Metaobjects

How do Shopify metaobjects work?

A metaobject starts with a definition: a type name, such as designer, and a set of up to 40 typed fields, such as name, portrait, biography and country. Each record you then create under it is an entry. Entries are edited in the admin under Content > Metaobjects, the same way staff edit products.

Entries become useful when something points to them. The usual link is a metafield of type metaobject reference. A product gets a "Designer" metafield that references one designer entry, and the theme renders the name, portrait and biography from that entry. Change the biography once and every product that references it updates.

Themes can also read entries directly in Liquid, without a product in between, through metaobjects.designer.some-handle or by looping over all entries of a type. Headless storefronts read them through the Storefront API after storefront access is turned on for the definition.

Each definition can switch on capabilities:

• Publishable: entries can be saved as draft or active.
• Translatable: entries can be translated for each market language.
• Renderable: you map fields to an SEO title and meta description.
• Web pages: each active entry gets its own URL and template.

When should you use a metaobject instead of a metafield?

Use a metafield when the value belongs to one record: this product's fabric weight. Use a metaobject when the same content is shared by many records, or when the thing has its own fields and deserves its own page: a designer, an ingredient, a care guide, a showroom, a certification with its own logo and explanation.

A quick test: if you would copy and paste the same block onto more than a few products, it is a metaobject.

Metaobjects are not a replacement for every content need. A one-off landing page is still a page built from sections and blocks. A long editorial program with workflows and many authors may still fit a headless CMS better. Metaobjects sit in the middle: structured content that is close to the catalog.

What are the metaobject limits in 2026?

Shopify raised entry limits in October 2025. Current figures:

• 128 merchant-created definitions on Basic, Grow and Advanced, and 256 on Shopify Plus.
• 40 fields per definition.
• 1,000,000 entries per definition on every plan, up from 64,000 (non-Plus) and 128,000 (Plus).
• 1,024 entries in a single list of metaobject references.
• 64 KB per field value for most types, and 128 KB for JSON.
• In Liquid, a loop returns 50 entries unless you paginate, and pagination returns up to 250 per page. A single page render can look up at most 20 entries of one type by handle.

Standard definitions that Shopify provides, and their entries, don't count toward these limits.

Can metaobjects have their own pages?

Yes. Turn on "Publish entries as web pages" in the definition's options, set a URL handle, and each active entry gets an address like /pages/designers/anna-berg. The theme renders it with a template at templates/metaobject/designer.json, which you edit in the theme editor like any other template.

For SEO, map a field to the page title and another to the meta description. Pages from definitions with the renderable capability are included in the store's sitemap. That makes metaobjects a clean way to publish location pages, designer profiles or ingredient glossaries from structured data, with structured data generated from the same fields. Thin entries with only a name and one sentence still make thin pages, so only publish entries that have enough content to stand on their own.

How do you set up a metaobject?

1. Write down the entity and its fields before opening the admin. Model the thing (a designer), not where it appears (a homepage banner).
2. Go to Settings > Custom data > Metaobjects and add a definition.
3. Add fields with types and validation. Make the first text field the display name.
4. Switch on storefront access, and translation or web pages if you need them.
5. Create a few entries and review them with the content team.
6. Add a metaobject reference metafield to products, collections or pages that should link to it.
7. Connect the fields in the theme editor as dynamic sources, or render them in Liquid.
8. For more than a few dozen entries, import them through the Admin API with metaobjectUpsert or a bulk operation.

What does this look like on a real store?

On Arcline, a US record store that sells soundtracks and Japanese music on vinyl, CD and cassette, we built a custom theme whose mega menu reads from metaobjects. Collectors browse by genre, label and pressing, and the Arcline team adds new genres and sub-collections to the menu as metaobject entries, without touching code.

Metaobjects also come up in most migrations. Repeating content from a Magento or WordPress store, such as custom field groups, usually ends up as metaobjects or metafields on Shopify.

What are the common metaobject mistakes?

• Modeling by page instead of by thing, which creates definitions nobody can reuse.
• Storing an entry's handle as text instead of a reference, so a renamed entry breaks links.
• Using a metaobject for one-off content that should be a page or section setting.
• Forgetting storefront access, so data shows in the admin and is missing on the site.
• Leaving fields without validation, then cleaning inconsistent entries by hand.
• Publishing hundreds of thin entry pages and letting them into the index.

When do you need help with metaobjects?

Creating a definition is admin work. Designing the content model, deciding what is a metafield, what is a metaobject and what stays in a PIM, and moving content in from another system without losing the links between records is development work. Our Shopify development team usually does that modeling in the first weeks of a build, before templates depend on it.