Guide

checkout.liquid Ended for Non-Plus Stores: What to Check After 26 August 2026

By gosite Published 16 October 2026

Short answer: Since 26 August 2026, script tags on the Thank you and Order status pages no longer run on Basic, Grow or Advanced stores. If you had conversion tracking, a post-purchase widget or custom code on those pages and didn’t move it, it has stopped working. Your storefront and checkout are fine. The fix is usually a day or two of work.

Plus stores went through the same change on 28 August 2025. The deadline for everyone else has now passed, so the question is no longer whether to prepare. It’s whether anything stopped on your store, and how long it’s been off.

What changed, and when

Shopify phased this out over three years, and each step covered different pages:

August 2024: checkout.liquid stopped working for the Information, Shipping and Payment steps on all plans.
28 August 2025: Plus stores had to move their Thank you and Order status pages to the new checkout. The Additional scripts box in Checkout settings became read-only for every plan.
26 August 2026: Script tags on the Thank you and Order status pages stopped running for non-Plus stores.

That last change is the one that affects most smaller UK stores. Anything that relied on checkout.liquid, Additional scripts or app-injected script tags on those two pages is no longer running.

What stopped working

Nothing shows an error, so most merchants find out from a report rather than from the store itself. These are the usual problems:

Conversion tracking. Google Ads conversion tags, Meta and TikTok pixels, affiliate tracking and custom analytics that fired from the order status page. Your campaigns kept spending after 26 August, but the platforms stopped seeing purchases. Smart bidding has been working from incomplete data since then.

Post-purchase upsells and surveys. Tools that added content to the thank-you page with a script tag instead of a checkout UI extension.

Loyalty and referral prompts. Some older loyalty apps showed their sign-up prompt on the order status page this way.

Custom order status content. Delivery instructions, warranty registration links, or anything else a developer added to that page in Liquid.

How to tell if your store was affected

You can do the first pass yourself in about fifteen minutes.

Compare conversions before and after 26 August. In Google Ads, Meta Ads Manager and GA4, look at purchases reported per day against Shopify’s own order count. A sharp drop from late August while Shopify orders stayed steady means tracking broke.
Place a test order. On the thank-you page, open the browser’s developer tools and check the network tab. If none of your tracking calls appear, they aren’t firing.
Settings → Customer events. Pixels listed here run on the new pages. If your Google, Meta or TikTok tracking isn’t in this list, it most likely relied on the old method.
Settings → Apps and sales channels. Look through analytics, loyalty, survey and upsell apps. Check whether each one has been updated for checkout extensibility. Apps that haven’t been updated since 2024 are the likeliest to have gone quiet.

If the numbers match and your test order shows tracking firing, there’s nothing to do. Plenty of smaller stores never customised the order status page.

How to fix it

What replaces the old code depends on what it did.

Web Pixels handle tracking. Google, Meta, TikTok and GA4 all have Shopify apps that install a pixel under Customer events. For these, the work is mostly setting them up and checking that conversions arrive, with little or no code. Custom tracking can be rebuilt as a custom pixel.

Checkout UI extensions handle anything visible on the page: upsell blocks, surveys, loyalty prompts, custom messages. Many apps now provide these as blocks you add in the checkout editor. Bespoke content needs a small custom extension. These keep working through theme changes and Shopify updates, which the old script tags never did.

Shopify Functions replace Shopify Scripts. That was a separate deprecation for Plus stores: editing stopped on 15 April 2026 and Scripts stopped running on 30 June 2026.

What it costs

For a typical store on Basic, Grow or Advanced with a few tracking pixels and one or two post-purchase widgets, expect half a day to two days of development. At UK contractor rates of £350–£450 a day, that comes to £175–£900.

It costs more when the order status page was doing real work, such as warranty registration, B2B order confirmations, or sending order data to an ERP or fulfilment system. Those need rebuilding as checkout UI extensions or moving to webhooks on the server, and usually cost £3,000–£8,000 depending on complexity.

The order to fix things in

Tracking first. Every day without purchase data affects your ad bidding. It’s also usually the quickest fix.
Check what you lost. You can’t recover conversions that weren’t recorded. Note the date range so you can read your reports correctly and leave it out of performance comparisons.
Visible elements second. A missing upsell costs some margin. Missing conversion data affects every campaign you run.
Test after every change. Place a test order and confirm the purchase appears in Google Ads, Meta and GA4, not just in Shopify.

Frequently asked questions

Does this affect my store if I’m on Shopify Basic? Yes. Basic, Grow and Advanced are all non-Plus plans, and the 26 August 2026 change applied to all of them.

I’m on Shopify Plus. Do I need to do anything? No. Plus stores went through this on 28 August 2025. If your tracking has been reporting correctly since then, you’re done.

Is my checkout broken? No. Your storefront and checkout work as before. The change only affected script tags and checkout.liquid on the Thank you and Order status pages.

My Google Ads conversions dropped at the end of August. Is this why? Very likely, if Shopify orders held steady over the same period. Check whether Google’s tracking is listed under Settings → Customer events. If it isn’t, it was probably running as a script tag and stopped on 26 August.

Can I get the missing conversion data back? Not from the pages themselves. Google Ads and Meta both accept offline conversion uploads, so you can import past orders from a Shopify export to fill some of the gap. It’s worth doing if the gap is large and you rely on smart bidding.

How do I know if I had custom checkout code? Settings → Checkout still shows the old Additional scripts as read-only, so you can see what was there. If a developer built anything post-purchase for you, assume it needs checking.

What’s the difference between a script tag and a Web Pixel? A script tag adds any JavaScript to a page. A Web Pixel runs in a sandbox and receives a defined set of events from Shopify. Shopify dropped script tags on checkout pages mainly for performance and privacy.

Do I need to upgrade to Shopify Plus to fix this? No. Web Pixels and checkout UI extensions work on non-Plus plans. Some deeper checkout customisation is still Plus-only, but none of it is needed here. See our Shopify vs Plus comparison if you’re considering Plus for other reasons.

Does this affect Shopify Scripts too? That was a separate change for Plus stores. Editing stopped on 15 April 2026 and Scripts stopped running on 30 June 2026. Discount, shipping and payment logic now runs as Shopify Functions.

Will my apps fix this automatically? Apps that are still maintained have released versions that work with the new pages, though some need you to add their block in the checkout editor before they show up again. If an app hasn’t been updated in two years, plan to replace it.

Last reviewed October 2026. Dates are from Shopify’s developer documentation and Help Center; check the changelog for anything announced since.

Tracking or post-purchase widgets stopped after 26 August? We audit and rebuild checkout customisation for UK stores, and handle the ongoing maintenance afterwards. Get in touch.