Sitecore Experience Editor: Tips and Tricks for Streamlining Content Editing

Content management is a very critical and important aspect of any website, especially in today’s fast-paced digital landscape, it is crucial to have efficient tools when it comes to content editing. The preferences of the customers are far more of a priority, and you need to meet the customers’ changing content needs.

Sitecore as you know is one of the leading CMS platforms to offer powerful solutions, one of them being the Sitecore Experience Editor. The Sitecore Experience Editor has a friendly user interface that allows content authors and marketers to edit web content quickly and efficiently. This also includes a live preview of the changes.

Through this blog, we will explore different tips and tricks that will help you streamline your content editing process in the Sitecore Experience Editor.

Before you dive into the specific tips and tricks, you need to familiarize yourself with the interface of Sitecore Experience Editor. The Experience Editor provides a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) environment where it allows your editors to make changes on the live website directly.

You need to spend some time for exploration of all the available tools as well as features for making your content editing experience smoother.

1. Personalize the Experience

   Sitecore allows you to personalize the Experience Editor in order to align it with your workflow. You can configure its appearance, layout as well as behavior based on your requirements. When you tailor the Experience Editor according to your needs, your efficiency will be significantly enhanced for editing.

2. Use the Placeholder Settings

   The Sitecore Experience Editor allows you to insert different components into different placeholders on your website landing pages. You can also create and configure the placeholder settings for determining which components can be added to specific placeholders. This will streamline your content editing process.

   Because of this, you are ensuring that the content editors can add components that are relevant to the design of the page. This reduces the risk of inconsistencies.

3. Enable Inline Editing

   Inline editing is one of the powerful features of Sitecore Experience Editor that allows you to make changes to individual fields within a component, all without actually opening a separate dialogue box. By enabling this feature, you can update texts, images and other content elements.

   When you get to do this without navigating through multiple menus, it will provide you with a more efficient editing experience.

4. Utilize Snippets

   What are snippets? They are pre-defined content fragments that you can reuse on different pages. Snippets are excellent for when you want to maintain consistent branding and content elements across your website.

   When you create and use snippets, you save time and along with that, also ensure the uniformity required in your content.

5. Versioning and Workflow

   Sitecore offers robust versioning and workflow features. This allows your content editors to work on the content in collaboration with complete control. You must always use versioning as it allows you to keep track of any changes made in the content.

   This also ensures that only the approved content is published. It is important to understand the workflow in Sitecore if you want to maintain content integrity and consistency.

6. Customize the Experience Buttons

   The Sitecore Experience Editor has a toolbar that comes with a variety of buttons allowing you to perform specific actions for example saving, publishing, previewing. But you can edit and customize this toolbar to include the buttons which are relevant and necessary for you.

   This way you can remove the clutter and make it easier for yourself to access tools that you require more frequently.

7. Keyboard Shortcuts

   When you want to boost your editing efficiency, keyboard shortcuts are the best way to go. Sitecore Experience Editor provides several of those shortcuts for common actions. When you learn and use these shortcuts, you save time during content editing.

8. Enable Autosave

   To prevent the loss of work, you must enable the autosave feature. This feature automatically saves your changes at regular intervals and ensures that your progress is never lost even by mistake or due to any unexpected interruptions (such as browser crash, power outage, internet issues, etc.)

9. Content Search

   The content search feature of Sitecore is one of the most valuable tools for when you want to locate and edit your content items quickly. You can use keywords to search your content and the results will quickly provide you with direct links to those content items, in turn making it easier for you to quickly make the edits.

10. Multilanguage editing

    If your brand is one that caters to a multilingual audience, Sitecore also offers you editing capabilities in multiple languages. This way you can edit your content simultaneously in multiple languages which saves your time and effort and helps you maintain the website.

11. Leverage Personalization

    Sitecore, as you know, is very well known for its personalization capabilities and features. You can use the Sitecore Experience Editor for creating and editing personalized content along with variations for your different audience segments.

    This will not just streamline your editing experience but also make sure that your content is relevant to your website as well as relevant to the visitors.

12. Enable Device Simulation

    The Experience Editor allows you to view and edit your content through previews of different devices such as smartphones, tablets, etc. This is one of the most valuable features because it helps you make sure that the content is responsive and understand what it looks like across various screen sizes.

13. Shared Fields

    Shared fields in Sitecore are a great way for you to manage consistency in your content. It allows you to share the same content across multiple web pages. Any changes made to these shared fields will also reflect on all the pages using that same field.

    This is useful specifically for elements like logos or contact information or any content that needs to be consistent throughout your website.

The Sitecore Experience Editor is a powerful tool for content editing, and these tips and tricks can help you streamline your content management workflow.

By familiarizing yourself with the interface, personalizing your experience, and making the most of Sitecore's features, you can optimize your content editing process and deliver a better online experience for your audience.