How to remove a Shopify app without leaving its code behind

What uninstalling removes, and what it leaves

Uninstalling an app from Settings, Apps removes it from your admin and cancels its future recurring charges, though the current billing cycle may still be charged. Anything that depended on the app stops working, some apps keep data you cannot get back afterwards, and charges an app bills outside Shopify are not cancelled by uninstalling (Shopify Help Center: Uninstalling apps (opens in a new tab)).

What it does not always remove is code in your theme. Shopify says so directly: some apps add code to your online store theme that is not removed automatically when you uninstall the app, so check the app's listing or ask its developer about extra steps first. Its performance guidance repeats the point: uninstalling an app does not automatically remove its code from your theme (Shopify Help Center: Improving your online store performance (opens in a new tab)).

Which apps leave code behind depends on how they were built. Apps can add app blocks, add app embeds, or inject code straight into your theme files (Shopify Help Center: Extend your theme with apps (opens in a new tab)). Apps built on theme app extensions use the first two, and Shopify describes them as not editing theme code (shopify.dev: About theme app extensions (opens in a new tab)). Shopify's App Store rules now say that an app which modifies a theme must use theme app extensions, not direct code changes (shopify.dev: App Store requirements, section 5.1 (opens in a new tab)).

So leftovers tend to come from three places: older apps that wrote into theme files, apps from outside the App Store, and code someone pasted into the theme by hand while following an app's setup instructions, such as a review widget or a tracking snippet. The last kind is the easiest to forget, because no app ever owned it.

Where leftover code hides

Most leftovers sit in a handful of places. Search for them in the code editor's search panel, which looks through every theme file at once and can include or exclude folders (Shopify Help Center: Editing theme code (opens in a new tab)). Search for the app's name, the web address its scripts load from, and any snippet name its setup instructions told you to add.

You can also look from the outside. Open a page of your store, view its source in the browser and search for the same names: if the app's script still appears, it is still loading for every visitor to that page.

Clean up on a duplicate theme

Before you uninstall, export any data the app holds that you want to keep, and check the app's listing or ask its developer (Settings, Apps, Get support) whether it has its own removal steps. Note which pages the app touched, so you know what to test afterwards.

Switch off the app's embeds and take out its app blocks in the theme editor, then uninstall the app from Settings, Apps.

Duplicate your published theme and do everything else in the copy. In the copy's code editor, search all files for the app's name, its web address and its snippet names. Remove the lines that render the app's snippets before you delete the snippet files, so no page is left calling a file that no longer exists. Then remove the app's asset files once nothing refers to them. Deleted theme files cannot be recovered (Shopify Help Center: Editing theme code (opens in a new tab)), which is the reason this happens in a copy.

Check Customer events for a custom pixel that was added for the app. Pixels can come from apps or be added by hand in the pixels manager (Shopify Help Center: Pixels and customer events (opens in a new tab)), and one added by hand is yours to remove.

Preview the copy on a phone: the pages the app touched, a product page and the cart. Look for blank spaces or error text where the app used to appear. When it is clean, publish the copy. The theme that was live moves to your draft themes with nothing lost (Shopify Help Center: Publishing themes (opens in a new tab)), so you have a way back.

If you would rather not edit theme code yourself, hire a Shopify developer to do the clean-up on a copy and show you the result before it is published.

Check speed before and after

Note where you start before you remove anything. Shopify's web performance reports show how real visitors experience your store on loading speed, interactivity and visual stability, and they mark app installs, theme updates and new code on their timeline. The data can be delayed by up to 36 hours and covers only the last 90 days (opens in a new tab), so write down the day you publish the cleaned theme and compare the weeks either side of it.

For a same-day check, run Google's PageSpeed Insights on the same few pages before and after, on mobile: the home page, a collection and a product. Shopify's own guidance points to it for more detailed metrics (Shopify Help Center: Improving your online store performance (opens in a new tab)). Test results move from run to run, so compare several runs of the same pages rather than a single score.

Expect the difference to match what was removed. A leftover line that loads nothing changes nothing; a script that ran on every page can matter. Shopify names installed apps and third-party code added to the store among the biggest factors in web performance, and says slow responses to taps and clicks most often come from too much JavaScript from the theme, apps or third parties.

If the store is still slow after the clean-up, the cause is elsewhere: images, the number of sections, or the theme itself. The Shopify speed and conversion sprint works through those, and if the theme itself has to go, Shopify store setup, redesigns and builds covers replacing it. For an outside view first, the free Shopify store review shows how much loads on your home page and which apps are visible from outside, with no login and no app to install.

Questions about removing app code from Shopify