Seasonal Campaign Pages on Shopify: Templates or Microsites
For a seasonal campaign on Shopify, such as Black Friday or a holiday gift shop, you rarely need a separate microsite. A seasonal page built on its own theme template, or a copy of your theme with the seasonal look that Rollouts publishes and takes down on a schedule, covers most campaigns inside your existing store. A separate store is worth it only for a genuinely different business, such as a wholesale store or a members-only shop, and on Shopify Plus that is what expansion stores are for.
Four options
| Option | What it is | Good for | Effort |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seasonal page with its own template | A page (or collection) using a custom template built in the theme editor | A gift guide, a campaign landing page for ads | Low |
| Seasonal theme on a schedule | A copy of your theme with the campaign look, published and reverted by Rollouts | A whole-store makeover for a sale period | Medium |
| Landing page app | A page builder app for campaign pages | Teams that build many campaign pages | Medium, plus the app fee |
| Separate store (Plus expansion store) | Another .myshopify.com store in the same Plus organization |
A different audience, catalog or rules | High |
Shopify’s Help Center page on adding themes, read on October 23, 2026, names the second option directly: you can keep “seasonal versions of your published theme” in your theme library. Basic, Grow and Advanced stores hold up to 20 themes, Plus stores up to 100.
Build a seasonal page with its own template
A page template lets one page look different from the others without changing the rest of the store. The steps follow Shopify’s Help Center page on templates, read on October 31, 2026:
- Go to Online Store, click Edit theme, open the Home page drop-down at the top, choose Pages and click Create template. Give it a name and, under Based on, pick the default page template, then click Create template.
- Build the campaign layout in it: a hero with the offer and the end date, the featured collection, a shipping cut-off notice, the FAQ that matters for gifts.
- Under Online Store > Pages, create the campaign page and, in its Online store section, choose the new template in the Theme template drop-down. Templates are assigned there, in the admin, not in the theme editor, and the drop-down lists the templates of your live theme.
- Point ads and emails at the page’s URL, with UTM parameters on every link.
Collections work the same way, with the Theme template drop-down on the collection’s page under Products > Collections: a “Gift guide” collection on its own collection template can carry a banner and a custom intro without touching your other collections. If your team builds many such pages, a page builder app may save time; see landing pages with PageFly. For the home page itself, the design side is in Shopify homepage design.
Before the page goes live, check five things: the offer and its exact end date and time zone, the last order date for delivery before the holiday, the discount that applies (and that it applies only where you mean it to), the page on a phone, and a test order from the page to the end of checkout.
Schedule a seasonal theme
Since March 31, 2026, Shopify’s Rollouts, under Markets > Rollouts on Basic plans and higher, lets you save theme changes to go live at a set date and time, and set an end date so the store reverts after the promotion; Shopify’s Help Center page on rollouts says “A Launch merges your changes into your store permanently”, while an Event publishes them for a set period and then rolls them back; adding an end date to a Launch turns it into an Event. Rollouts don’t work with vintage themes. Running a rollout as an A/B experiment needs the Grow plan or higher. Duplicate your published theme, give the copy the campaign look, and schedule it for the morning the sale starts with the end set for the night it ends. Targeting a specific market with a rollout needs Advanced or Plus.
Scheduling removes the 1 a.m. publishing job and the risk of forgetting to switch back. Preview the scheduled theme from the theme library before the date, and keep the old theme untouched as the fallback.
After the season
A campaign page that stays live with “Ends Sunday!” a month later costs you trust. Shopify’s URL redirect page describes the clean way to retire it: set the seasonal collection’s Online store visibility to Hidden (products can be set to Draft), so its URL returns a 404, and create a redirect from that URL to an active page, such as your main sale collection or the home page. Redirects work only for URLs that return 404 errors, and if you make the collection visible again, Shopify deletes the redirect automatically, so recreate it next year if you hide the collection again.
Keep the template. Next year’s campaign starts from it, with new dates and products. What a store’s 404 page should do for the URLs you miss is in redirects and 404 pages, and more seasonal planning in the running a store hub.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a microsite for Black Friday? A store can usually run Black Friday on its main store with a campaign page or a scheduled seasonal theme. A separate store makes sense only for a different audience or catalog, which on Shopify Plus is the job of expansion stores.
Can I schedule a theme change? Rollouts, under Markets > Rollouts on Basic plans and higher, lets you schedule theme changes for a date and time and set an end date when the store reverts. On Grow and higher it can also test a change against your current theme.
What happens to the page after the sale? Hide the seasonal page or collection so its URL returns a 404, then redirect that URL to an active page. Keep the template for next year.