Themes & the Legacy Single-Page Site
Before you publish your first page in the new page builder, your public website is served by an older single-page layout. It's a real, live site — just built differently. This page explains what that legacy layout is, how it looks and behaves, and exactly how publishing your first page switches you onto the new builder (and how to switch back if you ever need to).
Availability: Like the rest of the hosted website, this is a Commerce plan and up feature. Free shops have no hosted marketing site.
Two ways your site can be rendered
Your public site is served by one of two systems, and only one is active at a time:
| Legacy single-page layout | New page builder | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | One long scrolling home page made of stacked sections | Multiple standalone pages (Home, About, Services, …) |
| Edited in | Website → Theme (branding) + the Content editor | Website → Pages and the page editor |
| Active when | You haven't yet published a page in the builder (or you've reverted) | The moment you publish your first builder page |
Both layouts use the same theme, colors, fonts, and catalog — so your branding carries over either way. The difference is the structure of the site and how you edit it.
What the legacy layout is
The legacy site is a single scrolling page assembled from a fixed set of sections. You turn sections on or off and reorder them in the Content editor (part of the Website settings screen). The available sections are:
- Hero Banner
- Featured Products
- About Us
- Photo Gallery
- Testimonials
- How It Works (process / steps)
- Product Categories
- Contact
- Full Storefront
- FAQ
Featured Products, Product Categories, and Full Storefront pull live from your real catalog, exactly like their counterparts in the new builder.
Per-section layout variants
Each section type offers several layout variants — different arrangements of the same content. For example, the Gallery has a standard grid and a "Mosaic" (one large image plus smaller ones); the FAQ has a plain accordion and a "Tabbed" version grouped by category. Across all the section types there are roughly 32 variants in total, so you can give each part of the page its own look without touching any code.
Scroll animations
Sections can gently animate as visitors scroll them into view. Each section has an on/off toggle and a choice of motion style:
| Preset | Effect |
|---|---|
| Fade Up | Rises and fades in |
| Fade In | Simply fades in |
| Slide Left | Slides in from the right |
| Slide Right | Slides in from the left |
| Scale In | Grows slightly into place |
| None | No animation |
Per-company auto-variation
So that two shops using the same theme don't end up with identical-looking sites, TimberCloud seeds a unique arrangement per company — it automatically picks section variants and animation styles that are consistent for your shop but different from the next shop's. You can override any of these choices yourself in the Content editor; the auto-variation only sets sensible, distinctive defaults.
Switching to the new builder
You don't have to do anything special to move to the new page builder — you just publish a page:
- Go to Website → Pages and build (or generate with AI) a page.
- Click Publish in the editor.
Publishing your first page flips your public site onto the new page-builder renderer. From then on, visitors see your builder pages instead of the legacy single-page layout, and you manage everything through Pages, Navigation & Publishing, and the page editor.
Tip: The fastest path onto the new builder is to let AI generate a starter home page, review it, and publish. See AI Website Assistant.
Reverting to the legacy layout
If you unpublish all of your builder pages (or use the revert path), your public site falls back to the legacy single-page layout — your Content-editor sections and branding are still there, untouched, ready to serve again. Nothing you built in the new builder is deleted; it's simply not shown while the legacy layout is active.
Next Steps
- Website Overview — the hosted site and how it differs from the storefront widget
- Pages — create your first builder page
- AI Website Assistant — generate a starter home page in one click
- Navigation & Publishing — publish (and the first-publish switch) explained
- Theme, Domain & SEO — branding that both layouts share