Onboarding Walkthrough

Onboarding Walkthrough

When you install Stars SEO, a 6-step onboarding wizard opens automatically. It's designed to get your store from "just installed" to "actually optimizing" in a few minutes — each step maps to a real, checkable piece of setup rather than a checkbox you tick yourself. You can close the wizard at any point and reopen it later from the Dashboard; your progress is saved.

Step 1: Welcome

This is a short introduction screen. It briefly explains the four pillars of the app:

• AI-powered SEO content (titles, descriptions, meta tags, keywords, FAQs)

• Image compression

• Storefront speed optimization

• FAQ blocks for product/collection/blog pages

There's nothing to configure here — just click Continue when you're ready. If you're re-visiting onboarding later, you can skip straight past this screen using the step indicator at the top.

Step 2: Add the Speed Embed

This is the single most important step, because several other features (speed optimizations, some status badges) depend on it being active.

The Speed Embed is a small, invisible theme app block. It doesn't add any visible UI to your storefront — it just gives the app a hook to apply performance improvements.

How to add it:

1. Click "Open theme editor" — this opens your live theme in a new tab, already scrolled to the right section.

2. In the theme editor's left sidebar, click App embeds (near the bottom, above "Theme settings").

3. Find "Stars SEO Speed Embed" in the list and toggle it on.

4. Click Save in the top-right of the theme editor.

5. Come back to the Stars SEO tab.

The app checks your published theme (not a draft) for this block. Within a few seconds the badge should flip to Active. If it doesn't, click Recheck — sometimes Shopify's theme editor takes a moment to fully publish the change.

Common mistake: saving the theme editor in "preview" mode instead of publishing. If the badge stays on "Not detected yet" after several tries, double check that you clicked the theme editor's actual Save button (not just closed the tab).

Step 3: Image Compression Preview

This step doesn't require any action — it's a short preview showing you what image compression looks like (a before/after size comparison) so you know the feature exists. Actual compression happens later, per-page, from each product/collection/blog post's own SEO editor — see the Images category for details.

Step 4: FAQ & Blocks

Here you can add FAQ blocks to your theme, which display AI-generated Q&A sections on your storefront pages. There are separate blocks for Products, Collections, and Blog posts.

How to add a block:

1. Click "Add to theme" next to the block you want (e.g., "Product FAQ").

2. This opens the theme editor to the relevant template.

3. Add the block to the section where you want it to appear (usually below the main product/collection/article content).

4. Click Save in the theme editor.

Just like the speed embed, each block's badge only turns green once it's genuinely present on your published theme — clicking "Add to theme" alone doesn't mark it active, because the app can't be sure you actually completed the step in the editor until it checks.

Step 5: Choose a Plan

This step shows the three available plans — Free, Pro, and Business — each with its own monthly AI credit and compression credit allowance.

• Click "Start free trial" on Pro or Business to begin a subscription. Shopify will show its own confirmation screen for the charge; approving it there completes the upgrade.

• Click "Skip for now, stay on Free" to continue without upgrading. You can upgrade anytime later from Settings → Plans & Pricing.

Nothing here is a hard requirement to keep using the app — Free plan users can complete onboarding and use every feature within their monthly allowance.

Step 6: Done

A final summary screen lists each feature and its real status:

• ✅ Active — verified against your live theme.

• ⚠️ Not set up yet — with a note that you can finish this anytime from the Speed page.

This is intentionally honest rather than showing a blanket "all done" message — so you always know exactly what's left, if anything.

Tip: You can revisit onboarding anytime from the Dashboard by clicking any incomplete task card — it reopens the wizard at the relevant step.