Shopify is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms on the market. It’s easy to use, has a lot of features, and is perfect for small businesses. But what if you need to take a break from your online store? Maybe you’re going on vacation or taking some time off for a personal project.
Shopify provides two options to pause your Shopify store from taking any new orders. Here, I’m going to show how to implement each option.
Let’s get started.
Option 1: Restrict access to your store
In this option, you can pause your Shopify store by restricting it with a password page, which means only your team with access to the password can visit your store.
This option can be a good idea if you want to temporarily pause your store for redesigning or maintenance purposes. However, by enabling this option, you will prohibit search engines from crawling your web pages, which will affect your store rankings.
Follow this step to pause your store by restricting access –
- Go to Online store> preferences from your Shopify admin.
- Scroll down to the Restrict store access section.
- Enable the “Restrict access to visitors with the password” option
- Enter the password and message for your visitors.
- Click Save.
Once you do this, your Shopify store homepage will be replaced with a default password page. You can further customize it using page builder apps to make it more compelling and collect emails. Read this guide on hiding Shopify stores for more info.
Option 2: Switch to Pause & Build Plan
In this option, you can pause your Shopify store from taking any orders, but people can still visit your website and explore the products.
This Pause & build plan is perfect if you want to close your store temporarily because of any of the following reasons –
- Seasonal products: If you sell products only during a specific duration of the year, you can pause the store from taking orders during off-seasons.
- Technical Issue: If your store is facing any technical glitch affecting business operations, you can pause your store until the issue is resolved.
The biggest advantage of this option is that your store will still be crawled and indexed by search engines. So, you may keep your rankings on SERPs and continue generating sales once the store is live.
If you want to go ahead with this option, here’s how you can do it –
- Log into your store admin as an owner
- Go to Settings > Plan
- Click Deactivate store > Pause and build plan.
- Click Switch to Pause and build.
That’s it – your Shopify plan will now be switched to the Pause and Build plan, which keeps your store running at a lower cost of just $14/month.
If you want to restart your store, you can follow the same steps and switch to one of the regular Shopify plans.