"i only speak liquid" #90: Metaobjects for page templates

Hey everyone,

This is Georgie’s 2nd edit of “i_only_speak_liquid”. Georgie is a developer based between Lisbon and NY. She’s contributed to projects for leading brands including John Frieda, Bioré and Bio Oil. Her expertise spans front-end development, Shopify e-commerce, EDM creation, and digital consulting.

Ofc: She’s an expert on Storetasker 😉 apply here.

Let’s dive in 🤿

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What I’ve been thinking about:

I’ve been using metaobjects for a while now mostly for product data that is repeated across multiple skus, but I’d never actually used them as page templates until recently. A few new client projects pushed me in that direction, and now I’m hooked!

Metaobjects are great for organising content that repeats the same structure- recipes, city guides, routines, that kind of thing. In the past, when that content needed to live as pages, I’d usually default to blog posts. It worked, but it always felt like a workaround rather than the right tool.

What I really love about using metaobjects as webpages is how intentional everything feels. You get consistent data, one clean template, and much nicer URLs. For example:

/pages/recipes/green-curry

Compared to bending blog posts to fit structured content, this approach just feels cleaner and more scalable.

How publishing metaobjects as webpages works (high level)

The setup is pretty straightforward once you know where to look:

1. Create a metaobject definition
   Define the fields you need title, description, images, steps, location, links, etc. Every entry follows the same structure.

2. Enable web publishing
   Shopify lets you publish metaobject entries as webpages. Once this is turned on, each entry gets its own URL.

3. Create a template in your theme
   You build a single template that pulls in the metaobject fields and controls the layout. Every new entry automatically uses that template.

4. Add entries, not pages
   From then on, creating new content is just adding a new metaobject entry no new templates, no duplicated layouts.

It feels like a mix of pages, blogs, and structured data but without the mess.

Why I’m preferring this over blog posts

Pros

• Cleaner, more predictable URLs

• One template to maintain

• Great for SEO when content types are clearly defined

Cons

• Slightly more setup upfront

• Less flexible for long-form editorial content

• Not ideal if you want heavy rich-text formatting

For structured, repeatable content, the tradeoff is totally worth it.

1 app I like:

Tolstoy

Tolstoy has become one of my go-tos when clients want more interactive storytelling without going fully custom. It’s great for shoppable videos, and out of the box is a really nice clean template that sits nicely on PDPs or landing pages. Easy to implement, performs well, and clients actually keep using it after launch which is always a good sign.t

One learning as a freelancer:

Something I’m getting better at is educating clients as we go, instead of just delivering the final build. Explaining why something is structured a certain way whether that’s metaobjects, B2B logic, or templates leads to fewer surprises later and better long-term outcomes once I’m no longer in the day-to-day.

-Georgie