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How to Remove Shopify Product Reviews Leftover Code from Your Shopify Theme

Shopify retired its free Product Reviews app on May 6, 2024. Any code it left in your theme is now leftover by definition: the app cannot be reinstalled, and its reviews no longer display.

The app added two snippets and a few lines to product templates that read its spr.reviews metafield. Many themes, especially older ones, still carry all of it.

Find Shopify Product Reviews leftovers with Store Health Clean it up manually

What Shopify Product Reviews leaves behind

Across roughly 170 Shopify stores scanned with Store Health, about 1 in 10 still had theme code reading spr.reviews, two years after the app was retired.

Theme files

  • snippets/product-reviews-app__snippet.liquid: The review widget snippet.
  • snippets/product-reviews-app__badge.liquid: The star badge snippet for product cards.
  • sections/product-template.liquid: Older themes read spr.reviews here.
  • snippets/product-additional-content.liquid: Some themes place the reviews block here.

Metafields the theme still reads

These keys are read by theme code, but no data exists for them once the app is gone.

  • spr.reviews in product templates, product sections, and review blocks

Metafields the app stores

Data Shopify Product Reviews may keep in your store after uninstall. It is harmless once no theme code reads it.

  • product: spr.reviews

How to remove Shopify Product Reviews code manually

Check first: Search for spr.reviews. Every place that reads it is dead code since May 2024.

  1. Duplicate your live theme. In Online Store > Themes, choose Duplicate on the live theme and do all of the work below on the copy.
  2. Turn off the app embed, if there is one. In the theme editor, open Theme settings > App embeds and switch off anything from Shopify Product Reviews. Remove any Shopify Product Reviews app blocks from your templates too.
  3. Search the code. Open Edit code and search for spr.reviews, product-reviews-app, shopify-product-reviews. Write down every file that matches.
  4. Remove references before files. Delete the {% render %} and {% include %} lines that load Shopify Product Reviews snippets, and any code that reads the metafields listed above. Start with layout/theme.liquid, then templates, sections, and snippets.
  5. Delete the files. Once nothing renders them, delete the Shopify Product Reviews snippets, sections, and layouts. If you are unsure about a file, leave it for now. An unused file costs nothing.
  6. Test the duplicate. Preview a product page and a collection page, on desktop and mobile. Check the browser console for errors.
  7. Publish and recheck. Publish the cleaned theme during a quiet hour and keep the old one as a backup until you are sure everything works.

Watch out: Before deleting the two product-reviews-app__ snippets, open them. Other review apps such as Judge.me, Stamped, and Growave often write their own widget code into these files. If another app you still use lives there, keep the file and remove only the old Product Reviews code.

Faster: let Store Health find it

Store Health scans your theme, scripts, and metafields in one read-only pass. It shows script tags and renders of missing snippets with their file and line number, and lists metafields your theme reads that hold no data. Nothing is changed in your store.

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FAQ

When did Shopify Product Reviews shut down?

Shopify delisted the app in September 2023 and fully retired it on May 6, 2024. Its reviews can no longer be displayed.

Can I just delete product-reviews-app__snippet.liquid?

Only if no other app uses it. Several review apps write into this file to replace the old widget, so check its contents and search for its render lines first.

What about the spr.reviews product metafields?

Once nothing in the theme reads them, they are inert. If you exported your reviews before the shutdown, you can delete them to tidy up product data.

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