How Builder Works
Builder is a visual building platform. It connects to your existing site or application and enables anyone on your team to create, manage, and publish high-performing, enterprise-scale digital experiences without constantly relying on developers. Empower your team while freeing up development resources, which helps all team members be more productive, efficient, and creative.
Using Builder with your site
You can decide which parts of your site Builder manages and which parts you want to maintain in code. There are three main ways you can incorporate Builder:
- Builder pages: Use the drag-and-drop UI to develop everything between your site's header and footer.
- Builder sections: Make just a part of a page visually editable in Builder and use targeting and scheduling to decide who sees what.
- Builder data: Fetch data from Builder and use it anywhere in your application, such as menu items.
Use Pages to manage entire pages, such as:
- Homepage
- Marketing and content pages
- Blog pages
- Landing pages
Use Sections to maintain parts of your site or app, such as:
- Announcement bars
- Product detail descriptions
- Collection heroes
- Cart upsells
Use Data to manage structured data, such as:
- Navigation links
- Product data
- Blog post authors
Integrating other technologies
Builder integrates with your existing site or app and renders content much like developers do when writing code by hand. This means you can add visual site building while still leveraging your existing technologies such as the following:
- SEO
- analytics
- core user flows control
- frontend components
- backend data
Integration is automatic for Shopify hosted stores. For all other sites and apps, follow our brief developer setup.
You control hosting
Builder pushes content to your site or app by connecting to your codebase. You control your site, code, and hosting–we only pass content to your site or application, rather than hosting it.
The following diagram shows where Builder works. Your app still resides where you host it, and Builder provides a visual interface to your services, commerce platform, or headless CMS.
Structuring your site
By adding landing page building to your site, you can create editable sections across your app and use targeting to choose the right content for the right users.
The following image illustrates some examples we recommend for structuring various pages on an e-commerce site:
👉Tip: For a more technical overview of Builder, see Builder technical overview.
