About 35% of businesses today use headless content management systems and the headless CMS market is expected to grow to $3.8 billion in 2032.

The CMS everyone’s talking about, Sitecore XM Cloud is a headless, cloud-native SaaS solution. It not only solves many shortcomings of the previous XP platform but also revolutionizes the CMS landscape with its exceptional capabilities.

For the larger part, XM Cloud is all about speed and scaling productivity. Switching to XM Cloud will benefit you in more ways than one. Be it the cost, agility, efficiency, you name it. The headless approach means that its content backend is decoupled from the frontend giving you more flexibility.

Let’s take a detailed look at its features, architecture, and benefits.

Sitecore Architecture

The frontend website is mostly built with NextJS. Webhook is another crucial feature of XM Cloud and is used to notify external services about any triggers or changes.

You must have noticed how in the XP platform; events are used to signal the CD publishing as complete. In monolithic architecture, the core database could be used to notify remote events. However, composable architecture systems can only communicate via APIs. The webhooks could be used on the git repository.

There are higher chances for the developers to use customizations for data and synchronization than reworking system functionalities.

Sitecore XM Cloud Features

1. Sitecore Cloud Portal

A centralized portal that allows you to view Sitecore applications and subscriptions opted for by your organization and switch between them. If you are a member of multiple organizations, then you can also change between them. The portal is used to set up teams, roles, and users. You can see which XM Cloud instances are active using the Sitecore Cloud portal while working on XM Cloud development.

2. Sitecore Pages

Pages is the next stage for Horizon and the eventual replacement for Experience Editor. It focuses on creating and composing pages and adding components to pages. Pages allow users to drag and drop, and build content and experiences—and all work natively with headless capabilities.

Also, the embedded personalization features are layered into the Pages experience. Any custom components that development teams build can be seen in the Pages experience. There’s also a new dashboard from where you can quickly navigate and launch pages.

3. Sitecore Sites

The Sites tab is for multi-site management, where you can manage and create sites based on templates that you provide to customers to get them started quickly. It's an SXA site scaffolding feature where you generate a default site based on a set of predefined configurations.

4. Sitecore Explorer

A new Sitecore Explorer feature that allows customers to quickly see all the different sites that they have on a CM instance. From that site, they get to see the hierarchy and structure of their pages. They can drill into the pages application or do some high-level administration on a site or a page level.

5. Sitecore Components

Sitecore Components allows customers to design style sheets and theming. It also allows them to define custom HTML-based components and plug data sources into those components. This enables them to have XM as the data source where it populates items into these components.

It could even be a third-party (non-secure data source) as well. These components, once defined and created, are available in the Pages experience. When a user is in the Pages for page assembly and composition, they can either choose from an SXA component that their development team built or the Sitecore Components builder that marketing teams define.

6. Embedded Personalization and Analytics

It is a page-based personalization wherein you have audiences and segments with a set of rules defined on those variations and audiences essentially using Edge functions. You swap out the page that gets delivered to the visitor based on those personalization rules. You can also preview this in the Pages preview mode. And then to power a lot of those rules, you have embedded analytics and those get tracked basis page traffic on the site.