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Best practices

This page collects the recommended way to do the everyday things on a SitePack site, grouped by who is doing them. Each guide links straight to the page with the exact settings, so you can read the flow here and click through to do the work.

Two ideas run through all of it, and understanding them makes everything easier:

  • Change something once, and it updates everywhere. Contact details, opening hours, your footer, your theme's colours: you set them in one place and every page that uses them follows. You almost never edit the same thing twice.
  • Content and design are separate. Your theme owns the layout and styling; you own the words, images and settings that fill it. That is why a text change never breaks your design, and why a design change never touches your words.

Pick the guide that matches what you need to do:

Business owner: keep your site up to date​

You do not need to rebuild anything to keep your site current. Most day-to-day changes are a single edit in the right place.

Opening hours, address and phone number​

These live in one central place, not on each page. Set them under Settings → Locations, where you keep your address, phone number, email and weekly opening hours.

The key trick: the Contact Details and Opening Hours elements in your pages can be linked to a location. Once linked, changing your Saturday closing time or a new phone number in Locations updates every page automatically, including your footer and contact page. See Automatically updating your site content.

Holidays and seasonal hours

Because opening hours are stored once and reused, a holiday change is a single edit in Settings → Locations. Never hunt through individual pages for opening times.

Changing texts​

Open the page in the visual editor and edit the text directly, the way you would in a word processor. See Content Management for how pages and blog posts work. If your page shows a panel of labelled fields instead of blocks, it uses a theme template, so follow Template pages.

Changes go live immediately once you save a published page. If you want to prepare a change first, keep the page a draft until it is ready.

Photos and images​

Every image comes from your media library. In the editor, add or replace an image and pick one you uploaded before, choose a stock photo, or upload a new one. The rules (JPG, PNG, GIF, WebP or AVIF, up to 10 MB, virus-scanned) are in Adding images to a page.

The rest of your public details​

  • Highlights and selling points: your USPs (free shipping, years in business, and so on).
  • The bar at the top of your site: the topbar.
  • Social media links: Settings → Social.

Checklist for staying current

  1. Address or opening hours changed? Edit them once in Locations.
  2. New text or a typo? Edit the page in the visual editor.
  3. New photo? Upload it through the media library.
  4. Everything you edit on a published page is live the moment you save.

Online marketer: improve your SEO​

SitePack generates the technical SEO signals for you (canonical URLs, sitemaps, structured metadata). Your job is the content around them. Work through these in order for the biggest gains.

Give every page a strong meta title and description​

Set the meta title and meta description on each page: they are what Google shows in search results. See Meta titles & descriptions. Start with your most important pages (home, key landing pages, contact).

Short, descriptive URLs help both readers and search engines, see Clean, descriptive URLs. When you rename or remove a page, set up a redirect so the old address keeps working and you keep its search ranking. See Creating a URL redirect.

Control what search engines may show​

While you build, you can keep pages out of search results, and open them up when they are ready. See Search engine visibility.

Get multilingual SEO right​

If your site has more than one language, translations are set up to be found correctly out of the box: each language gets its own URL, the correct hreflang tags, and its own translated titles and descriptions. Translate the words and the SEO signals follow. See Translating your website and, to add or price a language, Settings → Translations.

Checklist for better SEO

  1. Every important page has a unique meta title and description.
  2. URLs are short and readable, and every renamed or removed page has a redirect.
  3. Pages that should be private are hidden from search, see visibility.
  4. Extra languages are translated, which produces the multilingual SEO automatically.

Developer: staging themes, staging content, and going live​

This flow is for building or updating a custom theme and preparing the content that depends on it, then releasing everything together without visitors ever seeing a half-finished state.

1. Work on the theme​

The theme owns the layout and styling. See Design & themes for how themes are selected and customised, and Themes (for partners) for building and shipping one. A custom theme can also expose editable templates, which merchants fill in through fields, see Template pages.

2. Prepare content on staging​

While a theme update is being reviewed on the staging host, the pages that depend on it are kept on staging: finished, but not yet visible to visitors. A page whose layout only exists in the new, not yet released theme version stays on staging on purpose, because publishing it early would serve a blank page.

You can build this content quickly, including in bulk and in several languages at once, with the AI connector, see Connect an AI assistant. New pages are created as drafts (or staging) so nothing goes live before you intend it to.

3. Publish everything at once​

When the theme is released and the content is reviewed, take it all live in one step with Publish staging pages on the content overview. It publishes every staging page together and tells you which (if any) were held back because their template is still only in the unreleased theme. See Publishing staging pages.

Release order

Release the theme first, then publish the staging pages. Pages on templates that only existed in the unreleased theme are skipped until that theme is live, so publishing after the release catches them.

Developer flow at a glance

  1. Build or update the theme, including any template pages.
  2. Prepare the dependent pages on staging (optionally via the AI connector).
  3. Release the theme.
  4. Publish all staging pages in one step, and check the skipped list.