Empowering Digital Experiences

Salesforce Experience Cloud: Empowering Digital Experiences

Salesforce Experience Cloud is a robust digital experience platform that enables businesses to create beautifully designed, CRM-powered online sites. Previously known as Community Cloud, the rebranding reflects its versatility in supporting a wide range of connected digital experiences.

What is an Experience Cloud Site?

An Experience Cloud site serves as an online hub to connect with customers, foster collaboration, and streamline business processes. These sites are customizable through Experience Builder, which allows users to design visually compelling and functional spaces based on their unique needs.

Experience Builder Sites
Formerly called Lightning Communities, Experience Builder sites are template-based and built on one of two frameworks:

Lightning Web Runtime (LWR): A modern framework designed for performance and scalability.
Aura: Salesforce’s earlier framework for creating dynamic web applications.

Introducing Lightning Web Runtime (LWR)

LWR is the core framework powering modern Experience Cloud sites. It leverages Lightning Web Components (LWC) for enhanced performance, scalability, and customizability.

Key advantages of LWR include:

Performance: Components are pre-rendered at build time for faster load speeds.
Styling: Sites can be styled using design tokens for consistent and customizable themes.

New LWR-Based Experience Cloud Templates

The latest Experience Cloud templates are built exclusively on Lightning Web Components, making them faster and more efficient than Aura-based alternatives. The templates are designed for customers using Salesforce CMS and feature:

Customizable headers, bodies, and footers via LWC or layout adjustments.
Flexible layouts, allowing easy transitions between two-column and three-column structures.

Page Layouts and Slots

Experience Cloud enables dynamic page structuring with:

Theme Layouts: Predefined structures for pages.
Custom Layouts: Assign specific page structures for greater flexibility.

Slots play a crucial role in defining placeholders for content or markup.

Named Slots: Specific content placeholders.
Default Slots: General content areas.

Metadata configuration allows these layouts to be integrated seamlessly into the Experience Cloud.

CSS and Styling in Experience Cloud

In Experience Cloud, Synthetic Shadow DOM replaces the native Shadow DOM. This allows global CSS to be applied across web components, ensuring design consistency. For example, custom buttons inherit background colors directly from the site theme, regardless of where they’re used.

Navigation Options

Experience Cloud sites support two types of navigation:

Standard Navigation (Aura-based): Prebuilt templates featuring editable navigation bars.
Custom Navigation (LWR-based): Fully customizable navigation menus that align with unique user needs.

For more advanced customization, Salesforce provides access to open-source codebases, such as the LWR Demo Agent site available on GitHub.

Future-Ready Digital Experiences

By leveraging the latest advancements in Lightning Web Components and the flexibility of LWR, Salesforce Experience Cloud empowers organizations to build connected, fast, and beautifully designed digital experiences tailored to their specific needs. Whether you’re enhancing customer engagement, building AI-enabled workflows, or streamlining collaboration, Experience Cloud serves as a powerful foundation for success.