What happens when I turn on a password to my Shopify store?

I spoke to someone recently who needed help with their Shopify store. They had started their site over a year ago and hadn’t made it public for a variety of reasons.

They said that it didn’t look right and they wanted to get more products up before they made it public. I get it! We’ve all been there. I want things to look perfect before I show it to the world.

When I told them the impact of leaving the password on, they were shocked.

So I want to share with you a nugget of advice when your working on your website.

When the password is on, meaning you can only view the website through the password, you’re hiding it from everyone. Makes sense! That's why the password is there in the first place.

What many don’t realize is that requiring a password to view the content, also prevents search engines like Google from looking at your pages. Google doesn’t know your password.

Organic traffic comes from search engines and you’re saying “Nope! I don’t want you to look!”

If it's early stages in your Shopify journey, no one knows you exist yet. It’s not like you’re going to remove the password and magically people are going to find you. This takes time and a lot of work.

If you take away nothing else from this article, take away this. Once you’ve got something on your site that tells people who you are and what you offer, even if it’s not perfect, remove the password.

Make it live! Then continue to improve. As long as people can do basic functionality (eg: contact you or make a simple purchase), make it live!

Search engines will begin to look at what you have and start to index your pages. They will start to show your content in search results, but this can take time.

So if you are working on your site, have basic functionality, and expect to have it ready soon, turn off the password. The exception is if you have a big launch or something. That’s not the majority of folks though.

On the flip side, if you’re going on vacation for 2 weeks and won’t be able to process orders, don’t turn on your password. Turning on the password tells Google, that you’re no longer active and that they shouldn’t share your information in search results.

By turning on your password, you’re resetting your SEO. Don’t do that!

Instead of turning on your password, communicate upfront with your customers that orders are being shipped after X date. Leave your site on and allow the money to keep rolling in while you take the much-needed vacation. Your site will still be there, Google will know you’re still there, and you won’t lose your hard work on SEO.

If your store is public and Google can see it (not password protected) AND you want to make SEO part of your long term strategy, don't forget to make sure your structured data is up to snuff.

Even if your store isn’t 100% ready, adding structured data now will give Google a chance to notice it. Then you can keep working on your store at the same time as Google runs their analysis.

It’s probably a good signal to Google if you’re adding pages and products over time too.

Ready to add structured data to your Shopify store? Want it to be fully automated? Install JSON-LD for SEO and be done in five minutes.