BigCommerce Stencil is the latest e-commerce development platform from BigCommerce. It offers greater versatility, speed and convenience for merchants than BigCommerce’s previous development platform, Blueprint.

Stencil uses the “Handlebars” templating language. As a merchant, you may not be using the stencil platform or the handlebars language yourself, but it does improve things for you. Here’s how –

With stencil, JavaScript and CSS is minified and combined, reducing file size and web requests. Streamlining the use of JavaScript and web requests makes super-fast e-commerce sites. BigCommerce sites now also feature lazy-loading, which means product images only load as the user scrolls down the page, reducing the initial load time.

Handlebars also runs on the store’s server, which means there’s less strain on the browser and less Javascript is needed to achieve the same goal compared to the Blueprint platform.

Soon BigCommerce will fully introduce Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). These are streamlined versions of category and product pages for mobile users which allow merchants to display product information to people searching on mobile devices, even in locations that have a poor data signal.

BigCommerce Stencil was developed with mobile responsiveness in mind, allowing mobile devices to see the same page in a display format that is suitable for a mobile device or for smaller screens, this means customers will experience a consistently designed website, with optimum functionality on all devices.

All of these features improve the speed of the load time, which leads to a more favorable ranking on search engines, and lower bills from Google AdWords campaigns. Combined, this leads to more website views, providing a better customer experience, and increased sales.