Etsy sellers looking to expand their online presence often consider creating their own standalone website.
Pattern by Etsy is the platform’s solution to this need.
However, despite the upsides of tight Etsy integration and easy order management, I wouldn’t recommend using Pattern by Etsy for sellers.
In this article, let’s take an in-depth look at Pattern by Etsy, exploring its features, pros, cons, and better alternatives.
Let’s dive in.
Pattern by Etsy is Etsy's own website builder designed specifically for its sellers. Here’re some basics to know:
Pattern offers limited customisation features:
Unfortunately, compared to other website builders, the customisation options of Pattern by Etsy are extremely limited.
Before we dive into the drawbacks (there are quite a few of them), let’s look at some upsides of using Pattern By Etsy:
Despite the upsides, Pattern by Etsy has significant draw backs that I find it hard to recommend it for most Etsy sellers.
Here are some of the glaring drawbacks of Pattern By Etsy, a few of which we will have a deeper look at later with an example:
Let’s illustrates some of the drawbacks of Pattern with an example. Here I used their ‘recommended’ website theme which is called “Zephyr”.
There are so little customisation options that it’s hard to start saying which ones are missing (because most of them are missing)
Here are a few basic examples of things that can’t be achieved on Pattern:
The product grid layout in Pattern is rigid and inflexible. Some listing photos are displayed as squares, while some are displayed in a wide 1:2 aspect ratio. This automatic cropping often results in your listing photos cropped in a suboptimal way, making them look less appealing and polished.
Pattern doesn’t allow you to create shorter versions of listing titles to display for your website. Because of how Etsy SEO works, the listing titles tend to be long to include many long-tail keywords. Because of this, on mobile devices, the listing title takes up more space than your product photos, which is unbalanced and distracting.
You don’t have any control of font size. Font size is an important (and basic) design control that allows you to create visual hierarchy on your website to emphasise and de-emphasise different elements. In this example, on the shop page, the font size of the menu items on the top is disproportionately small compared to the large product images that span the entire width of the page. Lack of design control like this severely hinders the ability to create a website that suits your brand.
The blog functionality of Pattern is also restricted. In the text editor, it’s disappointing that you don’t even have the options to create headings other than H1 and H2, which hinders your ability to create a clear content hierarchy. Also, there’s no options to add basic blog information like ‘title tags’ and ‘meta description’ which limits the ranking potential of your blog on search engines.
So what should Etsy sellers use instead of Pattern by Etsy? Here are a few options I’ve tried and loved personally:
