Experience Builder
A drag-and-drop tool in Salesforce for designing and customizing Experience Cloud sites (communities, portals, help centers) with configurable pages, components, themes, and navigation without code.
Definition
A drag-and-drop tool in Salesforce for designing and customizing Experience Cloud sites (communities, portals, help centers) with configurable pages, components, themes, and navigation without code.
In plain English
“Experience Builder is the drag-and-drop tool you use to design and customize Experience Cloud sites. You configure pages, components, themes, and navigation visually without writing code, building everything from a customer support portal to a partner community.”
Worked example
The admin at Treetop Daycare builds a parent portal as an Experience Cloud site using Experience Builder. She picks the Customer Service template, drags components onto the home page (a daily-photo widget, an upcoming-events list, an enrollment-status card), themes the site with the daycare's logo and palette, and configures the navigation so each parent sees only their own child's records. Building the entire portal takes her four days, no developer involvement. When the daycare adds a transportation service next year, she drops a new component onto the existing pages from inside Experience Builder rather than asking a vendor to rebuild the site.
Why Experience Builder matters
Experience Builder is a visual, drag-and-drop tool in Salesforce for designing and customizing Experience Cloud sites (formerly called Communities). Admins use it to configure pages, drag components onto a canvas, set component properties, apply themes and branding, configure navigation menus, and preview the site across different audiences. The tool supports both Lightning templates (pre-built starting points for common use cases) and the LWR (Lightning Web Runtime) framework for fully custom experiences.
Experience Builder makes site customization accessible to admins who don't write code, while still supporting developer-built custom Lightning Web Components for richer experiences. The combination is powerful: admins handle site structure, branding, and component placement; developers build custom components when needed; and the site is delivered through the same Salesforce platform with shared data and security. For most Experience Cloud projects, Experience Builder is where the bulk of the work happens.
How to set up Experience Builder
Experience Builder is the visual page editor for Experience Cloud Sites — drag components, set theming, configure pages, manage navigation. Each Experience Cloud Site has its own Experience Builder. Setup happens once per site at site creation; iteration happens here.
- Open Setup → All Sites → click into a site → Builder
Setup gear → Quick Find: All Sites → click Builder for the site you want to edit.
- Drag components onto pages
Left rail: standard + custom components. Drag onto regions on the canvas.
- Edit component properties on the right rail
Each component has its own property panel — content, visibility, behavior.
- Configure theming via the Theme panel
Brand colors, fonts, logo, layout. Apply globally or per-page.
- Manage Audiences for visibility rules
Audiences tab → New Audience. Define rules (User Profile = X, Permission Set = Y) for component / page visibility.
- Configure navigation menus
Settings → Navigation Menus → drag pages and external links into the menu.
- Click Publish
Publishes changes live. Until Publish, your edits are draft-only and invisible to site visitors.
Standard, custom Lightning Web Components, AppExchange components.
Brand colors, fonts, layout. Per-site.
Visibility rules — User Profile, Permission Set, custom criteria.
Page order in the site's nav.
Locked at site creation. Aura: more components. LWR: faster, fewer components.
- Experience Builder edits are draft-only until Publish. Forgetting to Publish is the #1 source of "my changes aren't showing up" tickets.
- Aura and LWR use different component libraries. A component that exists in one may not exist in the other — the Builder's left rail filters automatically.
- Audiences cascade — a page with Audience = X and a child component with Audience = Y both apply. Misaligned Audiences hide content unexpectedly.
How organizations use Experience Builder
Builds entire customer support sites for clients in Experience Builder, configuring navigation, pages, and components without writing code for the standard experience.
Uses Experience Builder for the structural layout of their partner portal and supplements with custom Lightning Web Components for partner-specific functionality.
Trains admins on Experience Builder so the site can be maintained and refreshed without developer involvement for routine changes.
Trust & references
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Experience Builder.
- Customize Sites with Experience BuilderSalesforce Help
- Create Custom Site Pages with Experience BuilderSalesforce Help
Test your knowledge
Q1. What is Experience Builder?
Q2. Who is Experience Builder aimed at?
Q3. What two approaches does Experience Builder support?
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