Open the Shopify App Store for almost any small storefront job — a trust badge row, a sticky add-to-cart button, a free shipping bar — and you'll find a dozen apps charging $5 to $20 a month each. Install six of them and you're paying more for widgets than for Shopify itself, and every one adds its own script to every page.
Most of those jobs are twenty lines of Liquid and CSS. This roundup collects fifteen tweaks you can paste into any Online Store 2.0 theme yourself, grouped by what they do for the store. Every one links to a snippet page with the complete code and an install guide; ten are free, five are $5 one-off (no subscription). If you want the reasoning behind each one, the longer tutorials are linked too.
Prefer to browse? All fifteen live in the snippet library with one-click copy and difficulty ratings.
Open the snippet library →Before you paste anything: four rules
These keep a ten-minute job from becoming a Saturday.
- Work on a copy of your theme. Online Store → Themes → the three dots on your live theme → Duplicate. Do the edit there, preview it, then publish. If anything looks wrong you've lost nothing.
- Put code in its own snippet file. Create
snippets/plynthr-whatever.liquidand render it with one line ({% render 'plynthr-whatever' %}) from the section that needs it. When the theme updates, you re-add one line, not fifty. - Add one thing at a time. Paste, preview on a phone, then move to the next. If two tweaks fight over the same element you'll know which one did it.
- Check speed once at the end. None of these load external scripts, but run your store through a speed check after you're done so you have a baseline. The free store audit does this in about a minute.
Conversion: the product page and cart
These are the ones that move revenue, so they come first. All five sit on or near the Add to Cart button.
1. Trust badge row Free
A row of the payment icons you actually accept — Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Afterpay — directly under Add to Cart. Inline SVG, so no image files and no blur on retina screens. This is the single most-requested thing merchants pay an app for, and it's the easiest to do yourself.
Get the trust badge row snippet → · Guide: Shopify trust badges without an app · Icons only: free copy-paste payment icons
2. Sticky add-to-cart bar $5
On a long product page the buy button scrolls out of view after the first screen. A sticky bar slides in with the product name, price, variant picker and an Add to Cart button, and disappears again when the real button is visible. It watches the real button, so the bar only appears when that button is actually off-screen — no fixed pixel offsets to tune per theme.
Get the sticky add-to-cart snippet → · Guide: how to add a sticky add-to-cart bar
3. Free shipping progress bar Free
"Spend $23 more for free shipping" with a bar that fills as the cart grows, updating live as items are added. The best average-order-value nudge there is, and one of the few that shoppers genuinely like.
Get the free shipping bar snippet → · Guide: free shipping progress bar tutorial
4. Stock countdown $5
"Only 3 left" pulled from your real inventory, with a progress bar and thresholds you set, and it re-checks when the variant changes. The word real matters: fake scarcity is easy to spot and damages trust. This reads your real inventory levels, so it only ever shows what's true — and it hides itself when stock is above your threshold.
Get the stock countdown snippet →
5. Size chart modal $5
A "Size guide" link next to the variant picker that opens an accessible popup, with a CM / inches toggle and a chart per product via metafields. Fewer wrong-size returns is worth more than most conversion tweaks.
Get the size chart modal snippet →
6. Recently viewed products $5
A carousel of the last products the shopper looked at, stored in localStorage so it works without an account and without touching your database. Pulls live prices and images, so nothing goes stale.
Get the recently viewed products snippet →
Navigation and browsing
Small quality-of-life fixes that make a store feel finished.
7. Mega menu with images $5
Your existing Shopify navigation, rendered as a full-width panel with collection images, cards and a promo banner. It reads the menu you already built in Navigation, so there's nothing to maintain twice. Keyboard-accessible with ARIA, and it slides up as a bottom sheet on mobile.
8. Back to top button Free
Appears after the shopper scrolls a screen or two, smooth-scrolls to the top. Ten lines. On long collection pages on a phone it's the difference between browsing and giving up.
9. Scroll progress indicator Free
A thin bar across the top of the page that fills as you scroll. Mostly for blog and long-form product pages; zero dependencies and about 15 lines of CSS and JS.
Get the scroll progress snippet →
10. Collection product count Free
"128 products" under the collection title. Literally one line of Liquid ({{ collection.products_count }}) plus a little styling — it's in the list because people still install an app for it.
Get the product count snippet →
11. SKU display Free
Shows the SKU on the product page and updates it when the variant changes. Useful for wholesale-adjacent stores where customers order by code, and for anyone whose support inbox keeps asking "which one is this?"
Promotion and compliance
12. Announcement bar with countdown Free
A top bar with a live countdown to the end of a sale, dismissible, and it remembers the dismissal so it doesn't nag. Set the end date once in theme settings. Most themes have a static announcement bar; this is the one with a clock.
Get the announcement bar snippet → · Guide: announcement bar with countdown timer
13. Cookie consent banner Free
Accept / decline banner that remembers the choice. If you sell into the EU or UK you need one; the free version here is a plain banner and doesn't block scripts on its own, so pair it with Shopify's built-in customer privacy settings for actual consent gating. The guide covers when the built-in tools are enough.
Get the cookie banner snippet → · Guide: cookie consent banner for Shopify
14. Social share buttons Free
Facebook, X, Pinterest and email share links with pure-CSS icons. The important part is what it doesn't do: no third-party share script, so no tracking pixel riding along and nothing slowing the page.
Get the social share snippet →
Branding
15. Custom favicon Free
Most themes only take a single PNG favicon. This snippet handles SVG, PNG and ICO with automatic fallbacks, plus the Apple touch icon, driven from theme settings so you upload once. Small, but it's the thing that shows in every browser tab and bookmark.
Get the custom favicon snippet →
When you genuinely do need an app
"No app" is the right default for anything that's just markup and a little JavaScript. It stops being the right answer when the job needs data that doesn't live in your theme, or has to keep changing after you've finished.
The clearest example is a store locator. A map of your stockists needs geocoded addresses, search-by-postcode, and a way to add and remove locations without editing code. You can build a static "where to buy" page by hand — here's how — but past about ten locations it's an app job. Adding a Shopify store locator walks through the options, and Stockist Map Sync is the one I built for it (free up to 10 locations, no Google Maps API key required).
The same logic applies to reviews, subscriptions, and anything involving payments: if it needs a database and an admin screen, pay for the app and put your time elsewhere.
Want your whole store dialled in?
Snippets fix one thing at a time. Want your whole Shopify store audited and tuned — speed, SEO, conversion? Get a free audit in about 60 seconds, or work with me directly.
Run your free store audit →Frequently asked questions
Is it safe to add code to my Shopify theme?
Yes, if you work on a duplicate of the theme and preview before publishing. Theme code can't touch orders, payments or customer data — the worst case is a layout glitch, which you fix by removing the snippet or switching back to the original theme. Shopify keeps your previous theme versions too.
Will these break when my theme updates?
Shopify theme updates replace the theme files, so anything you added to them is lost. That's why each snippet lives in its own file in the snippets/ folder and is called with a single render line: after an update you copy the file across and re-add the one line. Keep a note of where each line went.
Do these work with Dawn and other free Shopify themes?
All fifteen are written for Online Store 2.0 themes, which includes Dawn and every theme Shopify has published since 2021. Older "vintage" themes usually work with minor selector changes; each snippet page notes the theme-specific bits.
Are code snippets faster than apps?
Almost always. An app typically injects a script from its own server on every page, whether or not the feature is used there. A snippet is a few kilobytes inside your theme, served by Shopify's CDN with everything else. Replacing five widget apps with snippets commonly removes 200–500 KB of JavaScript.
Why are some snippets $5?
The five paid ones are bigger builds — a mega menu, a sticky cart bar, a size chart with metafields — that took days to make and come with a longer install guide. It's a one-off purchase, not a subscription, and you own the code. The other ten are free with no sign-up.
What if I get stuck installing one?
Each snippet page has an install guide and a FAQ for its common theme differences. If you're still stuck, get in touch — and if you'd rather have the whole theme looked at, that's what consulting is for.
