Closing and reopening your store

The Home tab has a card called Maintenance Status with a checkbox labeled Show the maintenance page to visitors. That is the switch.

Ticked — visitors see your maintenance page.
Unticked — visitors go straight to your normal storefront.

The change takes effect immediately. There is no save button and no delay; the next visitor gets the new behavior.

It starts ticked. A fresh install has the box already on, so your store closes as soon as a template is published and the theme app embed is saved. To get everything ready without closing, see Doing it in advance, below.

Reopening

Untick the box. That is the whole procedure, and it is deliberately the same one motion as closing — reopening is the anxious moment, and it should not be a checklist.

Nothing is deleted. Your template, colors, password, and allowlist all stay exactly as they were, so putting the page back up next month costs one tick rather than a rebuild.

Set it up once, use it repeatedlyStores that do this regularly — a monthly inventory run, seasonal closures, a theme refresh every quarter — leave the app installed and just flip this toggle. On the Free plan that costs nothing at all between uses.

What the toggle does not do

It does not cancel your subscription. If you are on Standard you are still billed while the app is installed. To stop being charged, either move to the Free plan or uninstall.
It does not unpublish your template. It stays published, ready for the next time you tick the box. While the box is unticked, a visit to /apps/maintenance is sent on to your storefront — use Preview Live to look at the page then.
It does not affect the app embed. The embed stays enabled in your theme, ready for the next time you tick the box.
It does not override Shopify’s own password page. If that is on, unticking this will not make your storefront public. See Disabling Shopify’s password protection.

The status card

Above the toggle, the Home tab shows which template is published. Active there means a template is published, not that visitors are seeing it — the checkbox decides that. Preview Live opens the published page in a new window, as a visitor would see it, whether or not the box is ticked.

The default heading and message every install starts with are a finished page, so there is no warning about publishing them as they are. Whether to say something more specific than “we’ll be back soon” is your call — see the template editor.

Scheduling

There is no built-in scheduler. The toggle is manual in both directions, on purpose: maintenance windows move, and a store that reopens itself while the work is still running is worse than one that reopens a few minutes late.

If you need visitors to see the right thing at an exact moment, set a countdown to that moment. The timer handles the explaining; you handle the tick box.

Doing it in advance

You can complete every setup step with the toggle off — but it starts ticked, so untick it before you publish a template or save the theme app embed. With it unticked, the template, the publish, and the theme app embed all sit dormant and your storefront behaves normally. Leaving the app embed off until you are ready does the same job, at the cost of a trip to the theme editor when the moment comes.

That turns closing the store into a single click at the moment you need it — which is usually a moment when you would rather not be reading documentation. See Setting up your maintenance page.