One of the first challenges in preparing for a theme change is preserving your store’s design and functionality while limiting development costs. With Stencil themes, there are several options for accomplishing your customization goals while maintaining your budget.
Customization versus Cost
The main contributing factors to your upgrade costs are the extent of the customizations to your new theme and how you implement those customizations. In general, code-level customizations are more difficult and require developer work, whereas design updates, such as those that can be accomplished in Page Builder, can be done without code knowledge and at no additional cost.
Although the prospect of paying to adapt existing code customizations can be daunting, the suite of tools available to developers in Stencil makes the process easier, and therefore less expensive than continuing to patch a Blueprint theme.
What’s more, the Stencil command line interface (CLI) allows developers to design and preview your new theme without any need for downtime on your live store. This is in contrast to Blueprint, which requires you to take your store down for maintenance in order to hide unfinished customizations from your customers.
Changing themes on an Enterprise plan store? You can request one free sandbox store to observe and test your customizations on a live storefront without affecting your transacting store. Contact our technical support team to learn more.
We have outlined below three basic customization strategies, with their benefits and limitations. Keep in mind that you can combine or omit elements from these strategies to create your ideal theme upgrade experience.
Free Theme Only
The free option involves selecting one of the free themes from the theme marketplace and relying solely on Page Builder to customize your storefront appearance.
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Paid Theme with Apps
If you’re able to invest a little more in your store’s look and feel, you can take advantage of the additional features and style elements of a paid premium theme, as well as leveraging apps from our App Marketplace, to provide additional design functionality. You can still use Page Builder to make additional customizations without the costs associated with a developer.
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Customized Theme
Unlike the other two options, the high-cost plan involves enlisting a developer to make customizations directly to your theme files. While this customization plan is the most expensive, it also provides the most flexibility in designing your ideal storefront.
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Choosing a Theme
The BigCommerce theme marketplace offers professionally designed themes suitable for any business style and catalog size. The search bar, as well as the filters under Collections and Industries, allows you to browse for themes with specific features.
All BigCommerce themes come with access to Page Builder widgets, regular feature updates, and the ability to manage the colors and fonts in your storefront. Many premium themes provide advanced customization options that can help you save on development costs, such as:
- Configurable navigation layout
- Advanced text and image styling
- Panels for popular categories or recent blog posts
- B2B options like restricting purchases to login and minimum order values
- Pop-up windows for newsletters or marketing
- Homepage Instagram feeds
When viewing a theme in the marketplace, scroll down to the Features and Optimized For lists to see its capabilities and preferences. You can also Preview the theme and its settings in your store, or view a demo store with the theme applied.
In the next chapter, we’ll discuss the recommended preparations for transitioning to your new Stencil theme.
