When to use Templates or Pages?

Shopify Discussion
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Hi,

I am looking for some advice on when to use ‘templates’ over ‘pages’ (or the other way round).

My website will have the following pages;

Home

Catalogue (with a list of categories)

About*

My Story*

Stockists*

FAQ*

Contact

Of those marked with an *, should I be using the ‘template’ function or the ‘pages’ function?

For example, the page from this Shopify store has quite a bit of dynamic content. To create something similar, would I create a template that holds all of the content? or would I try and use HTML to create it in the ‘pages’ area?

If I did create a template that lists all my stockists (like the above link), would I then just create a blank ‘page’ called stockists, and assign the stockists template to it, without adding additional content? (i.e: all of the stockist locations/buttons/email links, etc would be embedded into the template)?

Finally, I assume I would still have flexibility around SEO of individual ‘templates’? (i.e: page title, keywords, etc).

Thank you for any information you can provide.

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Any further updates? ‘Template’ function looks like it uses less coding knowledge than HTML to design a really detailed about page, such as this one.

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Hi there, @Jj37 . Thanks for taking the time to follow up on your post here in the Shopify Community! My name is Imogen. It’s good to meet you!

‘Pages’ are helpful when you’re going to be preparing or presenting content that is going to be remaining the same for a good chunk of time. Things like the story of your business (you’ll only really be changing this page when updating text or images), FAQS, your contact information and your policies are really good examples of when you would want to use a page over a template.

‘Templates’ are best used for environments where you want to provide a consistent static design, but the content that goes into that design changes. Product pages are good example, as the content of that template changes (the content being the information about the product, like the title and description and price) while the ‘design’ of that template would be remaining the same.

For the page types you’ve mentioned specifically, ‘About’, ‘My Story’ and ‘FAQ’ would be excellent ‘page’ candidates, while your ‘Stocklists’ (assuming this is like a collection page?) is best served as a ‘template’, where the contents within this page change to reflect changes you’re making on the backend to the products you stock in your store. I hope this helps!

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