Server Side Vs Client Side Personalization In Sitecore

What Is Personalization?

Personalization is the ability to provide audiences with a specific experience such as the content on a website based on known or perceived attributes. There are two main ways to provide this type of service. Server-side or client-side. This article will focus on Sitecore, what it offers, the direction it’s going, and the pros and cons.

Sitecore Server Side Personalization

Sitecore has offered this service for many years as part of Sitecore XP (Experience Platform). It was included with Sitecore Analytics, xDB, Marketing Automation and EXM as a total platform for providing marketing automation.

The advantage of this was that everything was integrated together within the same platform so you could utilize the data being stored in xDB for personalization, sending emails, and managing marketing campaigns.

The main con of personalization within XP is general performance both with Sitecore and the website. This is interesting because a lot of other blogs on the internet will talk about how server-side personalization is better for performance. Logically this would make sense as web servers are designed to handle the traffic needed for your website, have lots of resources and are highly scalable.

The problem specifically with Sitecore Personalization as part of XP is Personalization, xDB, EXM, and Marketing Automation require so many resources beyond core CMS functionality that it’s not uncommon to come across clients who have had to disable these features just to have a usable editing experience or a decent performing website.

The other problem with the server-side approach is caching. Caching is a huge factor in website performance. Storing web content outside of the CMS for a period of time that users can attempt to hit first vs the infrastructure can make a massive difference in performance. At Fishtank, we love Cloudflare specifically and have seen massive benefits of what it can provide to clients for performance for a relatively low cost. More Information on Cloudflare.

This is where the conversations get challenging. How can we use server-side personalization within XP and Cloudflare? The goal being to personalize and also have a strong caching solution for website performance. Well...you can’t really. If the majority of your web traffic is getting to Cloudflare first and never actually getting to Sitecore then Sitecore can’t identify users and provide the personalization needed. You can configure Cloudflare to not cache certain assets and pages but then you are losing the ability to see the whole journey. This tradeoff needed to change. Enter Sitecore Client-side Personalization!

Sitecore Client Side Personalization

In March 2021, Sitecore finalized an acquisition of Boxever. A SaaS-based Customer Data and Personalization Platform. Boxever started providing these services to the travel industry but the capabilities quickly spread to other industries.

This was a really smart acquisition by Sitecore as it allowed them to buy a mature product vs trying to create something internally. It also accelerated their SaaS plans.

Boxever is now known as Sitecore CDP and Sitecore Personalize.

Sitecore Personalize is a SaaS-based client-side personalization tool. Rejoice!

With Sitecore Personalize we are able to implement Cloudflare, a best-in-class caching solution AND implement Sitecore Personalize to provide client-side personalization.

Sitecore Personalize works by making a series of calls on each page back to Sitecore Personalize, CDP and other parts of the stack where then Personalize will decide which content gets served. The content can be served directly from Cloudflare or Sitecore depending on the use case.

Conclusion

It’s fairly clear that SaaS Client Side Personalization is the future for Sitecore. It will allow us and our customers to provide personalized experiences without sacrificing performance.