How to use Strapi CMS for AB testing and website personalization

You're a developer looking for a headless CMS. It would be great if it was free or open source. You found Strapi. It's customizable, it promises great performance, and it has tons of plugins and integrations. Great.

But before we move on with this. Let's pause for a moment.

A headless CMS is a great choice for managing and delivering content across websites, apps, and other platforms. Nobody can deny that Strapi is a popular headless CMS and has been a go-to for developers and content teams seeking flexibility, control, and scalability. But you are about to make a decision for many many years. You need to think about what's to come.

Your goal now is to build a website that gives your content team autonomy to work without relying on developers. You may already have one without a CMS, or you are building it from scratch. Your main requirements right now probably are:

1. It needs to be fast to load
2. It needs to be indexed on search engines
3. It needs to be scalable
4. It needs to provide a good experience for content managers

But what about those things that come right after the website launch?

The marketing team will drive traffic to the website. Soon enough, they'll start collecting data to understand user behavior. Then, they'll uncover optimization opportunities and need to test some hypotheses. As the next step, they'll need to personalize content for some user segments to increase conversions.

In short, you'll soon learn that for businesses focused on personalized user experiences and AB testing, Strapi has limitations. In this post, we'll explore what Strapi is good for, its core challenges, and how you can overcome them.

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What Strapi is good for

Don't get me wrong. Strapi is indeed a very good headless CMS. Actually, this blog you're browsing is built using Strapi, and we have nothing to complain about it. But we need to be honest about the best use cases for it.

As a headless CMS, Strapi decouples the back-end content repository from the front end, allowing you to build websites and apps using any programming language or framework, like Next.js for example. It is widely praised for its ease of use, flexibility, and support for different development environments, like:

• Static websites, like corporate, publishing, or editorial websites
• Mobile apps
• E-commerce
• Internal tools
• Industry-specific applications

However, like any platform, it has limitations, particularly when it comes to advanced marketing needs like website personalization and AB testing.

It's definitely not the best option for SaaS products or websites designed for conversion flows, for example.

Why Strapi isn't ideal for website personalization and AB testing

While Strapi is an excellent headless CMS for static content management, it wasn’t designed with personalization or AB testing in mind. For modern websites and apps, these features are crucial to deliver dynamic user experiences and optimize for better engagement and conversions.

While it's possible to achieve personalization and AB testing with Strapi, it involves piecing together multiple tools and managing complex integrations, which can be time-consuming and difficult to maintain.

Website personalization

Strapi doesn't have native tools for tailoring content to individual users. If you want to offer personalized experiences based on anonymous user behavior or geographic location, for example, you'll need to build custom solutions or rely on external tools and third-party plugins.

For this, most companies using Strapi build their own personalization engine on top of a CDP (customer data platform). Then, they connect user data from the CDP and custom segmentation criteria from the personalization engine to decide which content to render for each user.

In addition to all this work—and extra cost with other platforms—they usually rely on integrations that are not able to process information in real time to fuel the CDP with user data. So forget about real-time website personalization.

AB testing

AB testing involves serving different versions of content to different user groups to measure which version performs better. Although you can create multiple content versions in Strapi, the platform doesn't offer automated traffic splitting or variant management, which is key for running effective AB tests.

If you want to run experiments to uncover the best variant of your content in terms of conversion rate, you'll need to integrate third-party solutions into your website.

The most common ones rely on visual editors for content editing, which can hurt your website's performance. As an alternative, you could also use feature-flagging tools, which would bring back the marketing team's dependency on developers.

Alternative for personalization and AB testing

These limitations make Strapi less suitable for marketing teams or businesses that want to personalize and optimize their website through data-driven experimentation.

If your primary goal is having a dynamic website that gives the marketing team autonomy to work independently from developers—or if you want your developers to focus on core product development instead of website optimization—Croct offers a more seamless and powerful solution. Here’s why:

• Gradual integration

  Croct can integrate with any framework, allowing you to fetch content dynamically based on user segmentation without having to modify your existing infrastructure heavily. It also allows you to work with both default and static content.

• Unified solution

  Instead of relying on multiple tools to achieve personalization and AB testing, Croct provides an all-in-one platform that works smoothly alongside your existing CMS, saving you time and effort. It also provides built-in CDP and analytics capabilities.

• Real-time personalization

  Croct allows you to easily segment users based on their behavior and preferences, then serve personalized content in real-time. You don’t need to build complex logic or custom integrations, as Croct takes care of this automatically.

• Bayesian AB testing

  Croct includes native AB testing capabilities using Bayesian statistics, allowing for more efficient tests with more confidence and statistically significant results. This helps you optimize your website or app more quickly and with less traffic.

• Developer-friendly

  With first-class support for developers, Croct offers intuitive APIs and SDKs that simplify personalization and testing workflows, reducing the need for manual implementation.

If you're curious about how Croct compares with Strapi in terms of user satisfaction, this G2 comparison gives you a pretty good overview:

All you need in one place

Why having 3 platforms for content management, AB testing, and personalization when you can have a single one?

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But wait, I don't want to switch CMS and rebuild my entire website

No worries, you don't have to.

Croct is a dynamic CMS focused on experimentation and optimization, which means you should only use it for those elements and components that you want to experiment with.

Because of that, Croct CMS can coexist with Strapi CMS. Take this page as an example. The top menu, banners, and form within the post are dynamic elements since we use them for personalized communication. At the same time, the post content, the table of contents, and the footer are static, so they live in Strapi.

You can gradually move elements and components from Strapi to Croct, giving the content and the growth team the autonomy they need. Here is an example of a customer who did exactly the same.

If your goal is to create dynamic, user-specific experiences and optimize conversions, take the first step by creating your free account and get up and running in just a few hours.