Spinning up a basic customer-service community takes about a day if Knowledge is already set up. Branding, custom components, and rollout planning add weeks. Plan for two to three months from kickoff to public launch on a mid-sized implementation.
- Enable Digital Experiences
Setup > Digital Experiences > Settings. Check Enable Digital Experiences. Set the domain name; this is permanent once chosen so pick carefully. Save.
- Create the community
Setup > Digital Experiences > All Sites > New. Pick the template (Customer Service for support, Partner Central for channel, Build Your Own LWR for custom). Provide a name and URL slug.
- Configure user licenses and profiles
Assign the appropriate Community license type to each persona. Create a profile for community users with limited object access and no Setup permissions. Use permission sets for fine-grained access.
- Build pages and components in Experience Builder
Open Experience Builder. Drag standard components onto pages. Configure menus, footers, and headers. Add custom LWCs where the standard components fall short.
- Set sharing and visibility
Configure sharing sets so each community user sees only their own data. Test as a community user (Login As) to confirm no internal data leaks. Iterate sharing until access is correct.
- Publish and roll out
Click Publish in Experience Builder. Test the public URL. Pilot with a small user group, gather feedback, then announce to the full audience. Monitor adoption metrics for 30 days post-launch and tune based on real usage.
For self-service support communities. Includes Knowledge, Case Deflection, Discussion Forums out of the box.
For channel partner portals. Includes deal registration, Lead distribution, Opportunity sharing.
Lightning Web Runtime template. Full LWC freedom, fastest performance, requires more development.
Legacy Aura framework. Avoid for new builds; LWR is the modern equivalent.
Old-school internal-style community. Used for legacy migrations only.
- Domain names are permanent. Once you set [orgname].my.site.com, you cannot change it without contacting Salesforce Support and waiting for manual provisioning. Pick wisely.
- Community user sharing is fragile by default. A misconfigured sharing rule can leak internal data to external users instantly. Always test as a community user before going live; never assume internal sharing logic protects external users.
- The Salesforce Tabs + Visualforce template cannot be migrated to a modern Lightning template. Legacy communities on this template require a full rebuild to upgrade.
- Custom LWCs in communities have access to a different API surface than internal Lightning. The Communities-specific subset of LWC lacks some Lightning Data Service features; review the official compatibility matrix before building.