How to Create a Landing Page on Shopify Without a Page Builder

Most guides to Shopify landing pages start by telling you to install a page builder. You often don't need one. If your store runs an Online Store 2.0 theme (Dawn and most themes since 2021) or one of Shopify's newer Horizon-family themes, you can build a proper landing page with the tools already in your admin. The page stays native to your theme, loads as fast as the rest of your store, and keeps working if you ever uninstall an app.

Here's the complete process, checked against Shopify's help center as of October 2026.

What makes a landing page different

A landing page is built for one audience and one action. It usually differs from your regular pages in four ways:

• One goal. Buy this product, claim this offer, or join this list. No competing calls to action.
• Message match. It continues the exact promise of the ad, email or post that sent the visitor. If the ad says "rested-looking skin in three weeks," the page opens with that, not your brand tagline.
• Fewer exits. Not in your navigation, and often a slimmer layout.
• Its own measurement. Tagged links, so you can see exactly how that traffic converts.

Step 1: Create the page

1. In your Shopify admin, go to Online Store > Pages.
2. Click Add page.
3. Enter a title. Content can stay empty, because the template will hold the layout.
4. Under Visibility, choose Visible. A hidden page is hidden from your online store entirely, so an ad pointing at it won't work.
5. Click Save.

Shopify doesn't add new pages to your menus automatically. As long as you don't add a link under Online Store > Navigation, the page is reachable only by its URL, which is what you want for a campaign page.

Step 2: Give it its own template

If you design the landing page inside your default page template, you change your About and FAQ pages too. Give it a template of its own:

1. Go to Online Store and click Edit theme.
2. Open the drop-down at the top of the editor, choose Pages, and click Create template.
3. Name it (for example landing), choose the default page template under Based on, and click Create template.

Then assign it: back in Online Store > Pages, open your page, choose landing from the Theme template drop-down in the Online store section, and click Save. Our page template guide covers templates in depth, including bulk assignment and deletion.

Step 3: Build the layout from your theme's sections

In the theme editor, with your new template open, click Add section and build the page top to bottom. What's available depends on your theme. Dawn ships sections including Image banner, Image with text, Multicolumn, Collapsible content, Featured product, Rich text, Video and Custom Liquid. Horizon adds options such as Hero, FAQ, Image compare, Product highlight and Pull quote.

A structure that works for most product-led landing pages:

1. Hero (Image banner or Hero). The ad's promise as the headline, one supporting line, one button.
2. Problem and outcome (Image with text). Why the visitor is here and what changes for them.
3. Proof (Multicolumn or Pull quote). Three short reviews, ratings, or before-and-after results.
4. The offer (Featured product). Price, variants and add to cart on the page itself, with no extra click.
5. Objections (Collapsible content or FAQ). Shipping, returns, ingredients or sizing, and guarantee.
6. Final call to action (Rich text with a button).

Hide any section you don't want with the eye icon. Click Save when you're done.

Keep Shopify's limits in mind: up to 25 sections per template and 50 blocks per section. That's far more than a focused landing page needs.

About removing the header and footer

Shopify's help center is explicit: "your header and footer are shared across all of your online store's pages." Hiding the header in the theme editor hides it on every page, so there's no no-code way to strip it from one landing page.

The developer route is a separate layout file: a copy of layout/theme.liquid without the header and footer section groups. The landing template's layout setting then points at that file. Avoid setting layout to false, which removes the entire <head>, including your theme's styles and Shopify's scripts. For most stores, a normal header with the landing page left out of the menu is enough, and it keeps the brand familiar for visitors who want to look around.

Step 4: Set the URL, search listing, or noindex

Open the page and scroll to Search engine listing preview, then click the pencil icon:

• URL handle. Short and readable, such as /pages/sleep-serum-offer. If you change it later, keep Create a URL redirect checked.
• Page title and meta description. Shopify recommends staying under 70 and 160 characters so they aren't cut off in search results.

Should a landing page be indexed? If it targets a search term and should rank, yes, leave it indexable. If it's an ad-only page, or a near-duplicate of another page, hide it from search engines. Shopify's supported method is the seo.hidden metafield:

1. Go to Settings > Metafields and metaobjects > Pages, and click Add definition.
2. Name it (for example "Hide from search"), set Namespace and key to seo.hidden, choose type Integer with one value, and save.
3. On your landing page, set that field to 1 and save.

Shopify then adds noindex and nofollow tags and removes the page from your sitemap and your store's own search. Use the Integer type. Merchants report that a text-type field drops the page from the sitemap without adding noindex.

Step 5: Send traffic with UTM links

Tag every link you point at the page so Shopify can attribute the traffic. Shopify's campaign documentation uses the standard parameters:

https://yourstore.com/pages/sleep-serum-offer?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid_social&utm_campaign=sleep_serum_oct&utm_content=ugc_video_1

• utm_source: where the traffic comes from (facebook, google, klaviyo)
• utm_medium: the channel (paid_social, cpc, email)
• utm_campaign: the campaign name
• utm_content: which ad or creative, so you can compare them
• utm_term: the paid keyword, for search ads

Keep the values lowercase and consistent so your reports group cleanly.

Step 6: Measure it against your normal pages

A landing page is only better if the numbers say so. Compare its conversion rate and revenue per visitor with the page that traffic used to land on, for the same traffic source. Our Shopify conversion rate benchmarks give context, but your own before-and-after comparison is the number that matters.

When one landing page isn't enough

Dedicated landing pages work because they match one audience. Their weakness is that they only exist where you link to them. The visitor who saw your ad, didn't buy, and comes back two days later through Google search lands on your standard product page, not the landing page built for them. The same goes for returning customers, visitors from organic social, and anyone who navigates past the landing page into the rest of the store.

That's the gap Ariven fills. You build alternate versions of your existing product, collection and home pages with the same theme-editor process described above. Then you set up flows that say which segment sees which version: first-time visitors, a specific ad, returning customers, or a traffic source. Ariven routes each visitor to the version you assigned, on the page's normal URL. It sets the alternate versions to noindex, so they never compete with your canonical pages in search, and measures each one against the original.

In our own randomized A/B test on a founder-owned store, the strongest single flow followed this pattern: a collection landing page for one segment, which raised conversion rate 152% and revenue per visitor 205% on that one flow. Results vary by store and segment.

Sources

• Shopify Help Center: Adding and editing pages, Templates, Customizing sections, Hide a page from search engines, Understanding campaigns
• Shopify.dev: JSON templates, Theme limits, Optimizing storefront SEO
• Shopify theme source code: Dawn and Horizon section presets