How the gate appears

Centered popup or fullscreen, what each one shows behind the gate, and why this is a store setting rather than a design setting.

Settings → How the gate appears has one dropdown, Gate layout, with two options.

	Centered popup	Fullscreen
What is behind the gate	Your storefront, dimmed and blurred	A plain white sheet
What the visitor can tell about your store	That it is there, roughly what it looks like	Nothing
Your Background color paints	The card	The whole screen
Can anything underneath be read or bought	No	No

Centered popup is the default. It is what the rest of this category looks like and what a merchant installing an age gate expects to see: their storefront, blurred, behind the question.

Which to choose

Pick Centered popup unless you have a reason not to. A visitor can see they have arrived somewhere real, which reduces the number of people who assume the site is broken and leave.

Pick Fullscreen when nothing at all should be visible before the check — an adult store, or a catalog whose product images are themselves the thing being gated. A blur is a visual effect, not a redaction, and a determined person with browser tools can see through it.

The difference is presentationEither way nothing underneath can be read or bought until they answer. The layer covers the whole window before the page paints, the page behind it does not scroll, and checkout is blocked regardless of what happened to the overlay. The choice is about what shoppers see, not about how strong the gate is.

Why it lives in Settings and not in the editor

Because the layer has to be painted before the gate itself has loaded — that is what stops your storefront flashing into view for a moment on a slow connection — the answer has to be something your theme already holds, rather than something it has to ask us for.

It is also a decision about your store rather than about a design. Switching between the Confirm and Birthdate designs should never quietly change how much of your store a visitor can see, so the layout stays put when the design changes.

The preview

The editor’s live preview shows the layout your storefront will use. In the popup layout it stands your card on a white, dimmed background, because the editor has no storefront to put behind it. On your real store that white is your actual shop, blurred.

Changing it

Pick the other option and save. There is nothing to republish: the setting is pushed to your storefront on its own, and the next visitor to be gated gets the new layout.

It changes nothing about who is asked. Visitors who have already answered stay through; this only decides what the gate looks like for the ones who have not.

Still stuck?

Email [email protected] with your store's .myshopify.com domain and what you were trying to do. Most replies go out within one business day; over a weekend it can take longer.