Shopify's Aug 26 script sunset: is your conversion tracking silently broken?

This is the worst kind of breakage: nothing looks wrong. Customers buy, money arrives, the store hums. Meanwhile every ad platform you pay is being starved of the purchase signal it bids with — and smart-bidding algorithms don't pause when the data goes dark, they just get worse, quietly, spending the same budget against wrong numbers.

On 26 August 2026, Shopify sunset legacy script tags on Thank-you and Order-status pages for non-Plus stores — checkout.liquid and Additional Scripts had already been removed for all stores on 28 August 2025.¶

What exactly was removed, and when

Per Shopify's own developer documentation, the retirement happened in stages:

• checkout.liquid for the Information, Shipping and Payment steps: unsupported first (Plus-only feature, removed ahead of the rest).
• 28 August 2025: checkout.liquid and Additional Scripts sunset on the Thank-you and Order-status pages for all stores; script tags sunset for Plus stores.
• 26 August 2026: script tags sunset on Thank-you and Order-status pages for non-Plus stores — the final legacy mechanism, gone.

The replacement is checkout extensibility: tracking now runs through Customer Events (web pixels and app pixels) configured under Settings → Customer events, in a sandbox Shopify controls.

Why it's silent

A removed script doesn't throw an error a merchant would ever see. The Thank-you page renders, the order records, the customer gets their email. The only witnesses are dashboards you check later: Google Ads conversions sagging, Meta Events Manager going quiet on Purchase, GA4 revenue diverging from Shopify's. And because attribution always lags a little, most merchants take days — sometimes weeks — to suspect the tracking rather than the ads.

A store hit by the script sunset loses no orders — it loses the purchase signal, so ad platforms under-report conversions and their bidding algorithms optimise on wrong numbers with the same budget.¶

The 2-minute check

1. Open Shopify Admin → Analytics and note total orders for one full recent day.
2. Open your ad platform (Google Ads conversions, or Meta Events Manager → Purchase events) or GA4 purchases for the same day.
3. Compare. Tracking always loses a little to consent and ad-blockers — but a platform reporting a small fraction of real orders, starting late August, is the sunset signature.

Nightly, Bilby's Money check does the per-step version of this from the network log: it names which platforms fired on view, add-to-cart and begin-checkout, and flags one that fired last night and is silent tonight. Purchase events can't be verified without a real order, so the report prints this two-minute owner check instead.

How to migrate (the supported way)

Everything now lives under Settings → Customer events:

• Google Ads / GA4: install or update the official Google & YouTube channel app — it rebuilds conversion tracking on checkout extensibility and links GA4.
• Meta: the Facebook & Instagram app does the same for the Meta Pixel and Conversions API.
• TikTok, Pinterest, Snap: each platform's official Shopify app.
• Affiliate networks and anything custom: add a custom pixel in Customer events and subscribe to the checkout_completed event — Shopify's Web Pixels API docs cover the event payload.

Then verify with a real test order, end to end. Tag previews lie; a $1 product on a hidden page, purchased for real and refunded after, doesn't.

Frequently asked questions

Keep reading: Free Tracking Health Check · Did a theme update break your checkout? · How Bilby watches your store nightly