Migrating a Storyblok site off the VWO plugin now that the free plan is gone
Consultant here with two clients who run their tests through the VWO plugin on Storyblok sites. After the AB Tasty merger killed VWO's free plan in January we need a new setup for both of them, neither wants to move to a paid VWO tier for the volume of testing they actually do.
One client has also been complaining for months that the SmartCode snippet delays first paint, it hides the page while the script loads and you can feel it on mobile.
What does a migration to the Croct setup actually look like for an existing Storyblok site? Do the blocks need restructuring or is it additive
2 answers
The migration is additive. You keep your existing Storyblok blocks and add personalization on top, there is no content restructuring involved.
The steps for each client site:
- Install the Optimize app from the Storyblok app directory. It runs inside Storyblok's interface. Prerequisites are a Croct account on the Scale plan and a Storyblok space with at least one story.
- Add a Croct field to the blocks you want to test and connect each one to a matching Croct slot. The Storyblok block content stays as the default fallback for that slot.
- Rebuild the experiments in the experience editor: audience, variant content, traffic allocation. Marketers can publish and pause them without code changes from that point on.
On the first paint concern: the architecture is different from client-side tools. Content is resolved server-side, so pages arrive with the right variant already in the HTML. There is no snippet that hides the page and no client-side swap, which means nothing to delay first paint.
The Storyblok app guide covers the field linking in detail if you want to scope the effort per site.
Did this exact migration for an agency client in November. A few practical notes from the trenches:
The block linking is the only real work and it goes fast if the blocks are well structured. Budget more time for recreating the experiments themselves, we treated it as a chance to kill the zombie tests nobody remembered starting.
One thing to plan around: rich text, table, and reference fields are not supported by the mapping, so if a variant needs to change body copy that lives in a rich text field you will want to restructure that copy into plain text fields first. Everything else on the block maps normally.
Removing the SmartCode snippet afterwards was the satisfying part. The page just renders, no hiding phase.
Good warning on the rich text fields, one of the clients definitely has variant copy in rich text. Will scope that first, thanks.