Why JSON-LD for SEO doesn't remove its code when you uninstall, and why that's good for you

UPDATE: This article only applies to customers who installed the app prior to January 2022.

A potential customer for JSON-LD for SEO emailed me a question about uninstalling the Shopify app and I realized that I never wrote about the app’s uninstall behavior or my reasons behind it.

Also, if we end up removing your app will it remove all code that was loaded?

When you install JSON-LD for SEO the app will add a single line of code to your theme’s layout and a snippet of the code used to create the structured data.

If you uninstall, it won’t remove that code for two reasons:

1. Since JSON-LD for SEO is a one-time charge, the way I see it is that you’ve purchased a license to use the code for as long as your store is active.

If you decide to uninstall, you don’t lose that license and you can keep using the version that you last had. That way you can continue to benefit from the app even if you don’t have it actively installed and updated.

The alternative is to remove JSON-LD for SEO’s snippet or to make it invalid when you uninstall. This would then put your Rich Results at risk and could cause your store to lose all of them once Google detects the missing structured data. I know a couple of competitors that do this and their customers don’t realize that they are sitting on a ticking time bomb.

That doesn’t feel right to me.

2. The second reason why the app doesn’t remove the code is because when you uninstall any app, Shopify blocks the app from doing anything else to your store. So after uninstalling, we wouldn’t have permission to do anything.

App developers have been asking for Shopify for years to give them a way to run cleanup code after the app is uninstalled but sadly, there hasn’t been any progress towards that.

Today would be a good day to Install JSON-LD for SEO if you haven’t yet.