Troubleshooting: my popup isn't showing

You built a popup, but it never appears on your live store. This is almost always a setup or targeting issue, not a bug. This guide walks you through the common causes in the order you should check them, starting with the one that catches most merchants.

Before you start

Two settings work together to control whether a popup serves at all, and they are easy to confuse:

Status (draft, live, or paused) decides whether the popup is served to your store. Only live popups show.
Publishing (the Publish changes button in the editor) decides whether your latest design edits reach the live version. A popup can be live but still show an old design because newer edits are not published yet.

Keep both in mind as you work through the steps below.

1. Turn on the SupaPop app embed in your theme

This is the most common cause. Your popups will not display until the SupaPop app embed is enabled in your theme. A popup can be live, published, and correctly targeted, and still show nothing if the embed is off.

In your SupaPop dashboard, look for the yellow warning banner that says your popup won’t display until you enable the SupaPop app embed. Click Enable in Theme Editor.
In the Shopify theme editor, open the App embeds panel.
Toggle SupaPop Popup on.
Click Save.

The banner only appears when SupaPop can detect that the embed is off. Detection can sometimes fail quietly, so the banner not showing does not prove the embed is on. If your popup still isn’t showing, open the theme editor and confirm SupaPop Popup is toggled on under App embeds yourself.

New popups are created as draft and never show on your store until you set them live. Editing and saving a popup in the editor does not make it live.

On a popup’s detail page, click Go live. The button changes to Pause once the popup is live.
On the Popups list, use the Go live button next to the popup.

If the button says Pause, the popup is already live.

3. Publish your latest design edits

If the popup is live but shows an old design (or nothing you expect), your newest edits may still be unpublished.

Open the popup in the editor.
Look for the Unpublished changes badge in the toolbar. If it’s there, you have saved edits that visitors can’t see yet.
Click Publish changes. You’ll see a Published to storefront confirmation.

4. Check your targeting rules

Targeting controls where, when, and to whom your popup shows. A small mismatch can hide it completely.

On the detail page, a Showing on all pages badge means there are no page restrictions. If you don’t see that badge, the popup is limited to specific pages. Click Configure targeting rules to review them.
Page rules use patterns matched against the page path. Use * for all pages, / for the homepage only, /collections/* for all collection pages, or /products/* for all product pages. A pattern like /collections without the /* will silently exclude those pages.
Show popup after defaults to 3 seconds for new popups. The popup waits before appearing, so if you load a page and leave right away, you may not see it. Options range from Immediately up to 60 seconds.
Visitor type can limit the popup to new or returning visitors only. If it’s set to one of those, you only see the popup when you match.

Some popups are never meant to appear as a store overlay:

Standalone (quiz) popups live at their own URL and do not appear as an overlay, even when live. The detail page shows an info banner explaining this. Share the link to send visitors to it. To make it appear as an overlay instead, open the editor and change the display mode under Container settings.
Post-purchase popups only show on the Shopify thank-you page, not on your store. They need the block placed in the Checkout Editor, which is a separate setup step.

Tips

Only one popup shows per page. When several live popups match the same pages, the oldest one (the one you created first) wins. A brand-new live popup can seem broken when an older live popup is being chosen ahead of it. Pause the older one to test the new one.
Preview ignores most gates, but not all of them. The Preview button forces the popup to show regardless of its status, its suppression settings, and its show timing (it skips the delay, scroll-depth, and exit-intent triggers and appears immediately), and it produces no real analytics. Preview does still respect page rules and visitor type, and it always opens your storefront homepage. So if your popup is restricted to specific pages that exclude the homepage, or to a visitor type you don’t match, it can be hidden in Preview too. When a popup shows in Preview but not on your live store, the usual cause is that the popup is draft or paused, the embed is off, your design isn’t published, or a show delay (or a scroll/exit trigger) hasn’t fired yet. It is rarely a rendering problem.
Test on a fresh browser. If your Settings page has Don’t show the popup to visitors who are already subscribed checked, a visitor who already submitted that popup won’t see it again for a while. If you submitted the popup once in your own browser, you’ll wrongly think it’s broken. Clear your browser data or use a different browser to test again.

Troubleshooting

It shows in Preview but not on my live store. Work through steps 2, 1, and 3 in that order: confirm the popup is live, the app embed is on, and your design is published. Then check step 4: if you’ve set a Show popup after delay or a scroll/exit trigger, the popup waits before appearing on the live page even though Preview shows it instantly.

My new popup never appears, but an older one does. Only one popup shows per page, and the oldest matching live popup wins. Pause the older popup, or narrow its page rules so they don’t overlap.

I submitted the form once and now it won’t reappear. With the already-subscribed setting on, the popup is suppressed for visitors who already submitted it. Test in a fresh browser or a private window.

The popup loads slowly, then I leave before it appears. The default delay is 3 seconds. Set Show popup after to Immediately if you want it to appear right away.