"ditching the template" may not be a very good advice, there are plenty of game templates on Scirra store that are old, but still great. Just last week I helped to replace WebStorage in an old project, and I actually enjoyed playing that game.
Rigel11 I advise you first familiarize yourself with the Local Storage plugin. Check the official templates and tutorials.
The main difference between WebStorage and Local Storage is that WebStorage is synchronous, meaning that you can access any item from the storage immediately: Set level to WebStorage.LocalValue("currentLevel")
Local Storage is asynchronous - you request an item, and then you have to wait for it to be retrieved. You need to use "Wait for previous action to complete", or "On item exists/get" events.