What Does a DXP Mean for Developers?

For developers today, the pressure to build dynamic, great-looking websites and apps has never been higher. As younger consumers gravitate towards more personalized, authentic digital experiences, there’s a constantly-growing demand for websites and apps to run faster, look better, and integrate with the latest technologies.

A digital experience platform (DXP), which helps optimize digital experiences consistently across the customer lifecycle, can provide developers with a powerful tool for meeting this demand head-on, and often at a lower cost and faster time to market than it takes to manage everything separately, across an organization.

This article will explain what a DXP is, how developers can benefit from using a DXP, and some easy tips for getting started.

What is a Digital Experience Platform?

In today’s increasingly digital world, the online customer experience has become more important to businesses than ever before. How a customer finds a website or app, and how they interact with it, can have significant consequences for a brand and a business’ bottom line. Enter the DXP, an integrated set of technologies based on a common platform, that provides audiences with consistent, secure, and personalized digital experiences by streamlining the various touchpoints that occur across the customer journey.

Leveraging a DXP means finding the best way to meet customers through multiple communication channels in authentic, relevant ways, with a focus on speed and security. At its core, a DXP goes beyond the website and into the day-to-day life of a customer, from mobile access and personalization to IoT-connected devices. A DXP also includes customer-facing access as well as back-end digital processes that help internal teams create a better overall experience for end-users.

A DXP will differ depending on a business’ objectives and the type of audience it’s trying to reach. That said, most DXPs begin with a company’s website. A well-designed DXP can retrieve information from site visitors (i.e. physical location identified by IP address, or if the visitor is returning) and provide content specifically tailored for that visitor. With a more advanced DXP, visitors can sign into a user platform and enjoy a personal, customized experience, based on information they’ve supplied. That previously-collected customer data can also be included in a mobile app, and filtered to other parts of the customer journey, providing consistency across a company’s different access points.

How Does a DXP Impact Developers?

For a developer, a DXP is a powerful tool that can speed up and simplify their workload, particularly when it comes to setting up new sites, and ongoing management of the WordPress backend. When implemented correctly, a DXP can save time, reduce technical issues, and provide clients or end-users with dynamic, great-looking digital experiences that will help differentiate them from their competitors online.

A DXP should simplify a developer’s job and free-up time spent on things like backend CMS maintenance so they can focus on more innovative projects that move their business forward. A well-designed DXP should have infrastructure built-in to support fast page load times, and additional features like analytics, automation, and security that should either be baked into the DXP or easy to set-up and configure alongside it.

A DXP should also be user-friendly and relatively easy for a developer to learn and use. There are no special skills a developer needs to acquire before using a DXP and when deployed correctly, a DXP should improve many areas of a developer’s workflow, particularly with regard to customer-facing assets and content delivery.

More importantly, a well-designed DXP should make it easier for developers to comply with in-house security policies, develop modules that extend the DXP’s functional scope, reuse their code from project to project, deploy their development with single-click functionality, and leverage existing apps through powerful integration and aggregation capabilities.

Digital Experience Platforms and Developer Workflows

Most developers today follow some type of agile workflow (Scrum, Kanban, etc.) and while these methodologies were designed with speed and efficiency in mind, they are still vulnerable to a wide array of issues that might delay or stop the flow of work altogether.

Putting a well-designed DXP to use can reduce some of those issues by simplifying time-consuming development tasks such as site setup, site migration, and deployment. WP Engine’s DXP for WordPress, for example, offers Dedicated Development Environments, where developers can perform load tests, pen-tests, and compatibility tests in isolated development and staging environments.

How Developers Can Use A DXP

Developers can use a DXP to simplify their workflow as well as things like ecosystem integrations. For example, at WP Engine, we leverage the WordPress REST API to integrate WordPress with tools that span the MarTech stack, as well as integrated partner solutions within the WP Engine platform (i.e. AWS, GCP infrastructure, Let’s Encrypt SSL certs, and New Relic APM).

WP Engine’s DXP also offers additional features such as GeoTarget, which lets you deliver personalized, hyper-localized content to visitors based on their IP address.

With WP Engine’s acquisition of StudioPress in 2018, we began offering customers a suite of premium WordPress themes as well as access to the Genesis Framework at no extra cost. These premium themes allow developers to quickly create sleek, professional sites with no coding required. When combined with the WP Engine DXP for WordPress, these themes and theme framework help developers quickly and easily spin up great-looking websites that can scale across a customer’s digital journey.

WP Engine’s DXP is also tied directly to our in-house WordPress Expertise. From onboarding to assistance with new features to troubleshooting and beyond, WP Engine’s DXP comes with multiple channels for contacting our award-winning support organization, so you can focus on innovation—not admin tasks or troubleshooting.

Get Started With The Developer-Friendly DXP from WP Engine

Ready to get started with WP Engine’s DXP for WordPress? Check out our digital experience plans and find the right one for you.