How to schedule a homepage banner

A homepage banner is a hero slide on your live Shopify homepage, built and scheduled from the Home Page Banner section of a task. It sits with the campaign it promotes, so the launch graphic and the work behind it live in one place. It is part of What is Store analytics?.

Before you start

You need three things:

• The Change stock, receiving and store settings row in Settings › Permissions. See How to set who can do what.
• A connected Shopify store with theme permissions. If Settings › Integrations shows an amber note about missing permissions on the store, press Re-authorize permissions there. See How to manage integrations, your workspace name and the audit log.
• An unfinished Home Page Banner subtask on the task.

How do you get the section to appear?

Open the campaign task and add a subtask titled Home Page Banner. Leave it unfinished. A Home Page Banner section then appears in the task's detail panel.

Adding subtasks is covered in How to break a task down and put it in order. Whoever picks up the task sees the banner, and ticking the subtask off when the job is done removes the section.

How do you build one?

Click Upload banner photo and pick an image: png, jpeg, webp, gif or avif, up to 25 MB. Click the tile again to replace it.

Then fill in a Title, a Subtitle, and if you want a button, Button text (optional) and Button link (optional). Every banner needs a title, and it needs a photo before it can go live.

How do you schedule it?

Pick a date and time on the Go live row, and on the End row if the banner should come down by itself. Then press Schedule. Each time starts at 09:00 until you change it.

Tideswell puts the banner on your homepage at the go-live time and takes it down at the end time, so nobody has to be at a desk at 6am. The end time must be after the go-live time.

Times are read in your computer's time zone. Check them when you schedule from a different country to the person who briefed you.

How do you save it without a date?

Leave Go live empty and press Save. The button reads Save until you pick a go-live date, then changes to Schedule.

Save the banner once before anything else: Publish now stays greyed out until you have.

How do you publish or take one down now?

Publish now puts the last saved version of the slide on your live homepage straight away. Press Save (or Schedule) after any change, then Publish now. While a banner is live, Take down now removes it.

Both change the storefront your customers see the moment you press them. Check the photo, the text and the link before you press Publish now.

What do the badges mean?

The badge beside Home Page Banner shows where the banner stands:

• Draft: saved, with no go-live date.
• Scheduled: saved with a go-live time, waiting for it.
• Live: on your homepage now.
• Ended: taken down, at its end time or with Take down now.
• Failed: the last publish or take-down did not go through.

Why did a publish fail?

When you press Publish now or Take down now and it does not work, a message says why. A scheduled banner that fails shows only Failed: press Publish now to try again and see the reason.

The most common message is "Couldn't find a homepage banner area." Tideswell adds the slide to the hero slideshow section in your Shopify theme, so the theme needs one. Add a slideshow section to your homepage in Shopify, then publish again.

The other common cause is a store connected without theme permissions. Press Re-authorize permissions in Settings › Integrations, then publish again.