Intro to Instant site

Ecwid Instant Site is a website builder offering a wide range of tools and ready-made templates for effortless website creation, tailored for both ecommerce and non-ecommerce purposes.

Developers can enhance the functionality and design of these sites beyond the consumer-level templates provided by Ecwid's designers. Whether it's customizing a merchant's website with unique designs, adding new features, or building apps that extend theme capabilities, Instant Site provides the flexibility to meet diverse development needs.

For more detailed information about Instant Site, refer to the Help Center.

Instant Site editor overview

Merchants can create their website from the Ecwid admin by using Instant Site Editor. It offers settings for managing and rearranging sections, along with their content and design, through an intuitive UI built by Ecwid to make a desirable template.

Instant Site Template is a layout that consists of a set of sections arranged in a specific order that you use as a canvas to build your own unique site. Ecwid provides a variety of free, pre-built templates designed by our team, categorized by business niches. Choosing a template is your first step when creating a website. By default, each template consists of a homepage, store, and navigation menu. Merchants can customize the template by adding their content and images, editing sections, and creating more pages to fit their business.

Instant Site Section is a modular component of the template. Merchants can add, remove, or reorder sections within a template, offering flexibility to customize and extend it. Developers can build a new custom section to incorporate different designs or features like bestseller slides, brand introduction videos, highlighted customer reviews, and many more. A section can work independently of a particular template, making it possible to add one section to different templates.

Custom sections for Instant Site

Using custom sections, developers can add any interactive HTML code and scripts to Instant Site settings. Ecwid provides ready-to-use tools for creating settings and loading them into the section's code. Developers can also add showcase settings to present their sections to merchants better and include store translation support to increase the potential audience. Section settings are described in TypeScript, and the main file uses the Vue framework.

For merchants, we provide a ready-made interface in the Instant Site Editor. There, they can add custom sections, interact with their settings, and see all changes through the live preview of the IS editor without publishing a section on the site. User-defined content includes UI elements like text blocks, buttons, toggles, image uploaders, and design settings for them: color options, font configuration, default states and values, placeholders, etc. While working with content and design settings, users will always have a live-rendered preview of the section.

By combining pre-built and custom Instant Site sections, it is possible to greatly extend storefront functionality while offering extensive customization options.

Guide to start building custom sections →