Uniform blog/Overcoming Sitecore challenges with Uniform
adam conn
Adam Conn
Posted on Oct 18, 2022

3 min read

Overcoming Sitecore challenges with Uniform

Sitecore as a monolithic system has had a long, productive life. Over the years, as it grew from a content management system (CMS) to a digital experience platform (DXP), Sitecore has become more complex, more expensive, and hard pressed to keep up with changing business requirements and technical preferences. But fear not! Uniform for Sitecore addresses the challenges you face vis-a-vis performance, scalability, and front-end development without your having to upgrade, replatform, or change your license.
A common problem with Sitecore is slow sites. Sitecore was created at a time when webpages were simple, network speeds were slower, and visitors were willing to wait five seconds for a page to load. Things are vastly different nowadays: Webpages are bloated with client-side scripts, network speeds are 10-100x faster, and data shows that visitors bounce off if a page does not load instantaneously.

Personalizing webpages on a CDN with Uniform

Uniform improves Sitecore performance by reducing or eliminating the need for Sitecore CD instances, which are usually a foundational obstacle to high performance. To do that, Uniform caches Sitecore sites with a CDN, greatly reducing CD instances. Uniform does that even with personalized sites by moving personalization to a CDN. That way, even though configuration of personalization is done with the Sitecore rules editor, personalization runs in the CDN. Plus, since Uniform supports all leading CDNs, you’re free to pick your preferred vendor.
Uniform can remove CD instances with what’s called a “Jamstack approach,” whereby a site built and managed in Sitecore is rendered to static files that can be deployed on any CDN or hosting service. This Uniform capability applies to sites built on any version of Sitecore with any Sitecore license, including those created with ASP.NET MVC or Sitecore Headless Services (formerly called JSS). Because it runs on a CDN, personalization continues to work apace.

Scaling website delivery with Uniform

Another common problem for Sitecore customers is scalability. Sitecore’s architecture was created way back when websites ran on a single server capable of serving all the visitors. Those days are long past. In the meantime, Sitecore’s initiatives to enable applications designed to run on one server to run on multiple servers all turned out to be difficult to implement and expensive to operate.
In contrast, Uniform offloads the task of delivering websites from the Sitecore CD instance to the CDN, which handles scalability reliably, saving you the costly burden of maintaining a complex delivery infrastructure yourself.

Modernizing front-end development with Uniform

Front-end development is another challenge for Sitecore customers. Sitecore’s front-end technology has traditionally been ASP.NET MVC. Today, Sitecore offers products like Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) and Sitecore Headless Services. Neither of them—except, possibly, for Sitecore Headless Services, which is seldom used—lends itself well for modern front-end development processes. As a result, Sitecore developers cannot reap the benefits of modern processes, automation, efficiency, and quality improvements available to most front-end developers.
On the other hand, not all brands are interested in moving to a modern development approach for the front end. Uniform does not require you to do so in order to get the performance and scalability benefits. But for brands that forge ahead with a switch, they can do that incrementally with Uniform by using ASP.NET MVC without upgrading their Sitecore server or changing their Sitecore license.

Getting started with Uniform

Uniform for Sitecore offers solutions to the most common and intractable problems Sitecore customers face with no need to switch to another Sitecore version or license. Since incremental adoption is at the core of everything we do, you can implement Uniform at your own pace, ensuring that it works for you before extending it to other parts of your Sitecore site. Ultimately, Uniform helps you get more from your Sitecore investment. 
We’d love to show you how. Check out our Sitecore documentation and contact us for a demo.

References on Sitecore