How to Integrate a WordPress Blog into BigCommerce’s Stencil Front-End Framework

As a Solutions Engineer on the Enterprise team at BigCommerce, I have the pleasure of working with hundreds of merchants a year, and every single one of them is looking to unify their digital experience. With the number of different tools and interfaces available, it can be tough to get it right. My job is to make recommendations for developers and merchants in this crowded space of new solutions and acronyms.

One of the most common requests I hear from merchants is the desire to deliver “unique experiences” to their shoppers. They also want a solution that gives them a cohesive eCommerce experience that can seamlessly combine both content and commerce. For merchants that have an established presence on a CMS, I typically recommend a headless build. However, there are merchants who can’t afford a headless approach or the risks that it brings.

In this blog post, I’m going to discuss the different ways that mid-market and small business merchants can manage and deliver the right content experience for their brand. I will walk you through when and how to set up a WordPress blog within your BigCommerce Stencil site. Most importantly, I will show you an alternate solution to get all the benefits of a robust content platform without sacrificing the benefits of SaaS eCommerce.

Digital Content Experience & Blogging

One of the best ways to showcase create unique web content is through blogging. Blogs have long served as an avenue for thought leaders, experts, users or anyone who has access to the internet to share their perspectives with the world.

Blogging is especially valuable to eCommerce companies looking to engage and educate shoppers. The more engaged the shopper is, the more likely they are to come back and continue shopping. Blogs give companies captive audiences and the opportunity to entice your loyal customers to come back for more of your content, which they can consume for free and buy products along with it.

It is essential that blog content is relevant to what the shopper is looking at on the page. As a merchant or the developer, when making shopper-facing content or functionality it is best to understand the user’s journey and point of view. Think of the last time you shopped for something specific. You read some reviews, did some research and as part of that, you probably read a post or series of posts about the thing you wanted. Just like you, all of your shoppers are doing the same thing. Therefore it is crucial to remember, your value isn’t just the product you are selling, but the information and knowledge you are giving away along with it. The more you can get the audience to think about the subjects you are discussing, the more likely they are to come back to you for more of that information.

In order to make sure your content is engaging, merchants should consider the following:

• How would your customer’s day-to-day be improved by your products?
• What about your product is different?
• Can it change a behavior or start one?

The value of appealing content continues beyond the shopper because all search engines are reading your website and store. More importantly, they are scoring you based on that content. Search engines like Google and Bing have gotten “smarter” over the years and have natural language reading capabilities. For example, Google ranks sites and assesses the paid-per-click cost of ads based on the Quality Score of the site. The Quality Score is dependent on multiple factors:

• Click-through rate (CTR)
• The relevance of each keyword to its ad group.
• Landing page quality and relevance.

Landing pages aren’t just the web pages you have created. These include your blog pages, your category pages and really any other page that you can include text and content.

How to Incorporate a Blog on BigCommerce

There are several different methods for blogging on BigCommerce. For the sake of this post, I’ll walk you through three of the most common use-cases.

Using the Built-In BigCommerce Blog

The out-of-the-box basic blog functionality allows businesses to publish posts and manage them based on the tags associated with each post. This is a good tool for merchants that don’t have or need full contributor management of a blog. The blog content is available to store account users who have access to the blog section. Since BigCommerce’s number one focus is eCommerce, we have intentionally not fully built out a blogging platform. For merchants who don’t already have a blog, they’re able to easily enable and leverage our in-platform tool. If you are in a very competitive market with the products you sell, consider having a blog about the product or service that you are providing shoppers. This keeps them informed about the events and updates in the industry.

Subdomain Setup

Merchants can also consider using the sub-domain approach. Businesses who blog heavily are likely already familiar with this approach. This works by using a blog platform like WordPress or Blogger and hosting a separate set of pages for your blog specifically. This is the most traditional way for merchants at scale to add a blog to their eCommerce site. If set up correctly, Google and other search engines see the subdomain as part of the main property and assign quality scores that the merchant expects from their content. This still brings the shoppers in with the right level of detail and quality, however, it is harder to tie in with the product, or to get the design exactly matching the rest of the site.

WordPress Blog to BigCommerce Storefront

Recently, one of our agency partners set out to solve this problem. BigCommerce has the Store Content API, which has been used in many different ways before, but this time we are accessing it to inject content into Stencil. This, in a sense, turns WordPress into a headless CMS, meaning we are only using WordPress for its back-end Content management tooling.

Matter Design’s team is using the WordPress REST APIs to pull specific posts, whether they are Blog or Page type posts from the database. All of the data needed to create a webpage or a blog post in BigCommerce are retrieved with those API calls. WordPress, being an open-source CMS, is very accessible. More importantly, it allows for the SEO information, tags, and publish dates and times to be extracted. Therefore, all of the publishing benefits of WordPress can be maintained.

Matter Design’s App takes all of the Body of the post (this includes in-line CSS!) from WordPress. Significantly, if a post includes SEO metadata, that can also be imported. This is a super simple JSON load that would need to be pushed to BigCommerce Blog API to create a blog post.

Example

{
“title”: “A Sample Blog Post”,
“body”: “<p>This is a blog post. With all of the inline CSS included </p>”,
“author”: “Author Name”,
“thumbnail_path”: “http://cdn.example.com/sample-post.jpg",
“is_published”: true, 
“tags”: [
“Blog”,
“Example” ]
“published_date”: {
“date”: “2019–12–05 T08:26:42.000Z”,
“timezone_type”: 1,
“timezone”: “+00:00” },
“meta_description”: “Welcome Post”,
“meta_keywords”: “BigCommerce, welcome, ecommerce”,
}

Determining Which Blog Setup is Right for You

The Software as a Service (SaaS) model has brought many great benefits to merchants, allowing them to run at a much lower total cost. One traditional limit was that you couldn’t have a WordPress blog added to your store when using a SaaS platform like BigCommerce. You would have to have that WordPress Blog on a sub-domain of the main site or vice versa and have the shop under a subdomain. As John Mueller of Google says, “it isn’t necessarily wrong to do that but the consumers have a different perspective at times.” Having the blog under a subdirectory creates a unified look and feel as well, though you can create the same look and feel on both WordPress and Stencil. One thing is very apparent and important, Google is also going to start ranking pages based on performance and well if your blog pages aren’t performing like all of your other pages, you would be running with some weights on.

Conclusion

To summarize, the higher quality content you have across your site, the higher the quality scores your site will receive from search engines. BigCommerce allows you to add content easily to any of your landing pages, including the category and product pages. There is also a huge benefit to having a blog component to the site, which creates a captive audience if curated correctly.

There are many ways to set up a blog for your eCommerce site: using the built-in BigCommerce blog, creating a subdomain for a third party blog platform, or a new way with the app introduced earlier. If you want to have your blog as a subdirectory of your store but still want to be able to leverage great blog tooling like what’s offered on the WordPress platform, you can leverage the Matter Design app. This app will synchronize your content from WordPress into your BigCommerce store, and now your blog’s content uptime is guaranteed by BigCommerce. You won’t need to pay for separate hosting or design work to be done for your WordPress Blog frontend. To get started click here.