Interested in knowing the most important Sitecore Features? Look no further, I'm going to take you through them.
Modular Architecture
One of my favorite features is its modular architecture. Sitecore components are built to be reusable and extensible. This allows content authors to build entire pages by themselves without needing to wait for developers.
I’ve always thought of developing on Sitecore similar to how you build with lego. Sitecore developers create lego blocks for content authors. Content authors can arrange them to build anything they want. Over time you ask developers for larger, taller, or thinner blocks. The longer you have your site the more type of blocks the developers build. This empowers content authors to feel like they own the website.
Interesting Fact: The lego group also uses Sitecore. They won the Best community Site from Sitecore back in 2012.
Personalization
Sitecore helps marketing teams translate their vision for the customer's journey to the Website. Companies spend a lot of time and money figuring out their target audience. Sitecore allows you to match profiles to those users.
Sitecore allows you to alter the entire site based on simple flags like "User is x persona". You can change all the content on the site just for them.
Content-based CMS
Sitecore allows you to manage content separate from your pages. This allows for content reusability as multiple pages can use the same content.
Depending on your CMS you might need to alter the content in multiple locations.
In Sitecore its all done by adding a single piece of content. Here you fill in the information once and use it use all over your website. This way you don’t have 12 different places you need to fix that spelling mistake.
Multisite
Typical CMS solutions allow for a single website to be maintained. When you want to create another website you need to spin up a whole new project. Then you need another login account and password. This becomes confusing when you have 12 different account details.
Sitecore comes with a multi-website solution out of the box. Since Sitecore's goal is to be your marketers “One stop location to reach all channels”. Sitecore manages multiple websites at a single time. In a single instance, this gives you the ability to take components from one website to another. This maximizes developers time doing important tasks.
Analytics
Sitecore comes with extensive analytics features. These allow you to track your users.
To list a few
- Average duration
- Bounce rate
- Convertion rate
- Entry pages
- Exite pages
- Monetary Value per Visit
- Time on page
Now you might be thinking this is all great, but I have google analytics. Well, now a day google analytics is blocked by most ad blocking software. Since Sitecore is managed server side you don't have the same problem. Its also blocked less often by ad blockers.
Another key point is you don't give all your data to a third party company. You own all your users' analytics data.
Sitecore also allows you to leverage analytics directly on the site. For example, Sitecore has integrated A/B testing which can automatically change components based on the metrics you care about.
WYSIWYG Editor that works
Sitecore comes built with a sweet WYSIWYG editor. The editor is designed to look exactly like your final website. The editor allows content authors to add components to the page by dragging and dropping them.
From a developers perspective, editors are typically nightmares. Well with Sitecore its actually easy to develop on. Sitecore comes with .net libraries you use to make the editor work seamlessly.
Those are the features that make Sitecore a powerful CMS.