How Shopify sections bring flexibility and effectiveness to your E-store?
Shopify sections can sound strange to some, yet it is one of the most vital elements for merchants to customize their E-store’s functionality and design. For any Shopify store, it is of crucial importance that your store is organized and easy to function by the customers, especially if you are just starting out and have no regular clients. With the help of Shopify sections, things can be significantly changed for the betterment of both merchants and their customers.
What are Shopify sections?
In an attempt to make Shopify themes more modular and flexible for merchants to customize their shop to fit their preference and intention, Shopify sections, along with the new Theme Editor (an interface tool allowing merchants to change and preview their theme settings in real-time) were introduced in late 2016.
These new features empower merchants to build their theme and have their content customized without having to touch or see any hypnotizing code. Just by choosing, clicking, dragging, and dropping within the Theme Editor, Shopify merchants can now build any pre-made components into several kinds of complex and fully-responsive page layouts.
Shopify provides extremely flexible components that can be made up of anything the user chooses. It can be paragraphs of simple texts to colorful slideshows, image and video galleries, or product lookbooks. The best thing with Shopify sections is that, as they are all carefully designed to fit to develop a cohesive system within the theme, no matter how they are assembled, the final result will and always looks professional.
There are two types of sections:
Static section
A static section is a fixed component that can be customized through the Theme Editor. It is called "static" because its position on the page is locked, thus users can not move it around the place where it has been assigned within a page template.
Dynamic section
Opposite to the static Shopify sections, the dynamic ones can be flexibly added to the Store's home page if your theme has presets defined in their respective {% schema %} tags.
In short, you can think of it the simple way: Dynamic sections are basically a kind of static sections but with one major difference: they can be dynamically added, removed, and arranged through the Theme Editor. This allows the merchant to have absolute control over their Shopify store, from content to layout as not only can they easily add or configure sections they want, but they can also do the same with any blocks contained within those sections.
What sections are used for?
You can control the Home page sections under the Sales Channels > Online Store > Themes > Customize theme area of each theme. By default, there are already several predefined sections in your homepages.
For the time being, if merchants want to use Shopify sections at its maximum flexibility, they must know that sections are limited to the home page of the Shopify store. Of course, merchants can include sections on other pages (such as product pages), but they are not as flexible as the homepage since the order of sections on these pages can’t be controlled.
And yet, Shopify sections are still a great and flexible way to keep your homepage fresh and enhance your store’s engagement.
Why are sections better?
The interesting thing about sections is that each one can be independently controlled and configured once created. Technically, one’s home page can have multiple sections or combinations of them with any type they like. This is how Shopify gives merchants an unlimited amount of control over the number of layouts and its order in their shops.
Users can see this clearly with the example of "Images with text". This option can be used for featured links, promotions, or a variety of informational content types.
How to add a section?
Users can simply click the simple "Add section" button in the left panel. With this simple action, merchants will be presented with a large number of section options to insert in the body of your home page.
At launch, many theme developers, including Xopify, are offering a basic app to make the selection of yourself with a wide variety of products, collections, text, images, videos, blogs and social media. Depending on your aesthetic and preference, you may also find specific sections for logo lists, galleries, featured promotions, and customer testimonials.
What’s with the new sections?
The new section has some strange things you need to take note of. The first thing is that sections follow a naming convention that is different from any theme used in the past.
Secondly, many of these naming conventions are now dictated by Shopify. This means that merchants will see a more consistent naming system among all themes on the market.
What can merchants do inside a section?
Most section types allow users to add "blocks" inside each section module. A block can be everything, from an image, a video, custom text, to any input setting types options. Many refer to blocks as sections within sections. What makes blocks distinguished from sections is that elements can be moved around within a section while a section’s range is the homepage.
A good example of this is how you can add multiple slide panels within a slider. You can think of each slide as a block, all hosted within Slideshow - the parent section. This also means that when blocks are kept together inside a section and that section is edited or moved, all the blocks inside will move alongside.
The ability to understand and use blocks within each section is a wonderful skill all merchants need to have so that they can repurpose their section types for a variety of uses. By this, we mean you can have one slideshow section to attract and engage customers on your homepage, another to display your customer testimonials or reviews, and another one which serves as a media gallery to offer the smallest details and notes of your products on the homepage.
What is the future of Shopify sections?
The possibilities of Shopify’s sections are limitless as there are so many exciting functions that can be exploited. For example, merchants, with the assistance of specially formatted sections can now create an enchanting and professional gallery display of "featured in" or partner logos or an attracting call to action banner.
Below are some of many other section types from Shopify merchants can choose from:
- Tables to compare charts or price
- A slider of featured blog posts
- Stylish layouts featuring products or blog posts
- "Featured in" carousels or grid layouts
- Sections for social media profile
It is not an exaggeration to conclude that yes, the possibilities of sections are endless. So far, Shopify has not been vocal about whether or not the section’s capability might expand to other features such as product, collection, blog, or other parts of themes.
And while we wait for that day to come, just explore the great world of Shopify sections and make the most use of them!