Select your content modeling approach

You’ve learned about different ways to store structured content in Xperience. From a global perspective, the approach you choose depends on the project needs, editor teams, and content delivery strategy.

You can store your data in a reusable content format in the Content hub for universal delivery, including a headless or hybrid-headless experience, and follow the pattern that we call an atomic content model, or create a page-based model that works great for web-centric, visually driven projects.

The atomic content model focuses on creating a highly composable, omnichannel experience. Editors store reusable content in the Content hub and keep this content channel-agnostic. To display this content in the presentation channel, such as a website, app, or campaign microsite, editors will use channel-specific “wrappers” around the reusable content and add channel-specific content, for example, SEO metadata in website channels. This approach works best for solutions that require scalable content reuse across many channels while maintaining a single source of truth.

The page-based model allows you to manage structured and unstructured content within webpage content types for web-centric, page-driven content flows. The editing UI for structured content in the website page is similar to Content hub, and editors can reuse content input through this interface in other website pages (on the same channel or cross website channel), for example, for listing pages, or in emails. The unstructured data is managed through the Page Builder. In Page Builder components, editors can refer to other reusable, structured content and display it. Or, they can store the content inside the Page Builder page or area. This makes the content “owned by the page” and very hard to reuse.

Using Page Builder as a primary way to store data is effective for:

• Projects where content is used primarily on one website and in one place on this website.
• Teams that require a user-friendly, WYSIWYG editing interface while maintaining semantic structure for SEO and AI readiness.

We’ll discuss both approaches later in dedicated material.

Compare the content modeling options

The following high-level comparison helps you decide which approach aligns with your project goals and highlights the most important trade-offs.

The Content hub fits best for content reuse, omnichannel consistency, and headless delivery. At the same time, page-based models align with visual-first workflows.

Page-based structured content aligns with design-driven editorial workflows, enabling structured content while maintaining flexibility for visual layout. In contrast, the Content hub enables consistent content reuse across websites, apps, and campaigns with centralized management.

The editing experience differs. Page-based model supports primarily visual, page-driven editing while the Content hub focuses on structured, presentation-agnostic, reusable data management.

Xperience also supports a combination of these approaches, allowing you to use Page Builder widgets to display data stored in a structured format from the Content hub within page layouts. However, Xperience does not support inline editing of the structured data within the Page Builder interface.

Both approaches can support strong SEO and AI search readiness if you correctly structure the individual content types.

Let’s make a short overview of both approaches: