Elevate User Experience and Performance: AEM Page Search for 50,000 Pages

AEM

In the ever-expanding landscape of e-commerce, where digital shelves are stocked with thousands of products, one of our valued clients found themselves overseeing a thriving e-commerce operation.

Their platform, powered by Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), was thriving with a diverse array of offerings. However, even in the era of digital abundance, success hinges on one crucial factor: the ability of users to seamlessly find what they’re looking for. It’s a story that often starts with a simple query and can end with a satisfied customer making a purchase. This is where our journey begins. Our client came to us with a clear business request: “We need to significantly improve our website’s search functionality to keep up with high traffic and boost user satisfaction.”

Problems

Balancing High Traffic and User Experience: Our client faced the dual challenge of handling a significant surge in website visitors, risking site slowdowns or crashes, while also grappling with user frustration due to difficulties in finding content. This led to increased bounce rates and missed engagement opportunities. Additionally, ensuring search results were relevant and provided instant access to information added further complexity to the challenge.

Achieving Instant Search Response: User expectations for near-instantaneous search results added to the complexity. Our client, with a repository of over 50,000 AEM pages, needed to address this demand for some millisecond response times. Simultaneously, they had to tackle inefficient search functionality, which hindered users in finding products or services to purchase. Achieving these improvements was essential for enhancing conversion rates and revenue, particularly for e-commerce websites.

Real-Time Data/Content Update: In addition to the challenges mentioned earlier, our client had a critical need for real-time content updates. They required changes to be reflected instantaneously across their website, ensuring that users always had access to the most current and accurate information. This demand for real-time updates further intensified the complexity of our optimization efforts.

Key Challenges

High Traffic Volume: When many people visit a website simultaneously, this can make a website slow down or even crash. So, before adding a search feature, we had to think about how to handle all these visitors without causing problems.
Large Content Repository: AEM repository is home to an extensive collection of over 50,000 pages. This large content library is essential to meet business needs. However, when it comes to searching, dealing with such a vast amount of content can be quite challenging. To put it plainly, think of it as having a gigantic toolbox with thousands of different tools. You need to find the right tool quickly, and that’s where the challenge lies.
Expensive AEM Search: AEM comes with a built-in search tool called the Query-Builder, which works well when we have a small amount of content. However, when dealing with thousands of pages, it struggles to keep up. In fact, it can’t handle it, and the server can slow down or even crash. For a large-scale business solution, we needed a much more powerful and efficient search mechanism.
Providing Relevant Results: For a helpful search, it’s not just about matching the exact keyword. We also need to consider similar words or partial matches. Of course, exact matches are important, but for a large-scale website, this can be a common challenge.
Millisecond Response: After overcoming various challenges and adding numerous features to our search, there’s one critical aspect we cannot overlook: delivering search results almost instantly, in just a fraction of a second. In fact, this is not just important; it’s the most crucial aspect of our search.

Solution Overview

To fulfill our business requirements and address key challenges, we implemented the following high-level solutions.

Balancing High Traffic and User Experience: To manage high traffic while improving user experience, we implemented cloud caching, dispatcher caching, and search engine caching. This optimized content delivery and reduced server load, ensuring faster page loads and smoother navigation.

Achieving Instant Search Response: We integrated a high-performance search engine capable of handling over 50,000 AEM pages. This improved search speed significantly, enhancing conversion rates and revenue, especially for e-commerce sites.

Real-Time Data/Content Update: We introduced a content update listener that instantly synchronized changes made in AEM with the search index. This ensured users always had access to the latest information, improving the user experience and delivering up-to-date search results.

In summary, in response to the challenges of managing high traffic and enhancing user experience, we implemented a multifaceted solution. This involved optimizing content delivery with caching techniques, integrating a high-performance search engine, and introducing real-time data updates. These measures collectively improved website performance, search responsiveness, and user satisfaction, contributing to enhanced conversion rates and revenue.

Technical Solution

In the pursuit of addressing these critical challenges and achieving our business goals, we turned to innovative technical solutions. This involved a combination of cutting-edge technologies, meticulous system optimizations, and strategic integration, all designed to elevate the performance of our web platform.

Here how the solution will work:

Data Generation: When we trigger the scraper tool, it performs a systematic traversal of the website, following the sitemap. During this process, it extracts relevant information from each page, creating what we call a “record.” These records capture essential data about the content on each page.

The web scraping tool allows for customized data fetching, enabling the extraction of specific, relevant information from each page.
It is an automated process, reducing the need for manual data entry and ensuring data consistency

Search Engine Integration: After generating these records, the scrapper pushes them to the search engine server. This integration with search engines allows us to store and manage the website’s content data efficiently.

The search engine integration allows for the customization of the response data format.
The integration includes an internal cache system, which enhances search performance
After content updates, the system reindexes the data in real-time, ensuring that users have access to the most up-to-date information

Event-Based Triggering: We’ve set up event-based triggers within the AEM environment. These triggers activate the scraping process whenever specific events occur, such as page publication, asset updates (images, videos, etc.), tag changes, or modifications to experience fragments. Depending on the type of resource being updated, the scrapper tools employ various scraping mechanisms to ensure records remain current and accurate within the search engine.

The setup includes dual trigger options – automatic and manual. This flexibility allows for automated scraping triggered by specific events as well as the ability to initiate scraping manually when needed, providing control and customization.
Depending on the type of resource being updated, the scraper tools employ various scraping mechanisms.
The triggers can be customized to respond to specific events relevant to the website’s content and update requirements, providing tailored solutions for data synchronization.

This approach ensures that the search engine is always up-to-date with the latest content from AEM pages, enabling lightning-fast search responses while maintaining data accuracy and relevancy.

The Impact of this Search

Enhanced User Experience: A seamless and effective search experience keeps users engaged and satisfied, reducing bounce rates and increasing the likelihood of conversion. Happy users are more likely to return and make purchases.

Increased Sales and Conversions: An efficient search function can significantly boost sales. When users quickly find products that meet their needs, they are more likely to make a purchase. This leads to increased conversion rates and revenue growth.

Data-Driven Insights: Search analytics provide valuable insights into user behavior and preferences. This data can inform business strategies, helping companies optimize their offerings, marketing efforts, and user experiences.

Competitive Edge: In today’s competitive digital landscape, businesses that offer superior search functionality stand out. Users are more likely to choose a platform that provides an effortless and rewarding search experience.

Achievements

Offloading Server Load:
By conducting page data indexing and search engine operations outside of the AEM environment, we’ve successfully eliminated the burden on AEM servers. This strategic move has significantly reduced server load, ensuring that the website’s core functions remain fast and responsive.

Enhanced Performance:
With the heavy lifting of indexing and searching performed externally, AEM servers can focus on their primary tasks, such as serving web pages and content delivery. As a result, users experience enhanced website performance, with faster page loads and seamless navigation.

Scalability and Reliability:
Separating the search functionality from AEM has not only lightened the server load but has also made the infrastructure more scalable and reliable.

Consistent User Experience:
Users can now enjoy a consistent and high-quality browsing experience, regardless of the volume of concurrent visitors or the complexity of search queries.

Cost Efficiency:
Offloading search-related processes from the AEM servers not only improves performance but also leads to optimized resource allocation. Only for this feature, we don’t need to expand the AEM server resource.

These benefits showcase how the decision to move the page data indexing and search engine functionality outside of AEM has positively impacted the website’s performance, scalability, and overall user experience.

In summary, the transformation journey to enhance our website’s search functionality has yielded remarkable results. By addressing the challenges of managing high traffic, improving user experience, and achieving sub-millisecond search responses, we have met our business goals and set a new standard for search excellence.

Our innovative technical solutions, including cloud caching, high-performance search engine integration, and real-time data updates, have propelled us toward enhanced performance, scalability, and a consistent user experience.

This strategic shift has not only lightened the server load but has also significantly improved website responsiveness, ensuring that our users can seamlessly navigate through our extensive content library of 50,000 pages.

In the fiercely competitive digital landscape, our commitment to providing superior search experience positions us as a leader in delivering user-centric solutions. This journey has transformed our website and empowered our users, setting the stage for continued growth and success in the digital realm.

Brain Station 23 is focused on delivering tailored services to meet the unique needs and expectations of their clients.

AEM