Sitecore Experience Edge for XM

Current version: 20.x

Experience Edge for Experience Manager (XM) is an API-based service from Sitecore that gives you globally replicated, scalable access to your Sitecore Experience Platform items, layout, and media. You can use the standard publish tools in XM , but instead of rendering content from a self-hosted Content Delivery environment, Experience Edge provides you a Sitecore-hosted GraphQL API. You can build your solution in any language and pull the content you need to power it with GraphQL.

Figure 1. Experience Edge for XM flow
Experience Edge for XM flow

The Experience Edge scalable content API lets you quickly implement solutions for multiple channels.



Experience Edge for XM acts as a publishing target for your Sitecore content and media, and provides a GraphQL API that lets you:

  • Traverse the content tree by ID or path.

  • Obtain a snapshot of the Layout Service output for a route, for use with Sitecore Headless SDKs such as the Next.js SDK.

  • Perform Boolean queries for items based on field values and other item properties.

Sitecore Headless Services provides a mirrored preview implementation of this API to enable editing, preview, and development scenarios on your self-hosted Sitecore XM instance. Experience Edge also provides a CDN for your Sitecore media library that supports media resizing and manipulation using query string parameters that mirror those of the existing Sitecore media handler.

Advantages of Experience Edge

Experience Edge provides a scalable, managed delivery option for headless Sitecore architectures that has the following advantages:

  • Removes infrastructure complexity - remove or reduce the need for hosting Content Delivery servers in your Sitecore infrastructure.

  • Scalability - globally replicate and scale your Sitecore content delivery.

  • Reaches customers across all channels - publish Sitecore content to any device or channel (watches, phones, tablets, voice-controlled devices, and so on).

  • Integrates with any platform - all applications that are able to make API calls out can pull content in from GraphQL.

For Jamstack architectures, in particular, Experience Edge provides an API that can be used for both initial static markup generation, and runtime data needs such as client-side fetch (AJAX) calls and incremental static regeneration.

For details on using Experience Edge with Sitecore JavaScript SDKs, see the JSS documentation.

To learn about the restrictions involved in using Experience Edge for XM, refer to Limitations and restrictions of Experience Edge for XM.

Video: What is Sitecore Experience Edge?

For a general introduction to Sitecore Experience Edge, watch the following video:

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