Instant Site editor: Overview
Instant Site is a code-free website builder enabling you to create a website, landing page, or online catalog. The easy-to-use editor makes the design process seamless, even for beginners. In a nutshell, you choose a template and then customize it by adding and editing pages, sections, texts, and images to create a website tailored to your business.
In this article, you will get an overview of the Instant Site editor tools and features. To get step-by-step instructions on designing a site, refer to the Setting up your Instant Site article.
Instant Site editor features
As a website builder, Instant Site provides you with rich editing and customizing tools for designing your website. The list of tools is not limited to the editing mode itself, but also includes SEO settings and more in-depth CSS customization.
Here’s a list of features to help you create your online presence:
- Customizable templates. Speed up designing your site by choosing a premade layout that you can use as a canvas for creating your own website.
- Different content types. You have an option of adding and editing text, static images, gifs, and sliders, buttons, maps, links, social links, and a custom code.
- Customizable content sections. All content of your website lives inside sections. Sections are stored in the library where you can choose a goal-specific item such as store, customer reviews, slider, and so on.
- Easy content arrangement. To move a section with all the text and images, simply drag-n-drop it in the editor.
- Multiple pages. Depending on your goals, you can go with a one-page landing, or create a multi-page website.
- What You See Is What You Get editor. All the changes you make are shown in real-time on the right side of the screen, providing you with a more intuitive experience.
- Dark mode. Switch between light and dark mode to adjust the brightness of the editor.
- Mobile adaptivity. No matter what design you create for your website, it will look good on mobiles and tablets since Instant Site is mobile-friendly and automatically adapts your design to every size screen. You can also specify how sections should look on mobile devices.
- SEO settings. To improve your site ranking in the search engine results, you can specify SEO tags and descriptions for different pages of your website.
Accessing your Instant Site editor
To access the editor:
- From your store admin, go to Website → Overview.
- Click Edit Site to open the editor.
Introducing the editing mode
In the Instant Site editor, you customize the site by adding your own content, images, and branding to create a unique and professional-looking website. For each section of the site, you can choose a layout, background, and style. All the changes you make are shown in real time right in the editor.
For high-level settings that are applied to the whole website, you click Settings at the top-left corner of the editor. Those settings include customizing SEO, translating a website, choosing fonts, and so on.
Previewing, publishing, and undoing changes on your site
All the changes you make in the editor are saved automatically, so there’s no Save button. Still, at the top of the editor, you will find buttons to help you control and preview the adjustments:
While you design your site, you can click the Preview button to see how your site looks for visitors. You can switch between desktop and mobile views at the top to see how the site appears on different screens.
Changes won’t go live until you click the Publish button at the top right corner.
Until you hit the Publish button, you can always undo changes and revert to the last published version of the site. For this, click the Undo button at the top right corner of the editor. Please note that you can’t sequentially undo a series of recent changes, only return to the latest published version.