Caucasian man in apron closing his shop with a closed sign
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Reasons and solutions when your shop is down

When your shop is giving you an error message and you’ve checked the Shopify server status to see whether Shopify is down, there are a few things that might be happening. 

Here are reasons (and most importantly, solutions!) for why your Shopify store is not working.

Before doing anything else after seeing your store is down…

Try loading your store in a different browser in private browsing mode. Shopify stores tend to work best in Google Chrome and multiple errors have been reported by merchants using Internet Explorer. Next, check your Internet connection.

If that’s not the problem, we can troubleshoot some more complex issues. 

  • Unverified domain 

This is the most probable issue you’re facing, if you set up your store recently. The email you’re using for your store may not match that associated with your domain. 

To fix this: verify that you own the domain before Shopify releases it from review, and be sure that you used up-to-date information to set up your store. Next, ensure you have access to your cPanel, and drop a line to Shopify support, keeping all this information to hand.

  • New app install

Just added some apps to help with payments or product updates? Perhaps you recently revamped delivery options with an add-on or connected a marketing automation tool. Run through all the apps you recently installed and try to nail down the first time you saw this error appearing. If you can match the times, consult the app developer directly because they’ll likely have a solution to your problem.

Alternatively, you can do a simple uninstall and reinstall recent apps, but this will likely require reconfiguring your preferences so only recur to this option if all else fails!

Woman upset about Shopify down notification
  • Partial deletion

As you ran through any recent apps you installed, you likely remembered some changes you made such as adding new products or landing pages, perhaps you uploaded an offer or changed a link. In doing so, it’s easy to delete a file or code that your page depends on to function. 

The solution is to restore your shop from a backup. Shopify’s team went through the restore process on this help page.

  • Incompatible themes

If you are using an old theme, this can cause incompatibility issues. Generally, errors that appear within the theme editor (which lead many of those publishing in the Shopify community to think that Shopify’s down or their page is) are caused by 1 of these 3 most common problems for an error when loading the page:

  1. Page redirects to an unsupported URL
  2. Page load failed due to an error
  3. HTML error found

If a theme is the issue, here’s what you can check and fix:

Page redirects to an unsupported URL 

Disabled redirects? Unsupported URLs? In case this sounds like gobbledegook, we’ll explain as simply as possible how you can check and fix this error:

Within your store’s code, you might have redirects. These are links that send someone on another page, for example to their home country if you have different sites for different locations.

If any of those redirects are not functioning correctly, you could see a page error. To avoid this in the future, disable redirects when you visit the theme editor. Use a reference to the window.Shopify.designMode variable in JavaScript. You’ll see this variable set to “true” when the store is loaded in the editor, and “false” when it is not.

For now, to fix unsupported URLs, check your theme and all the apps you’ve installed to make sure that all the URLs link to somewhere. This is tiresome but a likely solution to the problem.

Caucasian man in apron closing his shop with a closed sign

Page load failed due to an error

Since you already verified you’re not having network connection problems, there might be some invalid liquid code in your theme.

Did I lose you while talking about liquid code? Liquid is a template language created by Shopify, which retrieves referenced data from your store — store name, product details, images.

Now, how can you fix this error? Visit your online store’s theme editor and go to Theme Actions, then Preview Theme. If that page doesn’t load, your best bet is to contact Shopify support for help and report the steps you’ve already taken. They will also be able to confirm whether a Shopify down error might have triggered the page load to fail.

HTML error found 

If the warning message you see is, “HTML error found,” there is a syntax error in your theme code. Painstaking as it may be, your solution is to examine the code in the liquid file that the message refers to. 

Shopify wrote an easy breakdown on finding the error in your theme code here, to make sure you don’t miss anything.

All sorted?

Hopefully you’ve found a solution for whatever the reason your Shopify store was down, and some ideas to try for next time. 

Want to keep an eye on Shopify’s server status? Bookmark this Shopify down detector for future use!

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