● Findings · October 2026 · Daniel the Tuner

Shopify will stop loading script tag apps on March 1, 2027: is your store affected, and how to check

Script tags are an old way for apps to put their code on your store. Shopify is phasing them out in two steps, and only one of them has happened yet.

• Already in effect, since October 1, 2026: apps can no longer create or change script tags on the storefront, on any API version. Script tags that already exist keep running.
• Announced, not yet in effect: Shopify has announced that from March 1, 2027 it will stop adding script tags to storefronts at all.

Script tags on the order status page were switched off earlier. This change is about the storefront, the pages your shoppers browse. The details are in Shopify’s developer changelog.

What this means for your store

If an app on your store still loads through a script tag, and its developer hasn’t moved it to the new way by March 1, 2027, the part of the app that shows on your storefront would stop working. A review widget that no longer shows up. A pop-up that never appears. A chat bubble that’s just gone.

The fix is on the app developer’s side, not yours. Shopify’s guidance to developers is to move storefront features to an app embed (part of a theme app extension), and to move scripts that only collect analytics or conversion data to a web pixel. You can’t rewrite how someone else’s app is installed. What you can do is find out which of your apps are affected and ask.

How common is it?

Very. In a sample of about 11,000 Shopify stores, mostly from the top million websites, 72% had at least one script tag from an outside app on their homepage. Among those stores, the typical one had 3, and a quarter had 5 or more. More than half of all the stores had at least one script tag we couldn’t match to a known app, so don’t assume you’ll recognize every name.

These are the kinds of apps we most often saw loading this way:

Share of all 11,074 stores with at least one app of that kind loading through a script tag. A store can be in more than one row.

How to check your own store

The quick way: run our free check. In the apps section of the report, apps that still load through a script tag get their own group, called “Still on the old install method (script tags)”. When we can’t tell which app a script belongs to, we show its domain instead of a name.

The do-it-yourself way: read your page source.

1. Open your store’s homepage and view the page source (Ctrl+U on Windows, Option+Cmd+U on Mac).
2. Search for asyncLoad. Right below it you’ll find a line that starts with var urls = [.
3. Every web address in that list is one script tag. The slashes look like \/ in the source; that’s normal.
4. Look at the domain in each address. It often gives away which app it belongs to.

If you search and there’s no asyncLoad at all, nothing on that page is loading through a script tag.

What to do

1. List the apps that load through a script tag. Use the report or the page source.
2. Check each one for the new way. Has the app had an update? Open Online Store → Themes → Customize and look under App embeds. If the app shows up there, its developer has started moving it.
3. If it doesn’t, ask the developer. Something short works: “Shopify has announced script tags stop loading on March 1, 2027. When will your app move to an app embed?” If the answer is vague, start looking for a replacement while you have time.
4. Uninstall the ones you don’t use anymore. When you uninstall an app, its script tags usually go with it.

One thing that’s easy to mix up

Script tags aren’t the only way app code ends up on your store. Some apps, setup guides and developers paste code straight into the theme files. That code isn’t affected by this change at all. It keeps loading after March 1, 2027, and it keeps loading even after you uninstall the app. If that’s what you’re cleaning up, see how to find leftover app code on Shopify.

Don’t expect a faster store from this

Moving an app from a script tag to an app embed changes how its code gets onto the page, not how much code there is. The app can load just as many scripts, just as heavy, after the switch. So treat this as keeping things working, not as a speed upgrade.

How we got these numbers

In October 2026 we fetched the public homepage of 11,074 Shopify stores and ran Google PageSpeed Insights on each, the same sample as our Shopify speed statistics. Most of the stores (87%) are a random sample of Shopify stores among the world’s top million websites; the rest come from a list of brands, theme demo stores, and newer stores from the Shopify community. We read the script tag list from each homepage’s source, keeping up to 15 addresses per store, and counted an address as an outside app’s unless it was on a Shopify domain or the store’s own domain. Apps were identified with the same rules as our free check. We only looked at homepages, and we don’t name any of the stores or apps.