Maintenance Mode: How to Close Your Shopify Store Temporarily

In the process of introducing critical changes, as well as updates to the Shopify online store, the best solution would be to close it to public visitors. This can happen with sellers of unique products, for example, their own copyrighted products. This need may last for several months.

There are various reasons why people might temporarily close their online store. If it becomes necessary to test your site, plan to make more ads, or decide to go on vacation, closing your Shopify store for a while will be helpful. If you have any difficulties, use our service – Shopify maintenance by Make be Cool.

At the moment, Shopify does not have a vacation or maintenance mode, so the best way out of this situation is to protect the store using a password. We will talk about how to prevent visitors from entering for a while.

We Protect Access to the Store with a Password So That You Cannot View the Content

When we establish access only with a password, without knowing it, we will not be able to:

• get access;

• view products and collections;

• make orders.

When someone visits a Shopify site, they are presented with a password-protected page, along with a message stating the reason why access is not available.The error is usually find on this site, that affects the users’s experience.

How to Set a Password

On the administration panel, click the “Online Store” button, and then “Settings”. Then go to the “Password Protection” section. After that, click “Enable Password” and enter the combination that will be used. You need to be careful not to use the same password that is used to log into Shopify. For the message to be displayed on a password-protected page, you need to enter its content, if you do not do this, the field will be empty, and visitors will not know what caused the access restriction. If you have done so, click “Save”.

How to Remove Password Protection from an Online Store

When you have completed the planned work, you want the store to work again, as usual, you will need to remove the protection, providing access to the content on the site.

This can be done as follows. In the administration panel, click again “Online store”, and then “Settings”. After that, scroll down to the “Password protection” section, then uncheck the “Enable password” and “Save” boxes. Now the resource will work as usual and without access restrictions.

What Other Options Could There be

But it is not recommended to restrict visitors’ access to the online store for a long time, otherwise, the buyers may buy from another, and you will lose profit. It is recommended to do this for no more than a few months.

Restricting access will allow you to keep product items, but customers will not be able to temporarily order them, because after a break, perhaps nothing in the assortment will change. You can also hide product items from being shown in catalogs. This is to prevent people from unnecessarily clicking on product pages when navigating from internal keyword searches. You can also mark products as out of stock. In this case, visitors will be able to freely visit the resource, but will not be able to place orders.

Unlike completely hiding product pages, this helps to increase their lifespan, since the search robot will continue to visit them to index them. Of course, he will see that there are no updates for a long time and will lower their weight in indexing, but when you return to the full functioning of the online store, the next indexing of the “old” page will place it significantly higher than the same, but recently created.

If the site also has pages without product content, such as articles, a blog, which are highly optimized and capable of attracting good traffic, it may not be worth losing passive income on traffic and leaving them open. For the period of the break, you can make a side column in the design of such pages for targeted advertising corresponding to the topic of the page. They are easy to set up and every online store owner can handle the job. In this way, you will not be able to completely stop the resource’s performance.

We will help you resolve the issue with Magento to Shopify data migration and provide clients with professional advice.

• Next, you can consider reading: The Beginner’s Guide to Ecommerce Shipping and Fulfillment