Key takeaways
- A portal succeeds when it removes a real task from your team’s inbox, such as order status, invoices or case updates.
- Experience Cloud licenses come in Customer Community, Customer Community Plus and Partner Community flavors, each with different sharing capabilities.
- Choose between member-based and login-based licensing based on how often users actually log in.
- Guest and external user security deserves as much design time as the user interface.
Partners and customers ask the same questions every day: where is my order, can I get a copy of that invoice, what is the status of my request? Each of those questions costs your team time. A Salesforce Experience Cloud portal lets people find the answers themselves, using the same data your teams already maintain in Salesforce.
Start with the jobs, not the features
Experience Cloud can do a lot, which tempts teams to build everything at once. The most successful portals start with two or three high-volume tasks and do them extremely well. Good candidates are:
- Placing and tracking orders, or reordering frequent items
- Viewing and downloading invoices, statements and documents
- Opening and following support cases
- Updating account details, addresses and contacts
- For partners: registering deals, sharing leads and accessing sales materials
Choosing the right license
| License | Typical use | Sharing model |
|---|---|---|
| Customer Community | High-volume B2C or B2B customers who need self-service | No roles; access is granted through sharing sets based on the user’s account or contact |
| Customer Community Plus | Customers who need richer access and reporting | Roles and sharing rules supported, plus reports and dashboards |
| Partner Community | Resellers, distributors and channel partners | Roles and sharing rules, plus access to leads, opportunities and campaigns |
Each license is available as member-based, paid per member per month, or login-based, paid per login. If most users log in a few times a month, login-based licensing is often cheaper. If they live in the portal daily, member-based usually wins. Your Salesforce account executive can model both for your expected usage.
Templates and build approach
Experience Builder offers templates built on two frameworks. Lightning Web Runtime (LWR) templates are fast and modern, and are a strong choice for custom, performance-focused sites built with Lightning Web Components. Aura-based templates such as Customer Service and Partner Central include more out-of-the-box components and can be quicker to configure for standard self-service use cases.
Most real portals combine standard components with a handful of custom Lightning components for the tasks that make the portal valuable, such as an order form that understands your price lists, or a dashboard of open orders by location.
Sharing data safely
The hardest part of a portal is making sure every user sees exactly what they should, and nothing else. Plan this before you design screens:
- Set organization-wide defaults for external users to Private on sensitive objects.
- Use sharing sets, share groups or sharing rules to grant access based on the user’s account.
- Review field-level security on the external user profiles and permission sets field by field.
- Lock down guest user access, which Salesforce has tightened over the years, and never expose records to guests unless they truly need it.
- Test with real partner and customer users from different accounts before launch, not only with administrators.
Connect the portal to real processes
A portal is only as useful as the data behind it. If orders live in an ERP, decide whether to sync them into Salesforce or show them through an integration. If documents are generated elsewhere, make sure they attach to the right records automatically. Automation in Salesforce, such as notifying account managers when a partner registers a deal, keeps people inside the portal instead of on the phone.
Drive adoption after launch
- Invite users in waves and collect feedback from the first group.
- Add a link to the portal in every order confirmation, invoice and support reply.
- Make the first login effortless, with clear onboarding and single sign-on where possible.
- Track logins and the tasks people complete, and keep improving the top journeys.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to launch an Experience Cloud portal?
A focused portal with standard components can launch in a few weeks. Portals with custom ordering, ERP integration or complex sharing typically take longer, depending on scope.
Can customers log in with their existing accounts?
Yes. Experience Cloud supports single sign-on and social sign-on, so users can sign in with providers you configure.
Do portal users need full Salesforce licenses?
No. External users use Experience Cloud licenses such as Customer Community or Partner Community, which cost far less than internal user licenses.
