Sitecore Symposium: 2024 Key Takeaways
This year’s Sitecore Symposium was a banger. Most attendees came away with the impression that Sitecore has a clear direction and purpose heading into 2025. The standout topic was Generative AI and Sitecore’s implementation of it with Sitecore Stream. There was much material on that, but there was more to see and learn at Symposium beyond the AI revolution.
Here are my takeaways from my three favorite talks that had little or nothing to do with AI.
Sitecore XM Cloud R&D Roadmap
Liz Nelson, Senior Director of Product at Sitecore, gave this talk. She focused on the feature roadmap for XM Cloud and JSS, both near and long-term. There was a lot to learn from Nelson’s talk, but I found the following to be the most noteworthy.
First of all, .NET is back. Last year, there was a question about whether Next.js was the only approach to implementing websites with XM Cloud and JSS. This talk made it clear that Sitecore is dedicated to supporting other frameworks, and they demonstrated this by demoing Sitecore Page editing using a .NET Core rendering host. Both framework approaches have strengths and weaknesses, and it should be up to the customer to decide which one is right for them and their project. Sitecore listened to user feedback and is bringing .NET back into focus —a promising development for the platform’s future.
A theme of Nelson’s presentation was feature parity, and it didn’t just have to do with development frameworks. Sitecore has recognized that its Pages product is still behind the classic Experience Editor in several areas, creating a disjointed authoring experience for customers with complex components. We saw a demo of the Pages take on Edit Frames, which appears even more capable than the feature available in Experience Editor. With the new Pages feature, you can build any selectors into an edit frame UI by providing your own components. We also saw a demo of a selector that allowed the author to use a color wheel to select a color and save it to the component rendering parameters — an interface very similar to image editing software — all in Pages.
My biggest takeaway from this talk is that Sitecore is listening. They’re listening to their customers, they’re listening to their partners, and — most importantly — they’re acting on that feedback. The Sitecore team is on a mission to bring their products up to feature parity, with a clear focus on the quality and stability of the tools and choice in implementation approaches.
Headless SXA vs. Component Builder:
The Rock-Off of the Year
This was a fun talk that embraced the theme of Nashville, the host city. Two Sitecore architects, Christian Hahn and Sebastian Winter, championed a different approach to building XM Cloud components. They ran brief demos of each tool for each category, scoring them on criteria such as Author Experience, Developer Experience, and Performance.
Unsurprisingly, Sitecore scored these two tools equally in the end. What was surprising, however, was the highlights of each tool’s strengths and weaknesses. Component builder, for example, is a powerful tool for Marketers to quickly get something published without needing development. However, it cannot do inline editing in Pages. The contrast of speed to market compared to fine-tuned control and scalability was on display.
Another important meta-read from this talk was that Component Builder is playing catch-up. However, over time, it will attain feature parity with SXA. If you’ve been sleeping on Component Builder in your XM Cloud solutions, it’s worth taking another look and getting familiar with it. If there’s another rock-off next year with SXA, it might just be the winner.
Make Your Next.js Sitecore Site Faster
Performance is an essential aspect of building a quality website. It plays a crucial part in the user experience and directly impacts a customer’s engagement with your site. A website’s Lighthouse score can impact its search ranking, making that metric particularly important.
One of the main value propositions of Next.js, Vercel, and SSG is performance and user experience. Despite that, many Sitecore developers roll out their first Next.js build, and their Lighthouse score just isn’t very good. They’re left wondering, “What gives?” One area you might get dinged on is the size of your JavaScript.
The demo Anton Tishchenko gave during this talk showcased a helpful tool for analyzing your JavaScript bundles. He showed us the Next.js bundle-analyzer package, which offers a great visualization showing the relative weight of your JS modules in your solution (If you’ve ever used WinDirStat to clean up your hard disk, this will look familiar). That alone is incredibly valuable, but we also got advice on cuts to reduce the bundle size.
An important distinction when developing with Node & Next.js is the distinction between client and server computations. For example, in most cases, we do all our GraphQL calls server-side, so there’s no need to include that module in client scripts. Anton showed us how to use Webpack to exclude that module from the client script bundle, effectively reducing its size and increasing the performance score. This approach applies to any module in your solution that you don’t need to ship to the client’s browser.
The Next.js Sitecore talk was perhaps my favorite because I left with something I could do immediately to improve performance for all our Next.js builds.
Looking Ahead
This year's Sitecore Symposium showcased Sitecore's commitment to innovation as it prepares for 2025. With a strong emphasis on user feedback and product enhancements, the discussions surrounding XM Cloud, Component Builder vs SXA, and performance optimization for Next.js signal an exciting future for the platform. As we embrace the evolving Sitecore landscape, at Velir, we’re looking forward to helping our clients harness the full potential of Sitecore's offerings.
Want to know more about anything we covered in this recap? Reach out. Our Sitecore MVPs would be happy to share more about how your organization can capitalize on these exciting developments to get the most out of Sitecore.