Yes, Sitefinity Handles Large Volumes Of Content Better Than Any CMS On The Market (RIP WordPress? 👀)

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By: Brian McCrackenbutton to visit the authors linked profile
High Level Developer

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KEY
POINTS

  • Sitefinity offers a variety of content publishing and control tools that can help your business perform it’s best online.
  • Sitefinity offers four different levels of content approval so that you can be sure your customers see only what you’ve approved them to see.
  • Sitefinity’s caching system helps ensure that your content is delivered quickly to your website visitors, improving your SEO and user experience.

Sitefinity is the CMS solution that many of our enterprise, commercial, and government clients turn to for their web design and development needs.

There’s no question that Sitefinity handles tasks like user management, file security, and granular permissions better than any other CMS on the market, but how does it handle large volumes of content?

When people think of content management systems for content heavy sites, WordPress is the solution that almost always comes to mind. If you’re concerned that Sitefinity might not be the right fit, we’ve got some good news for you.

Does Sitefinity Handle A Lot Of Content Well?

Yes! Sitefinity handles content better than almost any CMS solution on the market today. It offers content staging, content version control, and an advanced content workflow to help ensure your organization’s website is delivering the right content, to the right audience, at the right time.

In addition, Sitefinity also provides advanced search functionality as well as the ability to classify and tag content so that you can organize it in a way that is most useful to your editors and website visitors alike.

In terms of performance, Sitefinity leverages a built in caching system which further improves the performance of websites that have a lot of content and traffic levels to match.

Woman adding content to her Sitefinity website.
Sitefinity’s content control and publishing tools help businesses show the right content, to the right user, and at the right time.

Sitefinity Content Staging, Revisions, and Workflows

Your website has a lot of responsibilities. Its web design has to provide a customer-centric experience and help users find what they need as quickly and easily as possible so they don’t go to one of your competitors to find what they are looking for.

Once they get to the right page of your website, you have to be sure that you are showing your customers exactly what they need, and most importantly, the content you want them to see in order to leave them with the best possible impression of your business.

Content Staging

Sitefinity has a unique content staging feature that allows you to create, revise, and perfect content in a separate staging area before publishing it to your production, publicly available webpage.

This staging area is a perfect replica of your production webpages and helps ensure that only high-quality, approved content is published to your live website while also managing the flow of content, which is especially helpful on large websites with multiple authors and stakeholders.

example of sitefinity content staging
Sitefinity’s content staging is a unique and powerful tool that helps improve the workflows of websites that have a lot of content, or various content authors that require approval.

Content Version Control & Revision History

With Sitefinity, you have a lot of version control built right into the CMS. Beyond staging future versions of content, Sitefinity lets you look back at a previous version of a webpage’s content with just a single click.

Do you want to compare two versions of the same page of content? No problem, Sitefinity has a built-in compare feature that lets you evaluate how your content has evolved as well.

Not stopping there, Sitefinity allows you to notate your content versions as well so that your editorial team can quickly understand what changes were made to a specific version of content, by which team member, and why.

Content Workflows

Sitefinity offers your four main types of content workflows to help ensure only approved content is available on your website.

  1. No approval workflow – Create and immediately publish for all users.
  2. One level of approval – Create and send for approval to be published by a user with the minimum permission level required and authorized to make content decisions for your website.
  3. Two levels of approval – Create and send for content approval, then send to publishing for a final decision on making the content available to the public.
  4. Three levels of approval – Create and send for initial review. Once the content has passed initial review, it goes for approval to send to publishing. Your publishing team then makes the final decision what content ends up on your website for your customers to see.
Sitefinity content workflow example
Sitefinity offers multiple content workflows to help websites with a lot of content, or multiple content contributors to maintain old content, and easily publish new content, ensuring that it is put through the right amount of moderation required for your organization. Image credit: Progress

Sitefinity’s Advanced Content Search Functionality

Almost every CMS will offer you some form of content search functionality. If you want to customize that search feature to work in a specific way, it often involves a lot of custom code and a talented developer to make the platform work the way you’d like.

Sitefinity’s search functionality is one of the great qualities that separates it from other CMS platforms.

Have Content Publishing Needs or Questions?

Drop us a line and tell us a little more about yourself, your website, and what you’d like to accomplish. We’re happy to help.

    Search Indexes

    Sitefinity’s search index feature allows you to pre-define how certain search functions work on your website.

    For instance, if you want a search bar to only search for press releases, or about topic on a certain product or service, Sitefinity lets you setup a specific index for just that content.

    The result of this feature is a greatly improved user experience for your website visitors and a more favorable opinion of your business based on the professionalism and ease of use of your website.

    Sitefinity's search indexes administration screen
    Sitefinity’s search indexing system allows you to build efficient custom search functionality, an invaluable tool if your website has a large amount of content that users might have to search through. Image credit: Progress

    Content Classification

    Sitefinity has multiple ways of classifying content in their CMS platform.

    Simple lists: This put content into specific groups that have no relationship with one-another.

    Hierarchical lists: This puts specific groups of content that are somewhat related into their own parent group.

    Simple List Example:

    If your website had information on it about boots and tennis shoes, and you used a simple list system to categorizing the content, those two groups wouldn’t interact.

    You’d simply have one list of content about boots, and another separate list of content about tennis shoes.

    Hierarchical List Example:

    If you had another website that had information about boots and tennis shoes on it, as well as information about jackets, t-shirts, jeans, etc. you could create a parent category for “Footwear” and under that have two children categories for “Boots” and another for “Tennis Shoes.”

    The parent category for footwear could then be separated from other broad parent categories that might include things such as “Outerwear,” “Pants,” Shirts,” etc.

    That way, you would be able to separate your content for users by both parent and children topics in order to provide them with exactly what they were looking for, which will help you provide a better user experience with your website.

    How Sitefinity’s Enterprise-Level Caching System Improves Its Content Handling

    When a dynamic CMS like Sitefinity has a page requested, it has to assemble that page based on its resource package, associated widgets and modules, images, and text that make up the page before it gets sent to a user.

    For many content management systems, that assembly process would take a long time, leading to a slower website. Sitefinity however doesn’t have this problem when configured properly.

    Sitefinity’s Content Caching System

    When someone comes to your website to view a page, most content management systems have to assemble that page each time. That means the resource package has to be parsed, content pulled from various tables in the database, then building your website’s page before sending it to the user so they can view and use it.

    This all takes time, and can reduce the speed of your website. Some content management systems have caching built in, and like everything on the market, there’s some caching systems that are better than others.

    Sitefinity's advanced content caching system diagram
    Sitefinity has one of the most advanced caching systems available. Its ability to accurately cache a webpage’s content helps to reduce server load when pages are requested, improving speed, and enhancing Sitefinity’s ability to serve large amounts of content to users. Image credit: Progress

    Sitefinity’s Advanced Caching System & It’s Impact On Content Delivery

    Sitefinity has four main types of caching that make it a great CMS for handling a lot of content and traffic.

    1. Output caching: This type of caching stores the HTML output of a page or widget in the cache.
    2. Data caching: This type of caching stores data that is retrieved from a database or other data source in the cache.
    3. Fragment caching: This type of caching stores individual fragments of a page, such as a header or footer.
    4. Full-page caching: This type of caching stores an entire page in the cache.

    When combined, these four caching tools allow your Sitefinity website to pre-store your webpage’s content and serve it to users quickly when they visit a page on your website.

    The Final Sitefinity Content Ingredient

    Sitefinty is clearly a great CMS for serving a lot of content to your users, but there’s one thing you need to really make the most of these systems.

    The Role Of A Sitefinity Development Partner In Content Delivery

    If you want to create a Sitefinity website that handles a lot of content well, it’s important to pick the right Sitefinity development partner. They will be able to help you setup your search indexes, content categorization, and build custom front-end layouts so that your content always looks it’s best.

    Additionally, they will be able to help you with fast, secure Sitefinity cloud hosting in many cases. Purpose-built Sitefinity hosting is critical for ensuring that your website is able to perform it’s best and serves its content to users quickly, helping improve your Sitefinity website’s SEO and user-experience at the same time.

    Need To Improve How Your Company Handles Its Website Content?

    Our team is always available to answer any questions you may have, even if Sitefinity isn’t the right tool for the job. Reach out, and let us know how we can help.

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