The Home tab has a card called Maintenance Status with a checkbox labelled 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 behaviour.
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, colours, password, and allowlist all stay exactly as they were, so putting the page back up next month costs one tick rather than a rebuild.
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. Your published page is still reachable at
/apps/maintenance, which is deliberate — it stays available for you to check and to share with whoever is doing the work. - 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 whether the page is currently shown to visitors and which template is published.
If your published template has never been customized, a warning appears here telling you visitors are seeing example content — the default heading and message that every install starts with. Fix that before you close the store, not after.
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 left off. The template, the publish, and the theme app embed all sit dormant and your storefront behaves normally.
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.