Shopify Admin Redesign: Search and Notifications Move to the Sidebar

Starting September 15, Shopify began gradually rolling out a revamped admin interface to all merchants: every page has updated colors, fonts, spacing, and icons. There is no toggle for this redesign; merchants will see the new look as soon as they log into the admin.

The most concentrated changes are in the navigation structure. Search, notifications, and the store switcher, which were previously fixed in the top bar, have now all moved to the left sidebar. The sidebar can be collapsed, widening the content area when collapsed, and can be expanded when needed. In the official blog, Principal Product Designer Derek Briggs mentioned that the design team observed that merchants often move back and forth between different areas, especially frequently entering and exiting the settings page. By moving these elements into the sidebar, merchants remain anchored within the entire admin while adjusting settings, without feeling like they have jumped away from the current page.

Merchants with multiple stores will feel the change in the store switcher the most. Previously, it was prominently positioned in the top bar; now it has moved to the sidebar—if managing three or four stores, merchants might instinctively glance at the upper right corner in the first few days.

For example, a standalone site selling outdoor gear might have customer service handling shipments on the Orders page daily, then going to settings to change shipping options, and returning to orders to continue. In the old version, the top bar spanned the page, while the settings page was a separate shell; in the new version, the left sidebar remains visible, shortening the switching path and maintaining context. This change isn’t groundbreaking, but over a day, one can feel a bit less friction.

Sidekick Moved to the Bottom of Every Page

The second major change is Sidekick: the side panel that used to expand from the right has now become a floating chat window at the bottom of every page, which can be opened to ask questions, with longer tasks expanding into a side panel.

The reasoning behind this position change is backed by official numbers: daily conversations with Sidekick increased by 4.8 times from 2025 to 2026. Shopify explains that merchants are increasingly using it as their primary working method, thus transitioning from a “tool that needs to be opened separately” to “something that is always present.”

Looking at the rearranged navigation and the new position of Sidekick together, the intention is clear: the backend information architecture is being reorganized around the AI assistant—the sidebar removes top bar elements to free up space on the page, and the freed space at the bottom of the page is reserved for conversation entry.

Embedded Apps Automatically Get New Styles, Custom Interfaces Do Not

For app developers, the official changelog divides the changes into two categories.

Interfaces built using Admin UI extensions and App Home UI extensions will automatically receive the new styles when the new admin is pushed to the store, with no changes to functionality or a single line of extension code needed. If the app is entirely embedded using extensions, this redesign requires zero workload.

However, if you render the interface yourself in App Home (without using Polaris Web Components), the interface will retain its existing style and will not automatically follow the admin changes. To adopt the new visual style, you must actively migrate to Polaris 2.0. Currently, the release candidate for Polaris Web Components is 1.1, and the RC for 2.0 has been released, featuring the visual style of the new admin. Shopify uses a semantic versioning model for Polaris CDN, where major version upgrades are explicit operations, and merchants will not see the application in a half-new, half-old state.

One issue that has not been clearly addressed by the official team is that the Built for Shopify certification requires visual consistency. Some developers have already asked in forums whether partially migrating to Polaris counts as compliant, and we can only wait for further clarification.

Testing Pitfalls During the Rollout Period

During the gradual rollout, there is a transitional state: the same app may display the new admin in Store A while still showing the old version in Store B. The changelog states, “an app can appear in either the previous or new admin depending on the merchant’s shop.”

When the testing environment and the version seen in customer stores are inconsistent, do not doubt your code; this is an expected state. The official timeline for when the full rollout will be completed has not been announced, and as of writing, my test store has not yet been updated to the new version.

Merchants Are Already Complaining, but This Time It’s More Subtraction Than Addition

There has been a fair amount of negative feedback in the community. Some merchants have posted that the new UI is “really bad,” complaining about strange fonts, excessive blank space on the Orders page, overly saturated colors, and frequent changes to buttons and page structures—implying that the issues are not just with this redesign but with the admin constantly changing.

These complaints are reasonable; the disruption of muscle memory is a real cost. The official design philosophy also makes sense: the design team did not start from scratch but instead traced existing design decisions page by page to see if they still held. Some pages have accumulated decisions over several years, and some patterns have remained because they only solved one problem.

For sellers, there is little to do: spending half a day to re-find commonly used entry points is sufficient. The real decision-makers are the development teams of embedded apps—those using only extensions have nothing to do; those rendering their own App Home are advised to pull down the Polaris 2.0 RC and run it in a test store while the rollout has not yet reached customers, to expose visual adaptation issues in advance.