Sitecore Astro JSS SDK vs Sitecore Content SDK
Last Thursday, I presented the Sitecore Astro Demo website on the Sitecore Headless Development User Group #16. I told the story, why we did the Sitecore Verticals demo, how we did it, and what results we achieved.
The biggest result for this demo is that the Astro website is much faster than the website on Next.js. There are two exact websites: one on Next.js, second is on Astro. They are the same. We run Backstop.js to compare all pages. Backstop.js makes pixel-by-pixel comparison. Then we run automated Lighthouse tests page by page.
Sitecore Content SDK
I expected that there would be a question about Sitecore Content SDK. Sitecore recently released the 1.0.0 version. They did a great job compared to Sitecore JSS. Sitecore made it slim, got rid of unnecessary imports, and improved the development experience. So, I was ready for the question about it. And I even prepared the slide for the answer. The slide said that Sitecore Next.js Content SDK is faster than Sitecore Next.js JSS. But it will not be faster than Sitecore Astro SDK. But at that time, I didn’t have anything to compare with. The only officially available Sitecore demo website for Sitecore Content SDK is very basic. It is one page with a few components. It is not representative to run tests on it.
Power of Sitecore Community
Martin Miles confirmed that there are no big official Sitecore demos for Sitecore Content SDK. But he migrated the official Sitecore Verticals Demo to Sitecore Content SDK. And he was generous to share links to Verticals Demo based on Sitecore Content SDK hosted on Vercel. And I was able to run the Lighthouse performance tests to compare with the freshly deployed Sitecore Verticals website based on Astro.
Results
Lighthouse tests confirmed that Sitecore Astro websites are still much faster than Sitecore Next.js websites. Sitecore Content SDK improved the Next.js scores, but the difference between Astro and Next.js is still huge! The average scores for all pages on websites are: 62 for Next.js Content SDK and 72 for Astro SDK. The difference is still 10 score points. It is still a huge difference for two websites that look exactly the same.
Conclusions
Sitecore Astro SDK remains the way to build blazing-fast Sitecore websites. And Sitecore Next.js websites still can not compete with it, even if they are based on the newest Sitecore Content SDK.
Astro was, Astro is, and Astro will be the way to get the most performant Sitecore websites. There are still no competitors who can get results similar to it.