, a form in Apps, then Forms, a checkbox in your theme's Theme settings, or a snippet in the theme code. Shopify has no single popup switch, so check those four places in that order and stop at the first one that lists your popup.

The order matters because the first three take a click and the last one takes a code edit. Most popups on Shopify stores come from an app.

Where can a Shopify popup come from?

How do I turn off a popup that comes from an app?

In the admin go to Online Store, select Edit theme, then the App embeds icon in the sidebar. Shopify's help centre says to select the embed, toggle it off and select Save. Embeds are set per theme, so if you later publish a different theme, the embeds you turned on in the old one are off in the new one until you activate them again.

Switching off the whole embed also switches off everything else that app shows, such as a reviews widget or a chat button. If you only want the popup gone, turn it off inside the app's own settings and leave the embed on.

For Shopify's own Forms app, go to Apps, then Forms, select the menu next to the form, and choose Turn off. Shopify notes that a form only shows on the store while the Forms app embed is active, but turning off the single form is the cleaner route because any inline signup form you placed on a page keeps working.

What if my theme has its own popup?

Some themes include a signup popup with no app at all. Shopify's free themes rely on a newsletter section or a footer form instead: its help centre says every Online Store 2.0 theme and the Horizon family has a newsletter section or a footer signup form, and says nothing about a built in popup. Paid themes and generated themes often add one.

Look in the theme editor under Theme settings (the gear icon) for a group named Popup, Newsletter popup, or Promotion. If the theme put the switch there, one checkbox turns it off and you are done.

If none of the menus mentions a popup, it is written into the code. Go to Online Store, Themes, the three dots next to your theme, then Duplicate. On the copy choose Edit code and search for popup, modal and newsletter. The popup is usually a snippet rendered from layout/theme.liquid, and removing that one render line on the copy removes the popup. Publish the copy only after you have checked it.

Why does the popup not show when I try to find it?

Two reasons account for most of this. First, popups remember that you closed them, usually with a cookie that lasts days. Ours lasts 7 days, so a merchant who dismissed it once would not see it again for a week. Open the store in a private window to see what a first time visitor sees.

Second, many popups are built not to open inside the theme editor, so they do not cover the page while you edit it. We switched ours off in the editor on 25 September 2026 for exactly that reason. If you can see the popup on the live store but not in the editor, that is expected, not a sign it is gone.

When does a popup decide to open?

Popups do not open at random. They wait for a trigger, and the trigger usually differs between a computer and a phone, because a phone has no mouse pointer to leave the page. These are the triggers in the popup our generator ships, with the timings we checked on a real store:

Other apps use different numbers, but the pattern is common. If shoppers complain that a popup appears as they scroll, it is probably the scroll up trigger, and the app's settings are where you change it.

Should I turn the popup off or keep it?

Keep it only if it is honest and polite. Google's search guidance calls intrusive dialogs ones that "obstruct users' view of the content, usually for promotional purposes", says they "may lead to poor search performance", and suggests "banners that take up only a small fraction of the screen" instead. Legally required dialogs such as age checks are treated differently.

If you keep it, test that the signups arrive. Why your Shopify newsletter signup is not working explains where Shopify stores them and how to check.

Our own popup promised 10% off that did not exist

Until 25 September 2026, every paid theme from our generator showed shoppers a popup reading "Wait, Get 10% Off Before You Go" with a "Get my discount" button. A new store has no discount, and the popup never showed a code, so a shopper who signed up was promised something that never arrived. Nothing about it was invalid code, so Shopify's theme check and our own validation were silent.

We changed three things. The heading, text, button label and an optional discount code now live in Theme settings, then Popup, with neutral default copy ("Stay in touch"). A discount appears only when the merchant types in a code they created under Discounts in the admin, and the theme never writes a percentage. And the popup no longer opens inside the theme editor. An automated check that fails if any theme default states an offer found 55 failures on the old code and none on the new one.

The lesson applies to any popup: if it mentions a discount, create the code in Discounts first, then write the offer. The same rule covers banners that promise free shipping you never set up. The free themes in our gallery carry the fixed popup.

How we checked this

The App embeds, Forms and newsletter steps were read from Shopify's help centre, and the interstitial quotes from Google Search Central, on 3 October 2026. The trigger timings come from our own theme, tested on a Shopify development store on 25 September 2026 at computer and phone widths.