Wakefly BlogKentico Xperience 13: Five Reasons to Take the Leap

Today’s digital marketers are looking for ways to streamline and automate their workflow in order to save hours that can be spent in more meaningful work. At the same time, websites are dealing with higher traffic and data flow than ever before. Kentico Software’s latest launch, Kentico Xperience 13, is designed with this future in mind, giving marketers and developers both more freedom and higher performance on a lightweight platform.

Kentico Xperience is based on Microsoft’s open-source, cloud-ready ASP.Net Core MVC framework. MVC is changing the way Kentico websites are built. Its modern, modular technology separates the website from the admin interface, leading to a lighter and more nimble site. The roles of marketers and developers of Xperience sites are now more clearly separated, allowing developers to enable content editors with the content structure and tools they need to deliver marketing results. Today’s digital experiences need to be consistent across many websites, apps and devices—and that’s what Kentico Xperience ensures.

There are a ton of reasons why Kentico Xperience is important for modern developers and marketing professionals. It’s more than an upgrade. It’s a new platform that improves the way we develop websites and unifies the customer’s digital experience across all devices and platforms.

Here are five of the best reasons why it’s worth taking the leap.

1: ASP.Net Core MVC framework

Kentico Xperience is one of the first digital experience platforms to switch to the new .Net Core MVC framework. It is a lightweight platform that makes code easier to develop, debug and maintain. This new way of building Xperience websites creates a clear separation between the public facing website and the back-end content admin interface. The public facing website only loads the content and libraries that it needs, resulting in a lighter, better performing and more secure website. And because .Net Core is cross-platform, customers can benefit from less expensive Linux-based hosting for their public website. Because of all these factors, .Net Core MVC opens a whole new range of possibilities for developing high-performing websites. It’s an exciting step forward, giving both marketers and developers more creative freedom and accessibility.

2: Better Control of URLs

If your site was built with .Net MVC prior to Xperience 13, you may struggle with a lack of flexibility around the URLs of your pages. The new version adds content tree-based routing, which is a fancy way to say that content admins can now control the URLs of their pages in the content tree. Provided your site is built to support this feature, content admins can freely move pages around to change their URLs, redirect old URLs to new ones automatically and provide alternate alias URLs for landing pages.

3: Best-of-breed Marketing Automation 

Kentico Xperience is all about simplicity and streamlining. Its new simple point-and-click interface for creating and organizing marketing flows lets marketers automate their workflow with built-in analytics to improve communication and performance. This is an incredibly powerful tool for marketers who don’t want to pay for custom development when designing new customer journeys.

4: Platform enhancements

Kentico Xperience comes with a slew of new platform improvements. New integrations with Bynder for digital asset management and Recombee, a powerful AI recommendations engine, expand the tools available to content administrators and developers for building robust websites. Kentico Smart Search now includes the contents of Page Builder widgets, making it easier to use widgets without backing them with structured storage mechanisms. And speaking of Page Builder widgets, content editors can now copy, cut and paste them between pages for easy reorganization and reuse of Page BUilder content across pages.

5: Content-first development

Content is what drives your website. It defines your messaging and is often your first line of contact with users. It’s true that UX and website layout are important, but content is the driving force behind your website. 

Kentico Xperience allows for a content-first approach before layout and design have even been considered. Developers can model content by creating types and attributes with easy point-and-click tools. They can create, edit and manage content and serve it to APIs. At the same time, content entry and management is not much different than in a traditional CMS. So, Xperience 13 is not reinventing the wheel, but it is a revolutionary platform. It is turning the focus to the most important aspect of any website— the content.

Of all the many reasons to take the leap, this may be the best one. Instead of driving the process with layout and design, users can focus on messaging and content first. The rest of the design can then be built around the foundation of your content. What results are intuitive websites that attract more attention and attain higher conversion.

The takeaway: Kentico Xperience is the future of web content management

Kentico Xperience is taking development and marketing workflows to new heights. It saves time, improves performance, integrates with everything and enables content to lead the design process. If your team is ready for the future of digital experience platforms, Kentico Xperience 13 can get you there.

You can see more information and find out about upcoming UX updates on the Kentico Software news feed.