Sitecore Development Best Practices for your Site

Sitecore is a flexible and dynamic platform that powers thousands of websites; however, if not implemented following best practices, you’re bound to run into pitfalls with various sections of your website. We’ve worked with Sitecore since 2007 and know the ins and outs of Sitecore implementations and, as we’ve seen with clients who’ve come to us with Sitecore issues, what can happen when Sitecore is implemented without following best practices.

As we gear up to release our third Sitecore Implementation Best Practices white paper, here is a taste of some Development Best Practices recommendations. Each item is broken down into three parts: the actual best practice, the rationale of why you would want to do it, and the impact it will have on your website:

Best Practice 1:

Content Editing should be done on the master database and then pushed to the web database.

Rationale:

This means data will always flow from the master to web database and also gives you one point of content editing, making for a smooth flow of data changes in your site.

Impact:

Implementation

Best Practice 2:

Disable View State for pages that do not require having one.

Rationale:

This reduces the size of the page, thereby improving the load times and performance of the site.

Impact:

Performance

Best Practice 3:

Remove the .aspx extension from the page URLs and the .ashx extension for the media items.

Rationale:

This will help improve SEO of the site.

Impact:

Implementation

Want more best practices? Keep an eye out for more best practices and the release of our new Best Practices Guide in the upcoming weeks.