Stencil Vs. Blueprint – Cracking The Secret To Your BigCommerce Store’s Success

21 Jul 2020

Mike Patel

Stencil Vs. Blueprint – Cracking The Secret To Your BigCommerce Store’s Success

Today, a majority of online stores choose to go with a SaaS solution like BigCommerce. Also, B2B businesses prefer BigCommerce as their e-commerce platform because of its

Quick website setup, fast launch
Hassle-free maintenance
Scalable framework

Launched in 2016, Stencil is the latest framework of BigCommerce. It incorporates industry best practices in technology, design standards, and Search Engine Optimization.

And if you haven’t upgraded your store to Stencil, you could be missing out on many benefits of the updated framework.

Stencil Vs. Blueprint

The BigCommerce developers at ioVista have worked with both Blueprint and Stencil on a number of e-commerce websites. Before we present to you the benefits of Stencil, we want to share some of the limitations our developers have experienced while using Blueprint.

Limited Editing

All the development on Blueprint needs to be done within the editor available in the BigCommerce admin account. Unlike modern development tools and applications, the old BigCommerce Blueprint editor hinders the developers’ productivity.

Global Variables

BigCommerce Blueprint has many of the store attributes hidden inside %%GLOBAL%% variables. This causes the store variables to be blocked and inaccessible to developers due to which they can’t access and change their contents; leading to major project roadblocks.

No Local Testing

Blueprint doesn’t allow local testing. All the changes need to be made live on your e-commerce website for testing. This makes it difficult to carry out conversion rate optimization tests, A/B tests and other tests essential for maintaining the efficiency and UX/UI of your website.

BigCommerce Stencil Benefits

Modern Front-End Development Framework

Stencil overcomes limited editing and global variables challenges through the handlebar templating language. It allows developers to make as many changes as they wish. Stencil makes it easier to redesign, develop and edit the site with much less coding.

Another functionality supported by Stencil is the use of CSS preprocessors which enables the developers to write code much faster by writing in abbreviations, then translated and expanded into full code.

CLI to Facilitate Local Testing

Stencil allows developers to use a command line interface for local testing and development; not affecting the live site, unlike Blueprint. It also enables developers to test the store theme with the store data.

Stencil has 160 industry-specific theme variations to find a customizable theme that perfectly suits your store.

Another noteworthy functionality Stencil’s BrowserSync preview that lets developers view any changes they made in real-time on any device. So, the changes to a desktop view can’t come across negatively on mobile devices.

Cornerstone and New Functionalities

BigCommerce comes with its base Stencil theme called Cornerstone which is updated regularly with the latest features and functionalities offered; including Apple Pay and Google AMP support.

Cornerstone’s native AMP compliance accelerates the page speed and offers great website experiences.

What Next?

BigCommerce Stencil will improve the overall storefront experience for you and your customers. Upgrade your BigCommerce site from Blueprint to Stencil without any data loss and other hassles with ioVista.

Feel free to contact us for any questions or if you want to learn more about what your store’s upgrade could look like.

Mike Patel

Mike Patel is a digital marketing enthusiast, innovator and President of a leading Digital and E-commerce Development Agency in Dallas, Texas. Mike holds a BS, Computer Science degree from Wayne State University and is a key player in the E-commerce development and digital marketing industry since 2004. The scope of technology in his extensive experience of more than 15 years ranges from Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce SEO (Search Engine Optimization), PPC (Pay Per Click) management, E-commerce SEO, Google Shopping Ads and more.