Pages and widgets
Sitecore Discover widgets are dynamic components providing various merchandising opportunities. The pages, as containers of widgets, deliver these experiences based on your business needs. Pages also provide contextual information for these widgets and can be used to filter content in different ways.
Pages
Typically, pages are created for you by the Sitecore integration team during the onboarding process and you do not need to edit or change them. The only exceptions are promotional landing pages, which you can create as needed.
Page types
Page types include product details pages, product listing pages, and landing pages.
Product details pages
Pages that show details about individual products. Product details pages (PDPs) display recommendation widgets that show personalized product suggestions and trending products. When the user has not interacted with your site before, personal recommendations are replaced with top-viewed products.
Product listing pages
Pages that display a list of products by category. They are automatically created by mapping each of your categories to its corresponding URL and associated products on an ongoing basis using your product feed. Product listing pages (PLPs) have the product category as a natural context. You can select more than one category to build an intersection of category pages. This enables you to deepen your catalog exposure to search engines and improve your site's search authority for mid-tier and long-tail keywords. In addition to the list of products, PLPs display a recommendation widget that shows the top products within the current category.
Landing pages
A landing page is a single page, often composed of products from multiple categories. You can populate products for a landing page either by combining a search results widget with page hard filter settings or by combining a recommendation widget with rules.
Pages configured during onboarding
The following types of pages are created for you during onboarding:
Page name |
Description |
---|---|
Home |
Your site's homepage. Displays recommendation widgets that show personalized product suggestions and trending products. When the user has not interacted with your site before, personal recommendations are replaced with top-viewed products. |
Search results |
Page that displays search results. By default, this page type does not display a recommendation widget. |
Not found |
Page that is shown when a user attempts to access a page that does not exist. This page displays a recommendation widget that shows trending products. |
No results |
Page that is shown when a search returns no results. This page displays a recommendation widget that shows trending products. |
Order confirmation |
Page that is shown during the order confirmation step of the purchase funnel. This page displays a recommendation widget that shows products that are frequently purchased with the product(s) in the current order. |
Cart |
Page that displays the visitor's cart. In addition to the products in the cart, the page also displays a recommendation widget that shows products that are frequently purchased with the product(s) in the cart. |
Promotional landing pages display promotional collections of products. These are the only types of pages that you are likely to create after the Sitecore integration team completes the initial setup of your account.
Widgets
A widget can have many variations of which only one can be default or active at a time. It is the widget variation that is displayed on your website. When you create a new widget, the system also creates a default variation. To modify the experience or add more experiences, you typically create and work with additional widget variations.
Both widgets and their variations are integral parts of delivering experiences to visitors.
You can think of widget variations as instantiations of widgets that you can customize and schedule. A variation also contains rules to further define conditional experiences based on site and visitor context.
Widgets are built to track user interaction and report on their performance using key performance indicators and metrics. You can find these reports in the Analytics section of the Customer Engagement Console (CEC).
During initial setup, Sitecore representatives populate the CEC with pages and widgets. They configure them to match your requirements.
Unless specifically indicated, you can use these widgets with their default variations, without additional configuration.
Global widget
The foundation of all widgets is the global widget. It can have many variations of which only one can be default or active at a time.
Widget types
You can create the following types of widgets for personalized search, recommendation, and messaging experiences.
Preview search widget
A preview search widget drives the experience of the search input field on its host page.
As soon as a user starts typing a search term in the field, the widget requests matching products and displays suggested results.
Search results widget
On page load, the search results widget makes a request using search criteria often derived from the URL.
Based on the number of results, the widget paginates the results. The visitor can also sort and filter results for fitments and facets.
Recommendation widget
The recommendation widget is a very flexible widget that displays products based on the content of the host page, trends, categories, attributes, and more.
You can configure its experience from a list of appearance styles.
Email recommendation widget
The email recommendation widget is essentially an email campaign complete with a recommendation widget.
Banner widget
Banner widgets are image rich widgets. You can configure them by picking a layout from a list of appearance styles.
HTML block widget
HTML block widgets can contain images and text. You can create them by selecting an appearance style without writing any code. You can also customize an appearance style with HTML code.
SEO widget
The CEC publishes and serves static versions of all its configured pages. If a page contains an SEO widget, the publishing system adds meta data describing the page's content. This process is repeated after every catalog feed run or page configuration changes.