When your homepage is a JavaScript redirect

Your homepage is the page most likely to be fetched first and the one crawlers weigh most heavily. If it contains a script that immediately sends the visitor somewhere else, what a crawler records is a blank document.

Across 10,110 Shopify storefronts we have scanned, 0% fall short on a homepage that is not a JavaScript redirect.

Or read it off your own store. The scan fetches your storefront the way a crawler does and answers this question and seven others about it.

Free, no signup. Takes about ten seconds.

What causes it

Nearly always an app rather than the theme: geolocation redirects sending visitors to a regional storefront, age verification, currency or language gates, and pre-launch splash pages left in place after launch.

Fixing it without losing the behaviour

Use Shopify’s Markets for regional routing rather than a script. It handles country routing at the platform level, so crawlers get real content and shoppers still land in the right place.

Where the gate has to stay — age verification is often a legal requirement — render the real homepage content in the HTML and overlay the gate on top of it, rather than replacing the page with the gate. The content is then served, readable, and still behind the interstitial for humans.

Then confirm with curl -s https://yourstore.com/ | head -c 2000. If what comes back is a script tag and nothing else, the redirect is still the whole page.

If this one passes, this is the one that does not

The answer on this page is that yours is almost certainly fine, and that is true of 100% of the stores we have scanned. Worth saying what is not fine, because it is the same question with a different answer — can an assistant read your store well enough to recommend it:

80% fall short on product structured data, and 18% have none of it at all. That is the one to check. What it is and how to fix it, or run the scan below and it will tell you which of the eight apply to your store.

Checking your own store

The scan below reads your storefront the way a crawler does and reports this check along with the rest. It is free and needs no account.

Free, no signup. Takes about ten seconds.

The other checks

Install Shelfglance on my store

Installs on any Shopify store. The free plan needs no card, and the dashboard runs on sample data if you would rather look first.