How to remove powered by Shopify?

It isn’t just big brands that are reaching out to customers over the world wide web, even your neighbourhood boutique and the grocery store are working on building a digital presence. Platforms like Shopify make it easy for anyone to set up an e-commerce website and promote their products. There’s no fussing with servers and developers, the admin interface is intuitive and easy to understand, it’s customisable and most importantly, it is secure and reliable.

There’s one tiny detail though that may spoil your fun – that little line at the bottom of the page saying “powered by Shopify”. This line usually appears on the Check Out page and the Shopify Logins page if you use a password-protected theme. It might appear on the product pages as well.

“Powered by Shopify” is the brand’s trademark. It is present in all default/ debut themes as a way for the website builder to indicate their copyright. The only purpose of the tagline is to tell website visitors that the site was built on the Shopify platform. Removing it will have no effect on the functioning of your Shopify store.

The good news – you can remove the “Powered by Shopify” tagline just as easily as you built your website.

Why should you remove the Shopify tagline?

You aren’t breaking any rules by removing the tagline. In fact, Shopify itself has openly talked of ways to remove the tagline without letting it affect the website's functioning.

Some people may feel that such a tagline creates confusion in the customer’s mind – is the brand a part of Shopify? Is it a dropshipping site? Removing the tagline eliminates such fears and gives you complete ownership of the site.

For some, removing the tagline is a matter of aesthetics. It gives the website a cleaner look and ensures that all the content visible has a specific function.

Removing the tagline actually opens up a number of opportunities. Before we get into that, let’s look at the two ways you can remove powered by Shopify from your website footer.

Remove “Powered by Shopify” by editing the code

Behind all the beautiful images, the revolving banners, the text sections and everything else that you see on a web page are many lines of code. The code tells computers how the site should be structured and how it should behave. Every line of code has a unique purpose and so, be careful when you edit code. Here’s what you need to do.

Step 1: Go to the Shopify Logins page and access your admin dashboard. Go to Themes and select the theme you have used for your website. You’ll see a drop-down Action menu. Select Edit Code.

Step 2: Scroll down the list of code folders till you reach Sections. With the Sections folder, click on the footer.liquid. You’ll see code appear on the window to the right.

Step 3: Manually searching for the tagline will take too much time. Instead, press the Ctrl and F keys together to open a search window. Type ‘powered-by’. This will highlight instances in the code where this phrase appears.

Step 4: Select the entire line that contains the highlighted text and delete it. It should look something like this:

<small class=””site-footer__copyright-content” site-footer__copyright-content–powered-by”=””>{{ powered_by_link }}</small> 

The number of times this line appears will vary from theme to theme.

Step 5: Click on the Save button and then take a look at how your website looks!

Remove powered by Shopify by using Edit Language

If you’re not confident about editing code and feel you might delete something else by mistake, here’s another way you can Remove the Powered by Shopify tagline.

Step 1: Go to the Shopify Logins page and access your admin dashboard. Select Online stores from the menu on the left sidebar. Now click on Themes. You’ll see the current theme being used on the right window. Choose Edit languages from the Action menu drop-down.

Step 2: Type “Powered by” in the search box. This will show you all the sections where the tagline appears. Again, the number of times it appears may differ depending on the theme you have chosen.

Step 3: To remove the tagline, you can simply select the text and press the space bar key once. You will need to repeat this step for all the sections.

Step 4: Click on the Save button and it’s done.

Customising the space

Now, let’s go a step further. You’ve removed the “Powered by Shopify” tagline and you’ve got a clean web interface. If you want, there are three ways you can use this space creatively.

• Add your own tagline

Instead of having the “Powered by Shopify” tagline on your footer, you can use the space to say something like “Owned by ABC Company”. Instead of pressing the space bar, type this tagline into the section where the tagline appeared when you’re in the Edit Language section.

• Highlight brand policies

First-time website visitors will have a few questions on their minds before they complete a purchase – do you offer free shipping? Are returns permissible? What is the guarantee of your products?

Rather than leave the tagline space in the footer empty, you could use it to answer such FAQs. For example, you could say “Free Shipping and 30-Day Returns”. It’s a small line that goes a long way in building trust.

A Final Word

Whether you’re selling toothbrushes, shoes or T-shirts, Shopify is an easy way to build and customise an eCommerce website. You don’t need any special coding skills. Once you remove the Powered by Shopify tagline, none of your site visitors will know that you used the Shopify website builder to create it.

The option is available on all Shopify themes but if you change the theme for your website, you will need to follow the steps listed above to remove the tag line from the new theme as well. It takes no longer than a few minutes and you’ll have your dream website up and running.

Humans of ecom is a blog space to a community for the E-Commerce Obsessed

Illustration by Julia Gnedin from Ouch!