Instant Site themes
Themes are pre-designed website layouts that provide a quick, consistent starting point for creating your site. They serve as a site draft where you rearrange and add content to create your own website.
Your Instant Site offers 70+ themes tailored to different business niches. All themes are fully customizable, so you can add, edit, and remove any content such as text, images, colors, fonts, navigation menu, site sections, and pages to shape a site that matches your style and business needs.
In case you have something specific in mind, you can create your own custom theme from scratch.
Customizing a site theme
In Instant Site, a theme is a pre-designed website layout that consists of sections. A section is a block of content that may include images, text, products, navigation menu, promo bars and so on. You can rearrange, add, remove sections, and change their content, therefore creating your own site. When you edit your themes, your changes display in real time in the editor preview. You can also add pages to better organize content.
You will find detailed instructions on various editing processes in the Instant Site section of the Help Center:
- General steps for editing your site theme →
- Editing site sections →
- Editing site pages →
- Editing site header →
- Editing site logo →
- Customizing product catalog on your site →
- Adding videos on site →
- Adding sliders on site →
- Adding promo bars on site →
- Customizing mobile view for sections →
- Changing fonts on site →
- Applying custom design to site with CSS →
- Adding custom code to site →
- Creating your own theme →
Switching to another site theme
When you open the Instant Site editor for the first time, you will be prompted to choose a theme right away. Later, you can choose a different theme to change your site’s design and structure.
Keep in mind that switching to another site theme affects edits you made, such as adding your copy and images. Here’s how it works:
- Any changes you’ve made to an initial theme won’t save after you switch to a new theme and publish it. That includes text and image editing, navigation menu changes, SEO settings, and edits to your online store. That means you have to design the site content from scratch.
- In case you’ve added pages to your initial theme, those pages with all the edits will save after switching to another theme. However, you will need to add links to the pages to your navigation menu once again.
- Before clicking Publish after switching to a new theme, you can revert to the previous theme with all your changes intact by clicking the Undo button at the top right of the editor.
You can choose from a variety of free themes or start a trial to check out paid premium themes.
To change a site theme:
- From your Ecwid admin, go to Website → Edit Site.
- Click Settings → Themes. To view business-related themes, switch between tags at the top.
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Click Preview Theme to view it. Click Apply Theme to switch to a free theme or click Start Free Trial to apply a paid premium theme.
Until you click Publish, you can revert to the previous theme by clicking Undo → Revert to last published version. - Click Publish to apply the theme.
Developing an Instant Site theme
In addition to ready-made site themes that are available in the Instant Site theme library, there’s an option to create your own custom theme. It can have any custom functionalities tailored to your needs such as a booking section, form for collecting customer emails, social media integration, and so on.
You either build your custom theme from existing site sections from the Instant Site library or add your own sections and mix them with the default themes.
You need a good knowledge of Typescript and its Vue framework to build themes. To perform the task, you can hire a developer or ask someone from your IT team to do this.