What to use for an LWR DigitalExperience - ExperienceBundle or DigitalExperienceBundle?

Question

I've just started looking at using LWR instead of Aura Digital Experiences. Note that

Having created an LWR experience this:

sfdx force source retrieve -u MyOrgAlias -m experiencebundle

did not retrieve it but this did:

sfdx force source retrieve -u MyOrgAlias -m digitalexperiencebundle

The DigitalExperienceBundle documentation says:

You can use DigitalExperienceBundle for enhanced LWR sites created in Winter ’23 or later. For Aura sites and other LWR sites, use the SiteDotCom or ExperienceBundle metadata types.

This Enhanced LWR Sites seems to imply it is the way to go but has DigitalExperienceBundle marked as beta. It says:

DigitalExperienceBundle introduces the concept of content as metadata, with each element of your enhanced LWR site stored on our enhanced sites and content platform as its own content item. Your content items are stored in workspaces, an organized way to view and manage your content resources.

I'm looking for more explanation of why this change, and confirmation that for LWR, DigitalExperienceBundle is the way to go now.

Looking at these slides The New Digital Experience Bundle for CMS Platform being able to update and deploy e.g. just a single page and better CI/CD both sound potentially helpful.

Answer 1

You shouldn't let the word "beta" scare you off. Anything that's gotten as far as beta means "it mostly works but might have some weird quirks or limitations." The main reason for this change is performance. The older bundle format creates a monolithic file that has to be served to the client, which has longer loading times and requires more device resources. The newer format deploys faster and uses fewer resources at runtime. In other words, it is objectively better to use overall. You should definitely use the newer format when possible, as it is the way forward for the digital experience.