Troubleshoot the Student Portal

Errors in Experience Builder

When setting up a student portal in Experience Builder, you often see errors about not being able to show your success team or not being able to retrieve your Case record. These error messages are expected and normal. In Experience Builder, your System Administrator user is treated as the active user when displaying Lightning components in preview mode. Since your admin user account doesn't have a student Case, or a Contact, or an assigned success team, the components think there's a data problem and report the error.

You can do configuration in Experience Builder as an admin, but you can only preview the site and see valid data when you're logged in as a student.

If you do see the same errors when logged into the site as a student, make sure that:

• The student has a properly configured Student Record Case (where the Case's record type matches the Student Record Case Record Type configured in custom settings).
• All field-level security permissions are configured correctly for the student profile.

Prevent Your Site from Using the Salesforce Email Composer

Under certain conditions, Experience Cloud sites send emails using the Salesforce Email Composer instead of the site user's default (native) email app. Student portals use the Salesforce Email Composer when these three conditions are met.

• The UserPreferencesNativeEmailClient field is false, which is the default. AND

• The student profile allows student users to send emails from Salesforce. (This is a required permission for Student Success Hub student profiles—the Send Email system permission is required on the student profile in order for appointment email notifications to work as intended.) AND

• The Global Publisher Layout assigned to the student profile includes the Email action in the Salesforce Mobile and Lightning Experience Actions area of the layout. (The default Global Layout assigned to the student profile includes the Email action on the page.)

The Salesforce Email Composer allows users to send emails from within Salesforce—or from within a Student Success Hub student portal, in our case. However, the Salesforce Email Composer may give students access to templates, merge fields, and other areas of the Student Success Hub that should be unavailable to them. 

To prevent the Salesforce Email Composer from being used in your student portal—in other words, to ensure that a student's default email app is used when the student clicks a mailto email link for a support staff member—take either or both of these actions.

• When creating new student Users using the Data Import Wizard, Data Loader, or Apex, set UserPreferencesNativeEmailClient to true.

• Modify the Global Publisher Layout that's assigned to the student profile so that it doesn't include the Email action button.

Locked Out of Site Management

Did you accidentally remove the System Administrator profile from the Members list in the Administration workspace? And now you can see your site in the Digital Experiences All Sites list, but the Workspaces and Builder links are gone, so you can no longer manage the site?

Here's the fix: Add a Digital Experience site member if either the 'Manage' or 'Workspaces' link is not available.

Site Deployment Limitations

If you use change sets to migrate a site between sandbox and production orgs, keep in mind some considerations.

• A change set cannot create a site. You must create a site in the target environment first (make sure the name and template version match).
• Deploying an update to a site overwrites all settings and pages in the target org. You can't just deploy updates to a single page. So while initial deployment of a site to a target org is very useful, updates introduce more risk of losing configuration. You still have the option of making changes manually in the target org and publishing when ready.
• If a navigation menu item points to a custom list view, make sure to include that custom list view in your change set. It does not get added (or identified) automatically via dependencies.
• There are other considerations, too. See Considerations for Deploying Experience Cloud Sites with Change Sets. Make sure to review the unsupported settings and features list for items you need to configure manually in the target org.

See Deploy Your Experience Cloud Site with Change Sets.

Too Many User Roles Created

When a new student User is created for an Experience Cloud site, a new Role for that User is also created that references the student's Account (likely an Administrative or Household Account). This is default functionality for Customer Community Plus users and works fine if there are multiple Contacts within the same Account. However, when using Administrative or Household Accounts, this means a Role is created for every student User. A large number of User Roles can introduce performance issues and be subject to Salesforce limits on the number of User Roles per org.

In cases where there's only one Contact per Account, you can associate all Experience Cloud site Users with a central Role. You can maintain the necessary security and visibility while significantly reducing the number of User Roles. For details, see Optimize Account Roles to Improve Performance and Scale Your Org in Salesforce Help.