Q: What is the most important tip for working with Online Community?

Check the template family before you plan components. LWR sites run Lightning web components only, while Aura sites like Customer Service and Partner Central run both component models on the same page.

Question 1

What is Online Community in Salesforce?

Accepted Answer

An Online Community is the retired Salesforce name for a branded, authenticated site that gives customers, partners, or members access to your org's data without a full internal user license. Salesforce renamed the product to Experience Cloud, and the sites themselves are now Experience Cloud sites.
The relabelling ran across Winter '21 and Spring '21. Lightning communities became Experience Builder sites, and Community Builder became Experience Builder.

Question 2

Can you explain Online Community in plain English?

Accepted Answer

The thing did not go away. Only its name did. Salesforce used to call these private websites for customers and partners communities. Now it calls them Experience Cloud sites. Same website, same login, different word on the sign.

Question 3

What is a real example of Online Community?

Accepted Answer

A regional insurance broker built a policyholder portal in 2018. Its runbook still says "go to Setup, All Communities, click Manage." In a Summer '26 org that menu is gone. The admin finds it under Digital Experiences, All Sites, where the portal appears as Policyholder Hub with the URL suffix /policyholders. The next runbook line, "open Community Builder," now reads Experience Builder. Underneath, nothing moved. The site is still a Network record, and the same sharing sets grant the same rows. The users still hold Customer Community Plus licenses.

Question 4

What is the most important tip for working with Online Community?

Accepted Answer

Check the template family before you plan components. LWR sites run Lightning web components only, while Aura sites like Customer Service and Partner Central run both component models on the same page.

Question 5

In current Salesforce terminology, what is an online community now called?

Accepted Answer

Community Cloud became Experience Cloud, and the individual branded sites built on it are Experience Cloud sites. Portals and Force.com Sites are older, separate products, and a Lightning App Page is internal org UI, not an external site.

Question 6

Where in Setup do you find and manage Experience Cloud sites today?

Accepted Answer

Site.com Studio is a legacy builder for standalone public pages, and the Portals entry covers the retired portal products. Neither reaches a modern site, and the Communities options no longer exist in Setup at all.

Question 7

Which piece of the old community vocabulary did Salesforce keep?

Accepted Answer

Customer Community, Customer Community Plus, and Partner Community are still the license SKUs you buy, even though the builder became Experience Builder and the Setup node became Digital Experiences. That mismatch is why licensing conversations still use the older word.

Online Community

Definition

In plain English

Worked example

What the rename actually changed, and what it did not

The rename came in two waves

Setup navigation moved, so old runbooks break

Community licenses outlived the community label

Experience Cloud is still shipping

Trust & references

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