Is your website losing potential customers before they even get to see your offerings? For every 100ms delay, the website load time will see a 7% drop in conversion rates. That’s right, even milliseconds can mean thousands of dollars gone forever. Amazon estimated that a single one-second delay would cost them $1.6 billion in yearly sales. In this fast-paced digital economy, your website performance is no longer just a technical requirement; it is a direct factor of your revenue.
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Sites customers faced with these performance challenges will find that these issues are critical and offer great opportunities. Studies indicate that mobile users are 5 times more likely to abandon sites if they do not perform well.
Now, this brings us to phased rendering, perhaps the most powerful yet underused method in the Adobe Experience Manager CMS toolkit. By intelligently prioritizing when and how content loads, phased rendering creates the illusion of an instant user response on complex, content-rich sites.
Think of it as standing in a long single line versus being escorted to the express lane. Phased rendering doesn’t just make your website technically faster, but more importantly, it alters the experience that users perceive when they interact with the brand online.
With Core Web Vitals now concerning your search rankings and 90% of users reporting they have abandoned poor-performing websites, mastering phased rendering in AEM sites isn’t just nice to have; it is a matter of survival. Are you ready to see how this plays out for your website in terms of performance? Let’s get started.
What is phased rendering?
In Adobe AEM Sites, phased rendering is a performance optimization process that divides page rendering into several phases or stages. Rather than allowing the whole page to be loaded at once, phased rendering allows the foremost important content to load first. This progressive content delivery concept gives the idea of speed to the user, while in reality, it is prioritizing the essential page components.
Technically, phased rendering enables AEM to achieve the following:
- To load the shell of the page and critical content first
- Defer loading below the fold content
- Progressively enhancing the page as the user scrolls
- Optimizing server utilization by distributing rendering across many servers
Why is phased rendering important?
Phased rendering addresses several critical aspects of modern web development:
Performance Impact
- Reduces initial page load time by up to 40-60%
- Improves Time to First Contentful Paint (FCP) metrics
- Enhances Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) scores
- Creates a smoother user experience during navigation
SEO Benefits
Google, along with other search engines, gives precedence to page speed and user experience metrics in its ranking algorithms, so phased rendering can help improve:
- Core Web Vitals score
- Mobile usability score
- Overall ranking level on search engines
- Organic traffic growth
User Experience Enhancement
Users these days expect an instant response. Research indicates that:
- 53% of mobile users abandon a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
- Bounce rates increase by 32% just by increasing the page load time from 1 to 3 seconds.
- Significantly lower conversion rates with slower page speeds.
How does phased rendering work in Experience Manager Sites?
Adobe Experience Manager provides additional features to empower phased rendering through Edge Delivery Services. The Edge Architecture drives the closest server to serve content to users, which reduces latency and ensures faster loading of pages, especially during high-peak events. Additionally, with the help of persistent caching, it provides access to frequently used content quickly, even when the site is updated. In addition, the built-in Real User Monitoring (RUM) gives a real-time view of performance, so teams can start to address issues before they affect user experience. Together, these features amplify the impact of phased rendering and form a robust foundation for high-performing, resilient web experiences.
Let’s explore how this works in action.
The Experience Manager Sites with Edge Delivery Services load web content in three phases:
- Phase E (Eager): loads everything necessary to provide Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), the time to load the main page content as perceived by the user, which is an important aspect of user experience.
- Phase L (Lazy): loads resources from that same origin, which are not LCP-critical.
- Phase D (Delayed): all things third-party tags and assets that are not crucial to the visible experience.
Let’s take an in-depth look at the three phases.
Phase E — Eager
Phase E focuses on optimizing LCP load time, which represents when the largest element of your page, like an image, a video, or text, comes into view. The faster the LCP, the quicker the page gives users the perception of being able to interact with it.
Anything that needs to be loaded in order for the true LCP to be displayed is loaded in this phase. This usually consists of markup, CSS styles, and JavaScript files.
Phase L — Lazy
During Phase L, only the portion of the payload that does not impact Total Blocking Time (TBT) is loaded. TBT is the time a user cannot interact with your web page, negatively affecting the performance of the site and Core Web Vitals.
This phase allows for the loading of blocks (JavaScript and CSS) of the remaining images that were not critical for LCP and other JavaScript libraries that are non-blocking. During the L phase, the page header and footer are also loaded asynchronously, as they are not projected into LCP’s critical path.
Phase D — Delayed
The delayed loading of Phase D is where all the payload that doesn’t interfere with the user’s experience at that particular moment will load. These may involve several third-party tags, marketing tools, consent management, extended analytics, and chat modules. Because the loading phase sees heavy JavaScript being loaded through third-party tags, it impacts performance negatively.
The start of this phase should be delayed by more than three seconds after the LCP event, allowing the entire user experience to stabilize.
Phased rendering challenges and their solutions
1. Component dependencies
Problem: Interdependent components may break if loaded in phases..
Solution:
- Detailed contracts for components
- Contextual rendering
- Component isolation architecture
- Context-Aware Configuration in AEM
2. Personalization conflicts
Problem: Personalized content can create inconsistencies in phased rendering.
Solution:
- Server-side personalization for content that must appear
- Client-side personalization for content that can wait
- Adobe Target integration in the correct order
3. SEO considerations
Problem: Deferred content may not be indexed correctly by search engines.
Solution:
- Have structured data implemented correctly
- Pre-render for search crawlers
- Put critical content into the initial HTML
- Use dynamic rendering whenever necessary
4. Analytics tracking
Problem: Phased Loading can compromise the accuracy of analytics.
Solution:
- Set up event-based tracking
- Use Adobe Analytics integration points
- Implement custom timing metrics
- Track component rendering events
The bottom line
Phased rendering in Adobe Experience Manager Sites is one of the most powerful techniques for enhancing web performance with no compromise to content richness or personalization capability. By strategically approaching content delivery, organizations can meet performance benchmarks for contemporary digital experiences while still engaging the robust capabilities of AEM in content management.
The investment in a phased rendering optimization pays off across all digital channels, enhancing SEO rankings but also enabling the different metrics that matter to both AI-powered search engines and voice assistants. As searches evolve toward the AEO and GEO paradigms, structured, performance-optimized content enabled by phased rendering will gain more importance for digital visibility.
How can Ranosys, as your dedicated AEM Partner, help?
Ranosys understands that it’s not just a technical improvement; phased rendering is an organizational enabler of seamless, high-performing digital experiences. Our AEM services help you fully leverage phased rendering to the betterment of every customer interaction on your website.
- Expert AEM performance optimization: We go beyond standard configurations to fine-tune your AEM Sites with performance boosters like persistent caching, edge delivery optimization, and lazy-loading frameworks—all while maintaining robust personalization and SEO integrity.
- Comprehensive AEM Services: Our AEM capabilities cover everything from Adobe AEM development and website implementation to strategic AEM consulting. Our team of certified Adobe AEM experts ensures that your phased rendering strategy integrates seamlessly with your content workflows and publishing cycles.
- Advanced integrations and scalability: Whether integrating with Adobe Target for personalization sequencing or enabling dynamic rendering for SEO, our Adobe Experience Manager integration services ensure your website is future-ready and resilient across platforms and devices.
- Continuous monitoring and support: We don’t just implement—we maintain. With proactive monitoring, analytics tracking alignment, and ongoing optimization, our AEM-managed services ensure that your site continues to deliver peak performance even as your content and traffic evolve.
Partner with Ranosys to transform how your Adobe Experience Manager site loads, performs, and engages. Let us help you create web experiences that are not only faster and more responsive but also smarter, search-friendly, and conversion-focused.
