7 reasons to upgrade to Kentico Xperience 13

Kentico Xperience is a digital experience platform that combines content management, digital marketing, and commerce. It empowers businesses and brands to increase customer engagement and deliver personalized content to the right audience. 

Kentico Xperience 13, the latest version of the platform, provides new technologies for the development of websites and web solutions. With this update, Kentico is one of the first DXP vendors to switch to ASP.NET Core MVC.  

But what benefits will it ultimately bring us? In this article, we give you 7 reasons to consider upgrading to Kentico Xperience 13. 

1. .NET Core Support 

With Kentico Xperience 13 it is now possible for developers to build a ASP.NET MVC Core application with Kentico Xperience as the underlying engine. Developers can leverage features such as Feature folders, Tag Helpers and Docker.  

By running a live site application on the ASP.NET Core MVC framework, developers can benefit from better load times and website performance with a smaller footprint. They can process more huge amounts of data and traffic with less resources. It allows developers to build websites and apps on newer technology and brings more freedom when choosing an infrastructure to run a website. 

2. Integrations with Voice Assistants 

The rise of voice assistants has been amazing in recent years, so it's no surprise to see them on the radar of a leading digital experience platform like Kentico. If you upgrade to Kentico 13, you now can control the admin interface with KEVIN, Kentico's specially developed integration tool that works with Amazon Alexa or Google Home. 

3. Improved Marketing Automation 

If you spend a lot of time creating complex automation flows in Kentico's backend, you'll be pleased to see that the marketing tool has had a complete makeover. It's not just visual aspects though, there are also some useful updates that we'll all be enjoying. 

One of these is the ability to compose new e-mails directly in the marketing tool. It may sound simple, but this was always an effort, especially if you are the kind of marketer who likes to set up the automation flow before drafting the e-mails. Now you no longer have to hop from the marketing tool to the e-mail builder, it can all be done in one place. 

To take it one step further, Kentico has even been kind enough to include automation templates in Xperience 13. Instead of having to create a new workflow every time, you can choose from one of the predefined templates with patterns such as birthday emails, abandoned shopping carts and re-engagement campaigns. In addition, you can also save the templates yourself.  

4. Reusable Content 

Kentico Xperience 13 provides a full-fledged feature set to create pages, sections, and various elements by reusing existing content. The re-implementation of Xperience’s reusable content feature saves time by allowing editors to create pages, sections, and more by reusing existing content in three different ways. 

Content editors can now reuse content by:

• Linking a page or an object through the new Linked Node feature and interface

• Utilizing related pages via the related pages tab and relationships 

• Ad-hoc related documents (through a page type field of type ‘Page field’) 

Product management has listened carefully to the community and added functionality to the platform to create a content item in multiple places in the content tree. This can be used to for example build a page taxonomy within the content tree. 

5. A Future-Proof Web Framework 

Kentico’s move to the ASP.NET Core MVC Framework for Xperience 13 provides increased control over code and simplified deployment. It allows developers to progress with the latest programming structures and languages. 

Developers can create custom .NET Standard libraries or ASP.NET Core and ASP.NET Core MVC applications connected with Kentico Xperience. Meet and use a large scale of business requirements, not only for web development but also for mobile backend or IoT application development. 

6. Content Tree-Based Routing 

In addition to existing approaches for URL routing, Xperience 13 comes with a new content tree-based URL routing mode. The system can automatically generate URLs for pages based on their position in the content tree and their page types. 

This functionality makes it possible to automatically generate URLs for pages in the content tree. These pages can then be displayed within MVC without dealing with the technical part of knotting routes to controllers. The content tree-based routing functionality can be activated via a setting.  

7. Stay Up To Date 

Staying on top of software updates ensures that customers remain supported. This can be in the form of hotfixes, security updates or simply to be able to send a question by e-mail and receive an answer. By being up to date, you can also benefit from innovations in the latest product versions.  

When you stay up to date with the current versions, minimizes security risks and you will continue to benefit from high quality services. 

Get ready to upgrade 

If you are considering upgrading your Kentico 12 MVC site to Kentico 13 or going for a complete redesign, Kentico Xperience 13 offers you a great platform to build on in the future, with fast loading times, simplified implementation and the most up-to-date marketing platform.    

We can help you with the rebuilding and redesigning of your website in Kentico Xperience MVC or Kentico Kontent. Reach out to our team of experts who will be happy to help and advise you.