Your Additional Scripts Stopped Firing Today, Now What

Today is 26 August 2026. Script tags on the Thank you and Order status pages are sunset for non-Plus stores, which means anything sitting in your Additional Scripts field has stopped running. Your checkout still works. Orders are still arriving. Nothing on your storefront looks different, and that is precisely the problem, because the thing that broke was your measurement rather than your store.

What actually happened today

Shopify's documentation states it plainly: script tags "were sunset on those pages on August 28, 2025 for Plus stores, and are sunset for non-Plus stores on August 26, 2026."

If you did not upgrade manually, Shopify upgrades the pages for you, and customisations that depended on additional scripts or deprecated app features are removed in that process.

So the code you pasted into that box, whenever you pasted it, is no longer executing. For most stores that box contained conversion tracking, and it was put there years ago by somebody who may no longer work with you.

Why nobody notices for weeks

Every other kind of store breakage announces itself. Checkout errors generate support tickets. A broken theme generates complaints. Slow pages generate abandoned carts you can see.

Broken conversion tracking generates nothing. The customer buys, is happy, and leaves. Your order count in Shopify is correct. Your revenue is correct. The only thing that is wrong is what Google Ads and Meta think they produced, and you will not look at that closely until you review performance at the end of the month.

By then you will have spent several weeks of budget optimising against numbers that stopped being real today.

The fifteen minute check

Do this now rather than scheduling it.

Open Settings, then Checkout, and look at Additional Scripts. If there is code in that box, everything in it stopped running today. Copy the contents into a text file before doing anything else, because you are about to need to know exactly what was in there.

Place a real order. Not a draft order, not a test mode transaction, a genuine order you refund afterwards. Use a product with a distinctive price so it is easy to identify.

Watch the destination, not the source. Open Google Ads and check whether the conversion appears with the correct value and currency. Do the same in Meta Events Manager. The mistake people make is confirming that something fired rather than confirming it arrived with the right numbers attached.

Compare today against a normal day. Look at conversions recorded by hour in your ad platforms and compare against the same hours last week. A clean drop to zero at a specific point today is your answer.

Check the quieter ones. Affiliate postbacks, partner tracking, any custom analytics. These are the ones nobody remembers until an affiliate emails asking why their commissions stopped.

If it did break, what to do this week

The rebuild is not complicated but the order matters.

Start with vendor apps. Google and Meta both ship official Shopify apps that handle the purchase event properly through supported surfaces. If your tracking was a pasted tag from either of them, installing the official app is faster, more reliable and removes the maintenance from you. Do this before writing any code.

Then custom pixels for anything without an app. Settings, Customer events, add a custom pixel. This is where your remaining tags go.

Then verify again with a real order. Not optional. Custom pixels run in what Shopify calls a Lax sandbox, and Shopify states directly that not all pixel functionality works in that sandbox. A tag that worked fine pasted into Additional Scripts can fail silently once it is inside. Shopify also does not support the code you put there, so nobody is checking it for you.

We covered the full rebuild path in more detail in what can and cannot be rebuilt after the deadline, including why the advice to rebuild everything as checkout UI extensions is only partly available to non-Plus stores.

What about the content that was on those pages

Tracking is the urgent part, but some stores also had visible content in that field. Order tracking widgets, referral offers, delivery messaging, upsell blocks.

That content does not become a pixel. It becomes an extension on the Thank you page, using the purchase.thank-you target, which is available on every plan. Or it becomes an app from the App Store that already uses those supported targets, which is usually the faster route.

What it cannot become, on a non-Plus store, is a customisation of the checkout steps themselves. Those are Plus only, and no amount of development changes that.

The thing to fix so this does not repeat

This is the third platform change in three months that failed quietly rather than loudly. Shopify Scripts stopped executing on 30 June. Inventory buckets shifted on 5 August. Additional Scripts stopped today.

The pattern is consistent enough to plan around. Add a tracking verification to whatever you already check before a campaign or a sale. Place one real order, confirm the conversion lands in each ad platform with the right value, refund it. Ten minutes, once a month, plus once before anything expensive.

That single habit would have caught today's change on the day rather than in October. Our audit of six changes that broke things silently covers the others worth testing at the same time.

What to tell your ad platforms while you fix it

One practical step that costs nothing and protects your budget for the next few days.

If conversion tracking is down, your smart bidding strategies are optimising against an incomplete signal, and they will react to it. Target CPA and Target ROAS campaigns interpret missing conversions as poor performance and pull back exactly where you would rather they did not. Left alone for a week, that produces a spend and volume drop you then have to unwind after the tracking is fixed.

While the gap is open, either pause the affected automated bidding strategies or move them to manual for a few days, and note the date range in your account so whoever reviews performance next month knows why the numbers look the way they do. Then annotate the same range in your analytics. Future you, comparing September against August, will otherwise reach a confident and wrong conclusion about what changed.

None of this recovers the attribution, but it stops a measurement problem turning into a spend problem.

Did my checkout break today?

No. Your checkout works and orders continue normally. What stopped is anything that was running from the Additional Scripts field on the Thank you and Order status pages, which for most stores means conversion tracking rather than store functionality.

How do I know if my tracking is broken?

Place a real order and confirm the conversion appears in Google Ads and Meta with the correct value and currency. Then compare conversions by hour today against the same hours last week. A sudden drop to zero at a specific point today is the signal. Do not rely on the tag firing, check that it arrived correctly.

Can I still recover the data I lost?

The orders themselves are safe, since Shopify recorded every one. What is lost is the attribution, meaning which ad or campaign produced each order, for the period between the break and the fix. That cannot be backfilled, which is why the gap being days rather than weeks matters.

What replaces Additional Scripts for Google Ads and Meta?

Their official Shopify apps, which handle the purchase event through supported surfaces. For anything without a vendor app, a custom pixel under Settings, Customer events. Verify either with a real order, because the sandbox custom pixels run in does not support everything that worked in the old field.

I am on Shopify Plus, does this affect me?

Not today. Plus stores went through this on 28 August 2025. If you are on Plus and something still references the old field, it stopped working a year ago and is worth checking anyway.

How long does the rebuild take?

For a store whose Additional Scripts contained only Google and Meta tags, an afternoon, and much of that is waiting to confirm events arrive. For a store with affiliate tracking, custom analytics and visible page content, a few days. The variable is how many separate things were in that box, which is why copying it out is the first step.

Get your tracking checked today

Free check. Email hello@exactwhy.com with subject "Checkout deadline" and paste what was in your Additional Scripts field, with any keys or tokens removed. We respond within 4 hours telling you which items were revenue-critical, which had already stopped working, and what the rebuild actually involves. If it turns out you can handle it yourself this week, we will say so.

Paid rebuild, Rs 25,000 to Rs 1 lakh. We inventory the field, move tracking to supported apps or custom pixels, rebuild any page content as Thank you page extensions, and verify everything against real orders before signing off.

Ongoing Shopify development, Rs 20,000 to Rs 50,000 a month. Including the monthly tracking verification that turns changes like this into a ten minute check instead of a quarter of bad data.

If you have been meaning to deal with this since we first wrote about it three weeks ago, today is the day it stopped being theoretical. The good news is that the fix is small if you start now, and the cost of waiting is entirely measured in attribution you will never get back.