Widget Usage Trends in Kentico Page Builder

In my opinion, the Page Builder experience is very attractive to customers and one of the main reasons they choose Kentico.

1. 90%+
2. From what I’ve heard from my clients, Kentico sales representatives present Page Builder when pitching Kentico and set the expectation that this is the default way of working. So, yes.
3. It varies based on site complexity. I always try to keep the number as low as possible while balancing usability and manageability. Still, in my case it’s usually 20+ widgets per website. I also try to limit which widgets are allowed in specific widget zones, depending on the context of use.
4. It’s a bit difficult to judge. From what I see, it’s beneficial for editors and marketers to have a visual guide, where Page Builder clearly helps. Especially compared to working with structured content in Content Hub.
5. I try to find a middle ground. As I mentioned, I balance ease of use (which is related to the number of widget properties and how much functionality a single widget provides) with the overall number of widgets.

1. 100% - if they're not using the Page Builder then they're losing out on a ton of the value of website channels (marketer control of the experience, personalization)
   However, that doesn't mean every page relies on the Page Builder!
   Home page, landing pages, key product and service pages - these always use the Page Builder.
   If you have 1,000 products you want to feature on a website these would not use the Page Builder. No marketing team can build those out using the Page Builder so instead you would use templates that predefine layouts and content based on some business rules.
2. Yes. But it's combined with the structured content fields of the web page and reusable content from the Content hub.
3. I've seen anywhere from 10 to 30, so 20 is probably a good average for larger projects. The number and functionality of widgets should have a great marketer experience as a goal and work within the constraints of the content model, website design variations, and brand/experience requirements.
4. Yes. This is how we market and message Xperience by Kentico - it puts marketers in control of the content, design, and brand of their digital channels. Technical teams set up the guardrails with the logic of components and Page Builder restrictions (as Milan mentioned), but marketers should be empowered to work confidently within those constraints.
5. The amount of logic and complexity you put into a widget (to handle more use cases and content) is a trade-off of developer experience and marketer experience.
   When marketers use complex widgets there can be a frustrating learning curve, it can be difficult for developers to guarantee design and brand consistency, and evolving these widgets over time (as marketing strategy and requirements change) is difficult because you don't want regressions when deploying a change.
   Really complex widgets also have the smell of engineers who want to over-complicate things 😅.
   With Kentico Portal Engine people used Repeaters as the catch-all presentational component. I was not a fan. They were too complex and too many combinations of options led to poor or broken results.
   Simple widgets that have a very clear purpose and are focused on a single content type can have plenty of benefits. There's a happy middle ground that's probably different for each Xperience project, dev team, and marketing team.

I will throw my agency experience in as well.

1. 100%. We haven't done a Kentico build in many years that didn't leverage widgets as the primary form of content management. While it doesn't apply to every page, it is almost always a vast majority of pages that leverage widgets through the PageBuilder for content.
2. Yes. While I don't sit right at the front of the sales pipeline, it's definitely an expectation by the time it reaches my hands in the discovery process.
3. We try and get it to 10-20 during the original build process. We find that post build though as additional widgets get added that this number can easily end up as 30+ on some projects. To add to this, we have also had a client request 30 widgets to replace their existing widget stack so they could effectively redesign their content progressively over time. We were able to introduce the new style widgets and when they were finished with their content migration, we simply retired and removed the legacy style widgets.
4. Definitely with our client base. We often have clients who have previously worked with Kentico or have already been through a review process prior to reaching out where they have seen and had a demo of Kentico. By the time we are talking to our clients, widgets and page builder are an expectation with their potential Kentico build.
5. We typically have a core set of content-based widgets that are fairly common to most of our builds and then extend that with a series of widgets that match our clients' specific requirements. Often, when planning our widgets we take a look at the editing experience specifically and plan our widgets around what provides the best experience for the content editors. With several sites containing well over 10,000 pages of content, it's worth making the widgets clear and easy to use.