Your homepage hero can now play a video, as a silent background loop or as a video visitors click to play. Open Design > Editor, click your hero and set Media to Video. Then upload a clip, paste a link to a video you host, or pick a free stock clip.
A new Video Section puts a video on any page, and above or below the content on category, brand and article pages. Your hero picture still loads first, so your store stays fast.
A new Instant Store built from scratch on Crystal or Vista opens with a matching stock video when one fits its niche.
Redirects have been rebuilt. Paste a full old link instead of only its path, send it to any page or address, and see whether each redirect works and when it was last used. You can also add a whole list of redirects at once.
You can now choose which fields each part of your store search looks at, meta keywords included. Set it up so visitors find the products and articles they expect when they search your store. The settings are in your store admin with your other search options.
All six templates now start loading the next page while a visitor hovers over a link, so the page is often ready by the time they click. Browsing your store feels close to instant. It works on its own, with nothing to set up.
You can now reply to messages from your store's contact form in one click. The Reply button opens your own email app with the message ready to answer. Messages also show an unread count, and you can mark them as read.
Your homepage no longer has to be the page you build in the Store Editor. Go to Store > Pages, open Homepage and choose to show your categories page or a single article instead, such as a pillar post. Requested on the FreshStore roadmap.
Ten new Instant Stores have arrived, and a New this month strip at the top of the Instant Store picker shows the latest ones first. Every Instant Store now comes with at least 80 products and five articles, so a store you copy starts full.
Every image on your store, template images included, is now resized to the size a visitor's screen needs before it is sent. Pages are lighter and load faster, most of all on phones. It works on its own, with nothing to set up, and your original images are kept as they are.
You can now create your own pages. Go to Store > Pages and click New Page, then build it in the Store Editor with the same sections you use on your homepage. Use it for a landing page, a buying guide or anything else your store needs.
New stores are now built on the new section based design, with a theme, fonts and colour palette that AI picks to suit the store's niche. Your store looks finished from its first minute instead of starting on a plain default look. You can change any of it later in Design.
Once you finish a store's launch plan, it now hands over to Recommendations: a short ranked list of what will help that store most. The same list shows on your store admin dashboard, and the Actions list in your account is now called Recommendations too.
Every store now gets a step by step launch plan in your account, from setting it up through connecting Google and Bing to sharing it. Steps tick themselves off as you do them, and if a store stalls, a reminder email points you to the next step.
You can now build a complete store from one choice. Pick a researched, scored niche, or set the store name and address yourself, and AI builds the rest: name, logo, colours, categories, products, product copy and articles. A live build page shows each step as it happens, with a retry if a step fails and an email when your store is ready. You can also search Instant Stores by niche when you create a store.
You can now order an expert review of one of your stores. The review looks at your store and tells you what to fix first, in a clear structure you can work through. It arrives in your account, and you can download it as a PDF to keep or share.
When you ask us to feature your store, you now get an answer by email and on your own page in the account area. Stores we feature appear in a hand picked latest stores gallery on the FreshStore website, so good stores get seen.
Items you delete in your store admin now stay in the bin for 14 days. After that, store maintenance removes them for good. If you need something back, use Restore Deleted Items within those 14 days. Restore Deleted Items is in your store admin.
Category and product listing pages now load much faster, most of all on stores with large catalogues. Visitors browsing a big category see products sooner, and you no longer wait on slow pages while you check your own store. Nothing needs switching on; every store gets the speed up.
AI tools inside your store no longer stop you with an hourly limit. Write articles, fill categories and create content as fast as you like. Your AI Chips balance is now the only thing that sets how much AI work you can do.
New stores are ready sooner. A store build now runs its setup steps side by side instead of one after another, so the wait between choosing your niche and opening your new store is shorter. What you get does not change: the same products, categories, articles and design.
Fixed: some real visitors were being turned away by the store's bot protection, mostly shoppers on mobile and home networks. The rules are now looser for real people, and link previews and feed readers get through too, so your links show a proper preview when shared.
Your store now asks AI training crawlers to stay away. Every store's robots.txt tells the bots that collect content to train AI models not to crawl it. Search engines, and the AI assistants that answer shoppers' questions, can still read your store, so you keep showing up when people ask for product advice.
Changes you make to your store now reach visitors sooner.
Store pages are now refreshed at least every 12 hours, down from up to 7 days, so edits to products, text and design show up on their own much faster. You can still click Clear Cache in your store admin when you want a change to show straight away.
Fixed: updating a record through the store API now accepts the same fields as creating one, so a field you could set on create can also be changed later.
Fixed: Content Checker flagged products as missing content just because the meta keywords field was empty.
Fixed: breadcrumb and organisation data for search engines used the wrong URLs, product data could go stale on cached pages, and the cart page showed up in search results. All three are now correct.
Your store search now returns articles, categories and brands as well as products, and can include your pages too.
A new Search settings page lets you choose what search covers. Visitors looking for an article or a whole category now find it, not only single products. This was a popular request on our roadmap.
