Sitecore is the rapidly growing digital experience platform, delivering more than just content management. Sitecore is one of the most powerful and sturdy experience systems available on the market today, which combines robust web content management with marketing automation software. Sitecore shines at user engagement by providing abundance of personalization alternatives, which can be merged with analytics to calculate the effectiveness of the marketing campaign. Sitecore’s experience editor delivers easy & quick way to update content on every page. Sitecore supports various different websites in one deployment, multilingual content and is flexibly scalable for any target audience. It has many 3rd party modules available to install that can clarify development to easily create the optimum solution.

At the time of hiring a Sitecore Certified Partner, you believe that their precious partner status and all their Sitecore MVPs means that they know exactly what business they are into, that they will provide what they promised, and that they are solely committed to prioritizing your requirements first and assisting you in getting the most value out of the platform. Unfortunately, the reality is not always this fruitful. Sometimes, it is that some Sitecore Certified Partners, due to the feeling of pressure of unrealistic deadlines and an enticing urge to grow, will merge together a “B Team” or even a “C Team”, or even lead to an extent where they outsource your work to a team of overseas contractors just to close another deal and maximize their profit margin for the business. In such cases, you are just another deal to them, and when your first project comes to a close, it becomes seemingly obvious that your Sitecore certified partners are all about quantity and not quality.

Warning Signs That You Need To Change Your Sitecore Certified Partner

Your website was executed without a Sitecore Architecture Document

If your sitecore partner does not generate a sitecore architecture document for every project they do for your business, then you definitely need to think about your sitecore partner. A right Sitecore implementation, whether for a new site or an enhancement, should always start with a thorough Sitecore Architecture Document. This important piece of documentation contains the details of each and every process of how the content will be structured, what modules will be created, and what content will be editable within Sitecore. This document makes sure that you, and everyone involved in the delivery of your project, is on the same page. It ensures that there won’t be any unlikable surprises along the way, and most significantly at launch time.

Your website is slow to load

If you’re determining page load times in seconds, instead of milliseconds, then you’ve got a problem. There are many issues that can cause a site to load slowly, but all of them can be addressed and solved. If your sitecore vendor says they’ve done everything they can, they may not be agreeing or able to fix the underlying issues then you definitely need to have a check on it. Search functionality and menu generation are the two famous culprits behind poor site performance.

Your deployments have unexpected side effects and bugs

Code shall definitely be well tested and verified before it is deployed to a live environment. If your Sitecore Partner is following sitecore best practices, they will first deploy to a test or QA environment where new code is tested, verified and accepted by stakeholders before it is deployed to the live environment. If you often experience problems when code is deployed, then it can be a good indicator that your Sitecore Partner’s QA process is unproductive.

You cannot manage content on your website

If you are dependent on your Sitecore Partner to edit, manage and update content on your website, then you’ve got a major problem. An experienced Sitecore Partner will make sure that you are allowed to manage your website own content by:

Applying a modular content structure

Allowing adding and editing content easy

Arranging the site to use Experience Editor so that inline editing and the addition and assignment of content modules becomes easy and quick

Computing proper user roles to make sure that the right people are managing the right content

Configuring workflows to allow required review and approval of content before it reaches to a live environment

You Cannot Manage Content Using The Sitecore Experience Editor Interface

The Sitecore Experience Editor interface permits you to edit your content in-line as you browse through your site, and monitor exactly what the page will look like while you’re working on it. If you can’t do thison your website, then you’ve got a major problem to resolve. If your website was executed on Sitecore in the last couple of years, and you and your employees haven’t been trained on how to use the Experience Editor, or it wasn’t specified in the SOW or your Sitecore Architecture Document, then chances are your site was not implemented to work with the Experience Editor and you really need to think about it.

You Cannot Conduct A/B And Multivariate Tests On Your Website

If you requested that your Sitecore Partner provides you the capacity to set up and run A/B and multivariate tests on your own, and you have no idea how to do this, then you are stuck with an irrelevant vendor. The Sitecore Experience Editor is Sitecore’s recommended interface for managing A/B and multivariate tests. Being allowed to do this needs one part proper execution and one part proper training, but provided your vendor has offered both of these ingredients, you should be able to run tests and optimize content, on any page of your website, on your own.

Have Concerns About Your Current Partner? Here’s What To Do.

If you are facing any of the above mentioned warning signs then you may want to assess whether your implementation is following sitecore best practices or not, you can connect with Biztechnosys team that will assist and help you take actionable decisions and move forward. Here the team designs the assessment to help your business assess the current status of your sitecore website uncover hidden bugs, and determine what corrective actions need to be taken to meet your objectives for the present and future