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Guide for integrating Bigcommerce with imgix
0 2 months ago imgix/bigcommerce-integration-guide

BigCommerce imgix integrational guide

Disclaimer:

This guide presents a working solution for integrating imgix into your Bigcommerce site. All configurations are made to work on top of Bigcommerce's front end and CDN, but will have certain limitations that are detailed in our Caveats \& Warnings section. We cannot, unfortunately, guarantee expected results if at any time Bigcommerce were to make changes to its system in ways that create breaking issues with this guide.

This guide is written for BigCommerce users with Stencil experience (BigCommerce's theme engine), and will require you to write, modify, and test custom code.

Table of contents

Install the imgix.js script in your BigCommerce settings

  1. Open the BigCommerce admin UI
  2. Click on Storefront in the left sidebar
  3. Click Create a Script
    1. Name the script (imgix-js)
    2. Put it in the Head
    3. Use in All Pages
    4. Use the Essential category
    5. Script type: URL
      1. Grab the latest version from cdnjs to use: https://cdnjs.com/libraries/imgix.js
    6. Load method: default
  4. Save and move to the next section below

Editing your theme files

You can edit your BigCommerce theme files locally, or in the BigCommerce UI.

We strongly recommend editing your theme files locally, as that is the most efficient way to preview and test changes to your BigCommerce themes.

Editing locally makes it easier to preview your changes with the Stencil CLI.

  1. In your BigCommerce admin, navigate to Storefront in your admin sidepanel
  2. Go to Themes in your BigCommerce store control panel
  3. In your theme, click Advanced → Download Current Theme

From there, generate a Stencil CLI Token and install the Stencil CLI to begin editing your theme files locally.

Editing your theme files in BigCommerce's UI.

If editing theme files locally is daunting, you can edit your theme files directly in BigCommerce. This is typically not recommended because editing the theme in the BigCommerce IU is a time-consuming process because since the site is rebuilt every time a changed is saved.

  1. In your BigCommerce admin, navigate to Storefront in your admin sidepanel
  2. Go to Themes in your BigCommerce store control panel
  3. Find your theme and click make a copy
    1. This step is critical. Do not skip this step, otherwise you can break your site
  4. Activate the theme copy
  5. In your newly activated theme, click Advanced → Edit theme code

Editing images in template files

Once you have the template code available to edit, you must locate code where images are being output/modified in your theme code. This will vary from theme to theme, and you may even have plugins that modify how images are output.

To modify the image string outputs, we are going to be using these handlebar helpers provided by BigCommerce:

  • stripQuerystring: Strips the cache query parameters from BigCommerce (ex: ?c=1)
  • strReplace: Replaces the BigCommerce hostname in the image URL paths with the imgix hostname
  • getImage: Gets the image URL. To get the Origin Image, you will likely use getImage image in your template code

BigCommerce uses the handlebar helpers to get images from the image object. Examples:

  • getImage this
  • getImage product.main_image

This outputs the BigCommerce image URL. Use strReplace to replace the BigCommerce domain with your own imgix domain. Examples:

  • stripQuerystring (strReplace (getImage this) 'cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-STORE_ID' 'SUBDOMAIN.imgix.net')
  • stripQuerystring (strReplace (getImage product.main_image) 'cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-STORE_ID' 'SUBDOMAIN.imgix.net')

Replacing getImageSrcset

Additionally, BigCommerce uses getImageSrcset to generate a srcset of images. You should not use getImgaeSrcset because it generates multiple variations of image paths (/640w/image.png, /740w/image.png, etc), which will dramatically increase your Origin Image counts.

In general, you will replace getImageSrcset either a custom srcset:

srcset="{{stripQuerystring (strReplace (getImage this) 'cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-STORE_ID' 'SUBDOMAIN.imgix.net')}}?w=1000&auto=compress,format 1000w, {{stripQuerystring (strReplace (getImage this) 'cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-STORE_ID' 'SUBDOMAIN.imgix.net')}}?w=500&auto=compress,format 500w, {{stripQuerystring (strReplace (getImage this) 'cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-STORE_ID' 'SUBDOMAIN.imgix.net')}}?w=250&auto=compress,format 250w, {{stripQuerystring (strReplace (getImage this) 'cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-STORE_ID' 'SUBDOMAIN.imgix.net')}}?w=100&auto=compress,format 100w"

… or you will delete it and let imgix handle the srcset generation with imgix.js's ix-src attribute:

ix-src="{{stripQuerystring (strReplace (getImage image) 'cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-YOUR_BIGCOMMERCE_STORE_ID' 'YOUR_IMGIX_SUBDOMAIN.imgix.net')}}?auto=compress,format"

Replacing images in data-* attributes

Some template files use image srcsets in data-* attributes (ex: data-image-gallery-new-image-srcset). You must replace the srcset with manually generated srcset. Example:

data-image-gallery-new-image-srcset="{{stripQuerystring (strReplace (getImage this) 'cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-STORE_ID' 'SUBDOMAIN.imgix.net')}}?w=1000&auto=compress,format 1000w, {{stripQuerystring (strReplace (getImage this) 'cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-STORE_ID' 'SUBDOMAIN.imgix.net')}}?w=500&auto=compress,format 500w, {{stripQuerystring (strReplace (getImage this) 'cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-STORE_ID' 'SUBDOMAIN.imgix.net')}}?w=250&auto=compress,format 250w, {{stripQuerystring (strReplace (getImage this) 'cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-STORE_ID' 'SUBDOMAIN.imgix.net')}}?w=100&auto=compress,format 100w"

Common template files to edit

Most images are output and modified in the following theme files:

  • /templates/components/common/responsive-img.html: Outputs the <img> tags with srcset attributes
  • /templates/components/products/product-view.html: Passes image URLs to responsive-img.html
  • /templates/components/carousel.html: Outputs an image in the carousel element

Depending on your theme, you may have more images to modify, but these are the most common files to edit for BigCommerce templates.

responsive-img.html

This file commonly controls how most responsive images are displayed in BigCommerce themes.

It's referenced in other theme files like so:

                {{> components/common/responsive-img
                    image=product.main_image
                    class="productView-image--default"
                    fallback_size=theme_settings.product_size
                    lazyload=theme_settings.lazyload_mode
                    default_image=theme_settings.default_image_product
                    otherAttributes="data-main-image"
                }}

Steps to edit this file:

  1. Navigate to this file: /templates/components/common/responsive-img.html
  2. Replace all src values with something like this: {{stripQuerystring (strReplace (getImage image) 'cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-YOUR_BIGCOMMERCE_STORE_ID' 'YOUR_IMGIX_SUBDOMAIN.imgix.net')}}?auto=compress,format
  3. Replace the first occurrence of srcset with this: ix-src="{{stripQuerystring (strReplace (getImage image) 'cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-YOUR_BIGCOMMERCE_STORE_ID' 'YOUR_IMGIX_SUBDOMAIN.imgix.net')}}?auto=compress,format"
  4. Delete all srcset values. For example, delete this:
srcset="{{getImageSrcset image 1x=(default lqip_size '80w')}}"

Use this HTML file as an example for how your responsive-img.html template should look:

Editing the product-view.html file

This file commonly controls how images are displayed in a product page.

Note that there are several image handlers in the product page template. Ex:

  • getImageSrcset this
  • getImageSrcset product.main_image

You must use the right image handler when modifying the file.

Here is a good template to use for replacing BigCommerce image URLs with imgix URLs:

{{stripQuerystring (strReplace (getImage IMAGE_HANDLER) 'cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-STORE_ID' 'SUBDOMAIN.imgix.net')}}?auto=compress,format

In cases where a width and height is specified in the HTML element, you should modify the image so that it fits the width and height values - example:

{{stripQuerystring (strReplace (getImage IMAGE_HANDLER) 'cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-STORE_ID' 'SUBDOMAIN.imgix.net')}}?auto=compress,format&w=608&h=608&fit=crop

Caveats & Warnings

Updating custom themes

Note that integrating imgix into a BigCommerce theme involves modifying your theme code.

BigCommerce cannot push updates to custom or third-party themes. If you need to update a custom theme while keeping imgix functionality, you will:

  1. Need to download a new version of the BigCommerce theme
  2. Reapply your imgix edits to that new theme version

Plugin interference

If you have any plugins that control the output of your images (such as a gallery plugin), you may need to either disable/modify that theme's plugin files to be compatible with imgix, or you may need to modify that plugin's functionality.

Examples

You can find example files in the /examples folder of this repo.

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