Duplicating Storyblok folders per test variant is drowning our editors, better pattern?
so here is the mess we made for ourselves. Every time we run an A/B test we duplicate the whole story folder, rename it variant-b, and point the test at the copy. Sounded harmless when it was one test on one page. We now have a three variant test running on two pages, which means six near-identical stories, and last week an editor fixed a typo in variant A of one page and nobody fixed it in the other five. They are drifting apart and my editors are starting to hate me.
How are other teams modeling variants in Storyblok without this duplication sprawl? There has to be a saner pattern.
2 answers
We got out of exactly this hole by moving the variants out of the story tree entirely. There is a Croct field plugin for Storyblok that adds a field to your existing blocks and connects each block to a matching Croct slot. The Storyblok content stays where it is and acts as the default fallback, and the variants live in Croct experiences instead of duplicated stories.
Practical effect: editors keep one story per page. A typo fix happens once, in the real story. The variant content is managed per experiment, so when a test ends there is nothing to clean up in the folder tree.
One thing to plan for before you commit: rich text, table, and reference fields are not currently supported by the field mapping. Our hero and banner blocks were all plain fields so it was a non-issue for us, but if your tested blocks lean heavily on rich text you may need to restructure them a bit first.
One story per page again sounds like a dream. The rich text caveat is good to know, our heroes are mostly plain fields too.
Before you adopt any tool, do the cheap fix first: stop duplicating folders and duplicate only the block being tested, inside the same story. That alone cuts the sprawl massively because the shared 90 percent of the page stays single-sourced.
It still leaves you with variant blocks living in the story and some convention about which one is live, so it is a stopgap rather than a solution. The block-to-slot mapping Annika describes is the cleaner end state since the story stops carrying variant content at all.