How Not To Remove The Powered By Shopify Text

If you run a Shopify store then it is likely somewhere in the footer is the text “Powered By Shopify” and you want to remove this. There are multiple ways to do that (and we won’t go into it here), but the unfortunate thing is that the top article when you go a Google search for change powered by shopify text has a major drawback.

In the article, it tells you to change the i18n of the footer to a blank space because then this will load that text string for the shop. This does work great and it’s very simple. The problem is that this is usually a link back to Shopify as well. Why is that a problem? If you care about web accessibility – which you SHOULD – then you will know that it is bad practice to have a link on the page that contains no text or no aria-label attribute.

In my opinion, and in my quest to be better about making an accessible web, I believe this is a big issue. This doesn’t mean that every theme will implement the text that same way, but just be sure to do an accessibility check before you mark the task off as done. It’s pretty easy to do with the WAVE tool add-on for Chrome. It’s a simple thing to check and we can all be better about making the web great for everyone!