Support For Dynamic Websites Now Generally Available

With this capability, brands that were previously bottlenecked from scaling their program, can now truly optimize the experience of their single page applications.

The move over the last few years towards fully-fledged browser-based applications, or dynamic websites, is no surprise. After all, mobile apps have come to occupy the mindshare and time of so many consumers in the same timeframe partially because of the seamlessness of the user experience.

While the adoption of these frameworks has increased, the solutions used to test and experiment on them have lagged behind; up until now, the solutions have not been able to operate within the new complexities that these frameworks require. In 2017, 18 percent of the Alexa top 10K sites by traffic were using the three most popular Single Page Applications frameworks (React, Angular or Ember), and today that number is already up to a quarter (24 percent) and continuing to rise. Historically, brands that operate Single Page Applications have only been able to experiment after hours of custom coding and workarounds that are exclusively developer-focused and largely unscalable.

Optimizely is addressing this issue by offering up an industry-first solution that allows everyone in the organization to easily experiment on SPAs and get up and running in a matter of minutes. With Support for Dynamic Websites, marketers and developers will benefit from:

• Increased Flexibility – The biggest change we have made is a shift in how Optimizely communicates with your website. Leveraging the MutationObserver API, Optimizely can hear and respond immediately to changes to the Document Object Model (DOM) API. Previously, this meant that changes sometimes wouldn’t get applied, they would get erased by app logic, or would cause flashing.
• Experiment right from the Visual Editor – With our Visual Editor in the Optimizely Web product, marketers and non-technical team-members can run experiments without having to write code or rely on engineering help. We introduced this flexibility in the web client so that as websites become increasingly dynamic, marketers can continue to experiment in the Visual Editor. This was our goal from the beginning.

We introduced the product to a private beta group involving new and existing customers, including HP, Blue Apron and Kia Motors. Through partnering with these early customers we were able to deliver a product that enables marketers to experiment more freely, while giving engineers the time to focus on deeper experimentation.

“Support for Dynamic Websites from Optimizely has improved our experience and ability to run new experiments without extensive help from developers.” — Abigail Bulayo, Site Merchandising Manager, American Giant

“Optimizely’s Support for Dynamic Websites empowers our team to execute experiments more efficiently, which improves our testing velocity and frees up engineering resources.” — Nina Bayatti, Conversion Lead, ClassPass

Throughout the development process, we listened to customer feedback, observed beta testing results and experimented along the way to bring our customers an industry-first offering that allows everyone in the organization to easily experiment and get up and running in a matter of minutes. That invaluable feedback throughout the process allowed us to refine and enhance the product capabilities to the version that is available today.

With the rollout of Support for Dynamic Websites, customers will see some key changes:

• Optimize scalable SPAs, without custom code or workarounds – Historically customers that have Single Page Applications have experimented with existing developer tools that require specialized training, including a deep understanding of Optimizely logic and extensive partner involvement. Until now, no provider has gone back to the drawing board to proactively develop a solution built specifically to solve this issue. Any of our customers can now implement in one click.  
• Eliminate flash-related paint points, implement & QA with ease – With Support for Dynamic Websites, we have rebuilt the way our platform interacts with your website. This new method, allows us to eliminate flashing, change appropriate content as it loads on the page, and make experiment set-up in the visual editor easy to implement and QA.
• Let your teams spend more time doing what they do best – Product and marketing teams can now move more quickly to experiment on the content they want, while developers can spend their time on projects that require more sophisticated engineering. Optimizely’s solution was designed for the business user to use out of the box in the visual editor.

To learn more on how to get started optimizing dynamic content, please join our webinar (which will also be available on-demand), or contact your Optimizely representative to get started today.