WordPress vs Sitecore: Personalizations

If you want to add advanced personalizations to your Sitecore instance—it doesn’t matter if you use Sitecore XM Cloud or self-hosted XM or XP—you’ll need to get Sitecore’s Personalize solution.

But for this handbook, because we’re mainly concerned with Sitecore XM Cloud, we’ll discuss personalizations that ship with it.

So basically, you get Personalize “lite” with Sitecore XM Cloud. With Sitecore XM Cloud’s Pages, you can set up some basic personalizations using events. Here are some of the personalization rules that work with the default Sitecore XM Cloud:

• Region: The visitor is in region(s) during the current visit
• First referrer: The visitor comes from a URL that compares to referrer in the current visit
• UTM value: The visit includes a UTM type that compares to UTM value
• First page: The visit has started on a page that compares to page during the current visit
• New or returning visitor: The visitor is a specific type to your site

Let’s talk about WordPress now.

The basic personalizations that you’re getting right out-of-the-box with Sitecore XM Cloud can be implemented on WordPress with the help of lightweight plugins or delivery layers (like the CDN). 

And for advanced personalizations, you can use any third-party personalizations solution.

For doing the same on Sitecore, as mentioned above, you’ll have to go with Sitecore’s Personalize solution. 

Both add additional overhead to your setups, but with WordPress, you can choose the best vendor for your needs. For example, you might just end up going with a personalization solution that also brings A/B testing, feature flagging, and feature experimentation, considerably optimizing your experimentation stack.