Lightning Bolt Solutions
A Lightning Bolt Solution is a reusable Experience Cloud package that bundles a customized Experience Builder template, theme, pages, business process flows, and Lightning apps into one installable unit.
Definition
A Lightning Bolt Solution is a reusable Experience Cloud package that bundles a customized Experience Builder template, theme, pages, business process flows, and Lightning apps into one installable unit. The idea Salesforce sums up as "build once, then distribute and reuse." A consultant or ISV partner builds a site configuration once, exports it, then ships it to other orgs through AppExchange or a direct package install.
This is an older feature. Salesforce promoted the Lightning Bolt brand heavily around 2016 to 2019, with more than 50 prebuilt solutions for healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, and retail. The export and packaging mechanics still exist in Experience Cloud today, but the marketing brand has gone quiet. For deep vertical needs, Salesforce now steers customers toward Industry Clouds like Financial Services Cloud and Health Cloud, and toward the standard Experience Cloud templates.
How a Lightning Bolt Solution is built and shipped
What a Lightning Bolt Solution actually contains
A Lightning Bolt Solution combines several Experience Cloud assets into a single distributable package. The Salesforce Help docs list the pieces you can export: a customized Experience Builder template, a branded theme, individual pages, and the flows that drive guided processes. On top of that, a solution can carry custom Lightning apps and the components configured to support them. The goal is a working site that an admin installs and runs, not a blank starting point. Compared to building an Experience Cloud site from scratch, a bolt encodes decisions that would otherwise take weeks. The navigation, branding, page layouts, audience targeting rules, and process flows arrive preconfigured. An admin can still move components around, swap branding through the Branding Editor, and connect third party systems, mostly with clicks rather than code. That balance of prebuilt structure plus room to adjust is the whole point. You inherit a tested design, then tune it to your data model and partners without starting at an empty canvas.
The build-once, distribute-and-reuse model
Salesforce frames Lightning Bolt around a single phrase: build once, then distribute and reuse. A partner or in-house team customizes an Experience Builder site, exports the template, theme, and pages, adds the relevant flows, then packages everything for delivery. The same package can land in many target orgs, so an agency building similar partner portals for ten clients does the heavy design work once. Distribution runs through Salesforce packaging. After you create the solution, you package it as a managed or unmanaged package and can upload it to AppExchange to share or sell. Customers then install the bolt like any other AppExchange listing. This is why the term shows up so often in older AppExchange entries. The reuse story also explains the industry breadth. With more than 50 published solutions across healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, and retail, most teams could find a starting bolt close to their use case instead of designing a vertical site from nothing.
Vertical, industry-specific starting points
The bolts that shipped were tied to specific industries and partner scenarios. Salesforce and its partners published solutions such as retail banking customer communities, healthcare provider portals, insurance agent communities, and B2B partner portals. Each one carried the data model, terminology, and process flows that match how that industry works, so a bank did not have to invent an account servicing flow and a clinic did not have to design a provider intake page from a blank template. For partner relationship management specifically, Salesforce described Lightning Bolts as solution-specific partner portal templates with guided setup. That setup walked admins through partner visibility, record types, workflows, and assignment rules. Audience targeting could vary the experience by partner location or program tier. The value was speed plus industry credibility. Instead of asking a generic project team to research banking or healthcare patterns, the bolt delivered a layout that already reflected those patterns, ready to brand and connect to the customer's own org.
Why the brand went quiet
The Lightning Bolt name peaked between 2017 and 2019, then faded from Salesforce marketing. Two shifts explain it. First, prebuilt site templates became a core part of Experience Cloud itself. Templates like Customer Service, Partner Central, Help Center, and Build Your Own cover much of what a generic bolt once provided, so the standalone branded program lost its reason to exist as a separate thing. Second, Salesforce's industry strategy consolidated. After the 2020 Vlocity acquisition, the vertical story moved into the Industry Clouds: Financial Services Cloud, Health Cloud, and the other named clouds. These products go far deeper than a bolt ever did, with full data models, prebuilt automation, and AI features tuned to each sector. A bank that once might have installed a banking bolt now buys Financial Services Cloud. The packaging capability behind Lightning Bolt did not get deleted. It just stopped being the headline, and the marketing energy moved to richer products.
What to use instead today
If you are starting a new Experience Cloud site now, reach for the standard Experience Builder templates first. They are maintained as part of the product, get release updates, and cover the common customer, partner, and help-center patterns. You configure them in Experience Builder and never have to think about an aging third party package. When the requirement is a full vertical solution rather than a site skin, the modern answer is an Industry Cloud. Financial Services Cloud and Health Cloud bring the deep data model, automation, and packaged use cases that a vertical bolt only gestured at. For sharing your own reusable configuration across orgs, the underlying export and packaging path still works, and many teams now lean on unlocked packages and source-driven deployment for that. The practical rule: treat Lightning Bolt as a legacy label, and choose the maintained template or the relevant Industry Cloud for anything new you build.
Handling inherited bolts and exam context
Long-running orgs sometimes still have a Lightning Bolt package installed from years back. The package keeps working, but it no longer gets updates from Salesforce or the original partner, so it slowly drifts from current best practice. During a platform refresh, audit your Installed Packages for any bolt, then plan a move to the maintained Experience Cloud template or the matching Industry Cloud. Folding that swap into a planned refresh is cleaner than an emergency replacement later. For certifications, Lightning Bolt is mostly historical vocabulary now. Older Community Cloud Consultant material referenced it directly. Current Experience Cloud Consultant exams focus on Experience Builder templates, audience targeting, and site administration rather than the bolt brand. Knowing that Lightning Bolt was a 2016-era program for packaging and distributing prebuilt industry sites, and that its capability lives on through templates and Industry Clouds, is enough context for any modern exam question you are likely to see.
How to create and distribute a Lightning Bolt Solution
You create a Lightning Bolt Solution by exporting a customized Experience Builder site and bundling it for distribution. This is a feature configuration done in Setup and Experience Builder, not a single record you save. The high-level path below mirrors the Salesforce Help flow.
- Build and customize the site
In Experience Builder, configure the template, theme, pages, and components until the site reflects the industry pattern you want to reuse.
- Export the customized assets
Use the export options to capture the customized template, theme, and pages as reusable building blocks for the solution.
- Add flows and apps
Attach the relevant flows and any custom Lightning apps so the solution delivers automation and functionality, not just layout.
- Package and distribute
Bundle the solution into a managed or unmanaged package, then optionally upload it to AppExchange to share or sell it to other orgs.
The label that identifies your Lightning Bolt Solution to admins who install it. Choose something that signals the industry or use case.
The base template, theme, and pages you export. Including a template is optional, but most bolts ship one so installers get a ready-to-run site.
The business process flows you add so the solution carries its guided automation, not just static pages.
Managed or unmanaged, depending on whether you plan to maintain and version the solution or let installers edit it freely.
- Including an Experience Builder template is optional, so confirm yours is actually exported if installers expect a full site.
- A packaged bolt does not auto-update in target orgs. Plan versioning and communicate upgrades, or installers drift onto stale configurations.
- For brand new builds, weigh a standard Experience Cloud template or an Industry Cloud first, since both are maintained while the bolt brand is legacy.
Prefer this walkthrough as its own page? How to Lightning Bolt Solutions in Salesforce, step by step
Trust & references
Cross-checked against the following references.
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Lightning Bolt Solutions.
Hands-on resources to go deeper on Lightning Bolt Solutions.
About the Author
Dipojjal Chakrabarti is a B2C Solution Architect with 29 Salesforce certifications and over 13 years in the Salesforce ecosystem. He runs salesforcedictionary.com to help admins, developers, architects, and cert/interview candidates sharpen their fundamentals. More about Dipojjal.
Test your knowledge
Q1. What did Lightning Bolt Solutions package for Salesforce customers when the program launched?
Q2. What largely absorbed the Lightning Bolt value proposition after Salesforce's Industries Cloud strategy took hold?
Q3. What should an admin do about a Lightning Bolt package still installed in a long-running org?
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