Sitefinity Site Implemented Poorly? Common Frustrations and Fixes.
Sitefinity is one of the most powerful and user-friendly content management systems available, particularly for marketers. It offers intuitive drag-and-drop tools, robust personalization features, and a flexible content architecture that makes managing content and publishing pages simple.
But if your Sitefinity site isn’t meeting the expectations of your marketing team, the platform itself likely isn’t the issue.
The real problem could be a poor implementation.
Over the years, clients have come to us because they needed help fixing or improving their website after they experienced a bad implementation of Sitefinity.
And we've noticed that the same issues appear regularly.
Whether a project was rushed, handled by an inexperienced team, or it wasn't built using development best practices, the result is the same: a CMS that doesn’t work the way it should for the marketers and teams using it every day.
What a Poor Website Implementation Is (and Isn't)
To be clear about what constitutes a poor website implementation. A website that falls short of expectations doesn’t always mean the implementation was done poorly.
A poor website implementation can happen for many reasons, but typically occurs when the design or development process fails to follow platform best practices, long-term maintainability is disregarded, or the needs of users and agreed upon project goals, objectives, and requirements are ignored.
Not every frustrating website experience is the result of a bad implementation. For example, some situations where it's not a poor implementation is when:
- The site was built to meet a limited budget. If corners were cut intentionally to reduce cost, the end result may lack features or polish, but that doesn't mean it was implemented incorrectly.
- The site was built as a Phase 1. Sometimes functionality is intentionally deferred to future phases due to scope or cost.
- Marketing needs changed post-launch. If the site was built based on original requirements that later shifted, it’s not fair to call the implementation poor.
- The CMS is capable, but underused. If tools like personalization or analytics simply weren’t configured, that may be a missed opportunity rather than a development failure.
Now that we defined what a poor implementation is, let's take a look at the common barriers and determine if the frustrations your dealing with as a marketer are the result of a poor implementation of your Sitefinity website.
1. Hardcoding Everything
Marketing frustration: "I can't update anything without asking a developer!"
Content editors often encounter elements that are hardcoded into templates or widgets, making it nearly impossible for marketers to make basic changes without assistance from a developer.
At its core, Sitefinity's design is aimed at simplifying website management and content creation, even for those without extensive coding experience.
With many content management systems, ease of use for marketers and content editors is determined by how developers build the website. When it comes to a CMS like Sitefinity, inexperienced developers who fail to follow best practices or neglect to develop with marketers and content editors in mind will produce a website that constantly requires assistance from a development team.
This type of dependency on developers doesn't exist when a website, especially one built on Sitefinity, is constructed with ease of use in mind for all users.
Simply put, a CMS should empower content authors and marketers, not trap them.
Solution:
Utilize widget templates, dynamic content, and editable layouts that provide marketers with control, eliminating the need for the dev team to make every update.
This is especially important when extending the functionality of Sitefinity and when custom development is required to add features and functionality that don't come "out-of-the-box" or standard with the CMS. Developers should always look for ways and build solutions that can be managed easily by all backend users.
2. Ignoring Performance from Day One
Marketing frustration: "Why is our site so slow—and why is SEO taking a hit?"
Slow load times are one of the biggest complaints we hear, and they don’t just frustrate users—they hurt your SEO too. Search engines like Google use page speed and Core Web Vitals as ranking factors, so a sluggish site can directly impact your visibility.
Often, performance issues stem from heavy scripts, unoptimized images, or too many third-party tools competing for resources. But the real challenge is that performance isn’t something you can just bolt on later. Early development choices, such as how widgets are built, how assets are delivered, and how caching is configured, play a critical role in long-term speed, scalability, and search performance.
Solution:
Make performance a priority from the start. Optimize code and images, minimize third-party bloat, audit scripts, implement a CDN like Cloudflare, and test Core Web Vitals regularly to maintain both speed and SEO health.
3. Overcomplicating Widgets
Marketing frustration: “These widgets are impossible to use and constantly break.”
We’ve inherited widgets that attempt to do everything, which often break, confuse users, and create maintenance nightmares.
We've seen widget designers with dozens of confusing fields, custom logic embedded in every option, and zero documentation. This complexity defeats the purpose of reusable, modular components.
Overcomplication happens when developers prioritize flexibility over usability, or when requirements shift mid-project without clear versioning. Without thoughtful design, widgets become bloated and unusable.
Solution:
Keep widgets focused and modular. Reusable components > confusing logic and functionality. Widgets should be designed with users in mind. A few ways we achieve this are by limiting configuration fields to what editors actually need, focusing on UX for both frontend and backend experiences, creating different widgets for various use cases, and providing clear documentation for content editors.
4. Not Using Widgets and Content Types
Marketing frustration: “I have to rebuild the same page layouts and content over and over.”
While overcomplicating widgets is common, there are also Sitefinity websites that fail to leverage modules, widgets, and other content types to serve content across their site dynamically.
When everything is a page or static block (or worse, hardcoded on a page), content becomes chaotic. Marketers can’t reuse components, and personalization or localization is more difficult.
Solution:
Utilize dynamic modules and structured content to organize and deliver your content to site visitors effectively. It makes everything more scalable and shareable, whether it's blog posts, videos, or forms.
5. Building on Legacy Technology
Marketing frustration: “Why are we stuck with outdated tech just months after launch?”
Sitefinity continues to move forward, but many implementations haven’t.
If you recently launch a new website on Sitefinity or beginning a new project, your Sitefinity Partner should have shared with you that Progress strongly recommends building new Sitefinity projects with ASP.NET Core or Next.js. If you are building a new site or having one built by a development partner, then make sure you ask them what framework they are building on.
Choosing MVC or Web Forms (which has been discontinued in version 14.1) will keep you stuck on legacy technology that isn't supported.
Solution:
Take advantage of the speed, flexibility, and long-term support that modern technologies like ASP.NET Core and Next.js offer.
If you are on MVC, then start planning your migration to ASP.NET Core or even Next.js. And if starting a new website project on the Sitefinity platform, then choose ASP.NET Core, you won't be disappointed.
It’s also important to choose a Sitefinity Partner that has experience with the new renderer technology, especially when it comes to migrating an existing Sitefinity site. This process is not as straightforward as you may think and requires assessing your current CMS and careful planning to ensure a smooth transition. What it comes down to is future-proofing your website.
6. Skipping Documentation
Marketing frustration: "No one knows how anything works, and the developers that worked on the initial site build are gone."
No documentation can make future updates expensive and stressful for everyone involved.
It’s a significant problem when developers fail to provide detailed documentation for custom widgets, styles, CSS classes, and other components.
Documentation ensures a shared understanding of how things work and how they are created. It also provides new developers or editors joining your team with a roadmap or set of instructions for building pages and publishing content that appears consistent across your site.
Documentation also helps your team troubleshoot issues, often without needing to involve a developer.
There are a few reasons why some developers don’t include documentation for their site. One is that it requires a lot of time and effort, but we believe that this time is worthwhile.
Some development partners may not include detailed documentation because they don’t want to share the knowledge, creating dependence on their team and locking you into the client-vendor relationship. A terrible way of doing business, but something that occasionally occurs.
Solution:
Work with a development partner that documents your setup, custom classes, styling, and any other information that is helpful to marketers, developers, and content editors. Your future self (or next dev team) will thank you.
We document everything, from content models and widget usage to deployment steps and editor instructions. Your future self (or next dev team) will thank you.
7. No Deployment Process
Marketing frustration: "Every site update and upgrade feels like a gamble and something always breaks."
When an organization lacks a proper deployment process for its Sitefinity website, it often results in a chaotic and risky environment.
We’ve seen scenarios where environments are out of sync and where developers manually push updates with no version control or rollback strategy.
This lack of DevOps leads to broken features, inconsistent behavior between staging and live, and hours of unnecessary troubleshooting.
Without a structured pipeline, even minor updates become high-risk, and over time, the technical debt grows until the site becomes unstable and nearly unmanageable.
Solution:
You need a structured deployment process tailored to your site, platform, and business requirements.
We implement DevOps pipelines tailored to Sitefinity, including Git-based versioning, Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions for deployments, and staging environments for safe testing and development. We reduce risk by ensuring every release is tested, repeatable, and backed up by monitoring and rollback options.
8. Insufficient Hosting
Marketing Frustration: “Our site crashes during campaigns or when we are updating content—and support keeps blaming our CMS.”
Many organizations experience slow load times and downtime, not because of Sitefinity itself, but because their hosting provider isn’t optimized for the platform.
Generic or shared hosting environments often lack the necessary infrastructure, configuration, or support required for a high-performance Sitefinity site. Without the right hosting stack, even the best implementation can struggle.
Solution:
An enterprise CMS, such as Sitefinity, requires an enterprise-grade cloud provider like Microsoft Azure. But when it comes to improving performance, there are best practices for Sitefinity hosting that are needed to optimize your site for speed, scalability, and security.
Choosing a hosting partner that also understands the technical requirements for Sitefinity implementation and deployment is crucial for a high-performing website.
What This Means for You
If your current Sitefinity site feels like it’s working against you, whether it's performance issues, editing frustration, or technical debt, the platform probably isn’t the issue. It’s the way it was built and how it is being maintained.
And that’s something you can fix.
Let’s Fix It Together.
At Smooth Fusion, we’ve helped dozens of organizations clean up and rebuild their Sitefinity implementations the right way, with speed, structure, and scalability in mind.