What is the Difference Between Experience Fragments and Content Fragments?

While they may seem similar, content fragments and experience fragments in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) are actually quite different, and they serve very different purposes within AEM. For example, content fragments are primarily text and image paths lacking both design and layout. Experience fragments, on the other hand, are fragments of web pages that contain designed content, including things like color, copy, and images. But their differences go deeper than that. 

What are Content Fragments? 

Content Fragments in AEM contain structured, non-customizable content, typically things like text, dates, or references. The channel - that being the way which you consume content, whether it be through a web page or an app - which features these fragments will determine the layout and design. 

Content Fragments are stored in the DAM (Digital Asset Manager) as assets that can be replicated elsewhere on a website. 

What do Content Fragments do? 

Put simply, Content Fragments organize content to display at various locations on a website or app. They are used to create and populate page-specific content, allowing you to display that content across multiple channels. 

This is ideal for content reusability using different channels; for example, if your authors need to say something about a product in multiple channels, you can create one content fragment containing the necessary text instead of multiple text components saying the exact same thing. Then, when this content needs to be updated, you can simply change the master content fragment in the DAM, and the changes will appear in every location to which that fragment is pushed. 

What are Experience Fragments? 

Experience Fragments, unlike content fragments, are a grouped set of components that fulfill a specific function. For example, a grouped set of a Title, Image, Description, and Button could create a teaser experience. The teaser experience would be considered an Experience Fragment. 

Experience Fragments can also be helpful in specific use-cases, such as a header or footer. In this case, you may want to retain the same look and feel, but you might want to provide different links on different pages. To do this, you could simply create two unique Experience Fragments. The structure of the fragments would remain the same, but the content within each Experience Fragment would be unique to that fragment. 

It’s important to remember that Experience Fragments are not made up of unstructured content like a content fragment. On the contrary, they are a designed combination of multiple components that serve a specific purpose and remain the same across the entire site.  

What do Experience Fragments do? 

Experience Fragments allow content authors to re-use the same content across channels, including AEM Sites pages and third-party systems. In other words, they're for reusing experiences (i.e. grouped components) in many places, instead of loading the same components with the same content into every page; this allows you to author an experience fragment one time and that change is propagated to every page that contains that experience fragment. 

This increases the efficiency of AEM content authoring teams because they don’t have to load the same content or configure the same components multiple times and in multiple locations. Authoring an Experience Fragment once also reduces the prevalence of user errors and ensures consistency. 

With this in mind, it is possible that an Experience Fragment can be composed of Content Fragments, though their use cases vary. If you are curious which one you should use, think about whether the content you’re loading needs to be replicated multiple times across the site. If so, you should utilize Experience Fragments. If you are loading data without design, you can rely on Content Fragments. 

If you require further explanation of Content Fragments versus Experience Fragments in AEM, our team is eager to help. 

If you’re looking for the right partner to implement AEM for your business website, we do. 

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