There are only a few days until the end of 2018. Thanks to all Shopify merchants who decided to move forward fully with 365 days of e-commerce challenges. It’s time to have a short break to replenish energy and be prepared to achieve new goals in 2019. E-commerce has never been easy to conquer, and you know it very well. We understand one of the challenges merchants struggle with is the storefront building and customization. The PageFly of 2018 can help you build a Shopify store to match your brand and business goals.

Now, let’s take the overview of PageFly progress in 2018 and learn more about what you can expect to see and get from PageFly app solution in 2019.

Table of Contents

• January 2018. Release the Pro plan with 35 page templates.
• February. Mobile and SEO on the radar.
• March. Release PageFly template demo.
• April. Better Customer Support services. Email and Chat.
• Summer and Autumn. PageFly Quick Start video. Content Section.
• November. Holiday seasons and welcome 5 brand new templates.
• December. New PageFly Beta is released!
• What you can expect for 2019?

January 2018. Release the Pro plan with 35 page templates.

Before January 2018, the PageFly Shopify app became officially available on the Shopify app store back in September 2017. When we came to the market, there were some Shopify app solutions to solve the same problem. What could differentiate us from the other guys? E-commerce is about building the business and making the profit. All Shopify page builder apps by those days and still in our days are paid apps.

PageFly is the only page builder app that comes with the free plan. It’s not about the “trial time,” but free as the solution that works and merchants get free support as well. With the PageFly free plan, you can easily create beautiful pages for your Shopify store.

By January 2018  we released the Pro plan for the affordable price of $9.95 / month. With the Pro plan, we have added functions that could help Shopify merchants better customize their shop and make sales. The Product page and Homepage creation have been added to PageFly. With the easy drag and drop page building flow, you can remove the boundaries with Shopify themes.

To support Shopify partners with building the store for their clients, we have made PageFly to be “partner friendly.” What does it mean? When you create a development store for a client and install the app, you’ll get access to all PageFly features. The most important thing is there is NO TRIAL time. You’ll need to subscribe to PageFly paid plans only when you finish the service project for your client.
Next big thing for January was the release of 35-page templates included in both free and paid PageFly plans. Even the free plan lets you use any of the 15 templates at no cost. For the Pro plan, you’ll get 20 more templates. The PageFly page templates save your time on building your page. After using the template you need to replace dummy content with your own.

February. Mobile and SEO on the radar.

Two of the most significant things for February was mobile preview improvement. Meaning that you can preview your Shopify page on popular model devices. With the release of this feature, we wanted to improve the mobile page building experience and save you time.

With SEO, three main things matter for the page with PageFly. These are the Title, Meta Description, and URL handle. When you create a new page, you can configure those parameters right away and save time with SEO on the page.

While we improved the PageFly app, we also took things seriously with improving the PageFly Help Center. You can learn proactively what PageFly can do to help your business through https://help.sellersmith.com/. All articles are up to date with clear instructions of PageFly’s use.

March. Release PageFly template demo.

PageFly users got page templates to use in January, but only by March we have released the official PageFly demo with page templates to showcase for new merchants. To make sure that you have a real and best possible user experience, the demo website is based on Shopify. Pages you see are the PageFly templates. All merchants can see how the page looks on mobile and tablet devices as well. We have integrated the device screen switcher. 

A lot of effort went into the optimizing the code of pages created by the PageFly app. We know well each second in e-commerce matters from the conversion rate point of view. By making sure the page loads fast we wanted to optimize CR for your Shopify store. Google Pagespeed score of pages built with PageFly is around 90 and above. Below is an example of Bose Shopify product page template.

However, please take into account that the page speed also depends on other the Shopify apps running on your store, and the image content as well. Make sure that you keep images on your Shopify store with supported CDN technology.

By today you have 50 ready to use page templates when you subscribe to PageFly Premium. 

April. Better Customer Support services. Email and Chat.

To serve PageFly customers better and improve communication between customers and us, we have implemented support chat inside the PageFly app. We use Intercom platform combining chat and an email support channel into one convenient dashboard. When we’re online, you can chat directly with us to resolve the issue, when we’re offline the messages are converted into an email.

In addition, our support team are considerate of other time zones as well. So you can expect to get assistance in a timely manner whether you are in New York, London, or Singapore. Just drop us a message then we’ll show up to serve you.

May. PageFly Premium

By the 3rd week of May, the PageFly Team released the version 1.2.0 with the new plan called Premium. The premium plan gives you more freedom with customization for your Shopify store. To be precise, since the Premium plan release you can build blog articles, additional content to Collection pages, and a Coming Soon (aka password) page.

In addition, by the PageFly’s May release you get the feature to export/import page. It’s the JSON file. With PageFly Premium you can export data from one store and import it to another store. You save time on migrating the content.

In addition, we have added the History Version of the PageFly app. If your computer crashes in some way, rest assured we have already backed up that draft page. So you can restore the previous version of the page quickly. We also enabled the autosave page, so even if you forget to click on “Save” page, you’ll still be able to restore the previous version of the pages.

Learn More about PageFly Premium release.

Summer and Autumn. PageFly Quick Start video. Content Section.

The first thing is the PageFly Quickstart video tutorials. With the release this video series, we believe you will overtake the PageFly learning curve easily. PageFly might be hard to use, but when you invest just a few hours with these video tutorials, you’ll recognize how it is easy to use the app.

PageFly improves again, and this time it’s the content section copy and pastes. Let’s say you finished building one page and wants to re-use some content section on another page. Since July you can do such content creation flow and for all plans including both free and paid.

October. New slider element and the app’s core re-factory.

The slider element was one of the most used things on pages built with PageFly app. To create different information and sales pages the slider was the essential part of a page. The first version of this element has been built based on freely available open source library. The slider worked great on the desktop. However, when it comes to mobile devices, it showed bad responsive behavior. It led us to decide on building a new slider element from scratch. The latest version of a slider element has been in introduced in October’s app release.

November. Holiday seasons and welcome 5 brand new templates.

Since November PageFly customers can use the Product, Sales, Collection page templates exclusively designed for Black Friday and Cyber Monday events, with Google Analytics integration to your Shopify store, you can easily see how the page template helps you with the conversion. PageFly Premium customers have the opportunity to boost sales massively with these templates. These templates are great for using in the nearest promotion event as well.

Install PageFly Premium

By the last week of November, the PageFly Team joined the Shopify Pursuit event in Bangalore. It was a great opportunity to network with Shopify merchants and connect with regional Shopify partners and experts. We have contributed one topic session about building the PageFly app and marketing it.

December. New PageFly Beta is released!

During 3+ months our engineers worked on the new version of the PageFly app. The primary goal is the performance and reviewing of the whole code’s base. We have big plans for 2019, and the main focus is the “focus in conversion” of Shopify merchants stores.

Learn More PageFly Beta

What you can expect for 2019?

UX improvement. It covers both aspects: the app and the overall user experience. From the installation of the PageFly app to the building page you can expect a great experience. Our goal is to help you to achieve your goals with PageFly in the shortest period.

Focus on the “conversion”. From the element to use for building the page to ready to use templates to convert the best. Analytics function will be added as well to help you understand how the page built with PageFly affects your store’s sales.

Mobile first mindset. This is something already on our radar for a long time. We have spent a tremendous amount of time on researching, and in 2019 you can see the first app improvements for mobile and tablet devices. You can expect to see an improvement from page templates too.

Knowledge Source with Conversion Rate Optimization. We’re finalizing the latest parts of the guide to help you with the improvement of the Conversion Rate of your Shopify store. The guide will be available for free download and coming soon in Q1 2019.

Integration with other Shopify apps. We have heard many times the feedback from you guys that you need the integration with 3rd party apps. We’re already in the process of building that integration. Keep following our blog, and you’ll be the 1st who knows about the names of our partners.

More page templates. In addition to 50-page templates now we’ll be adding more page templates to fulfill your business goals. Templates cover more niches and product types. We’ll add more value as we did with five BFCM Template bundle pack.

And the last thing. PageFly Affiliate Program. We appreciate Shopify partners who have chosen PageFly as the solution for customization their client’s stores. To reward you, we’ll be giving the competitive commission structure and try our best to deserve more trust from you. The program is expected to launch in January - February 2019.

That’s all for now.

We are 12,000+ customers strong now and looking to serve more in 2019.

Happy New Year!

On behalf of PageFly Team,

Tony Bui, co-founder.