Plan and Prepare for Your Experience Cloud Implementation

Experience Cloud comprises flexible, powerful features that you can combine in multiple ways to deliver the digital experience you need, whether it’s a portal, help center, or mobile app. And although it can be tempting to dive right into building, we recommend taking time to think about the combination of features you need to deliver a productive, successful site. We can’t cover every planning aspect, but these topics describe some key areas to consider, research, and incorporate as you develop your overall plan.

Required Editions

Available in: both Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience

Available in: Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions

• Define Your Site Vision and Purpose
  Experience Cloud makes it easy to build sites that deliver customer-first experiences—fast! But, before you dive head-first into building your Experience Cloud site, pause for a moment to envision the larger picture of what you want your site to accomplish. What is your website’s primary purpose?
• Learn About Experience Cloud Frameworks and Templates
  Select a framework and template as part of your site planning. The choices you make at the beginning of your site creation process have long-term downstream implications. In particular, consider your business objectives, your technical know-how, and the costs associated with each.
• Learn More About Experience Cloud Licenses
  Licenses are a gateway to authenticated access to your Experience Cloud sites. So one of the most important steps when planning a site is selecting the right licenses for your use case. These licenses grant access to Experience Cloud sites to customers and partners who can't otherwise log in to your company's Salesforce org: External Identity, External Apps, Customer Community, Customer Community Plus, Partner Community, and Channel Account. A Salesforce account executive can help you understand the difference between the licenses, and help you decide the best ones for your use case. Before that, let’s answer some basic questions first.
• Who Does What in Experience Cloud?
  Experience Cloud sites are typically not developed, designed, and maintained by a single person because these tasks require different skills. Depending on the size of your company and scale of your site, you could have some people handle several roles or a dedicated person for each role.
• Define Your Site Structure, Layout, and Design
  After you consider your site’s vision and purpose and you’re familiar with frameworks and templates, you can plan your site’s structure, layout, and design.
• Map the Customer Journey and Drive Engagement
  You defined a site vision that aligns your site with your company’s purpose. Now you want to design a site experience that encourages users to visit your site and interact with your content. But to promote customer engagement, you must first understand your customers’ needs and create compelling content in to meet those needs.
• Plan Your Site’s Content Management Strategy
  If you’re like most organizations, you have a large amount of content, and you need a plan to create, organize, and manage it. Get the right content in front of the right people at the right time with a solid content strategy. Explore the various Salesforce offerings that provide content management solutions for different scenarios.
• Plan a Mobile Strategy for Your Site
  Over half of customer interactions happen over mobile devices. So having a mobile-responsive site isn’t an option anymore, it’s a necessity. Before you create a mobile site, ask these questions to help solidify your mobile strategy.
• Performance and Scale of Your Experience Cloud Site
  With Experience Cloud, you can build a wide range of business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) applications. Examples include help forums, self-service portals, partner and channel websites, commerce and ticketing stores, and vaccination and appointment sites. Many of these sites require high user volume and they experience high traffic. We extensively test every standard template, component, and product for performance and scale, but standard capabilities can be extended to build highly customized experiences. Customizations, high user volume, and high traffic, and more can impact a site’s performance. Salesforce offers a range of features focused on supporting performance and scale regardless of your site’s requirements.
• Develop a Security Plan for Your Experience Cloud Site
  Salesforce has various security settings and permissions you can use when you’re building a site on the Experience Cloud platform. Before you start creating a site, put together a security plan that can help you during the implementation.
• Prepare to Promote Your Site and Measure Its Success
  Your Experience Cloud site gives you a web presence and helps you connect your business to the people who need it—both inside and outside your company. Generate excitement, awareness, and traffic for your site with a promotional plan, and consider how to measure adoption of your site when it’s live.

See Also

• Video: Implementation Best Practices