An Experience Cloud site is composed of several layers that work together. Each layer contributes specific types of content and data. To help you understand how the pieces work together, let’s divide the components into major categories and discuss how they influence one another
Required Editions
| Available in: Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience |
| Available in: Enterprise, Developer, Performance, and Unlimited Editions |
Salesforce Platform
Experience Cloud relies on the elements that you’ve created in your primary Salesforce org—all the applications that make up the Customer 360 platform, such as Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Mulesoft. When you set up your org, you create users, profiles, and records that contain different types of data. You use all that data to power and populate your Experience Cloud site.
You can use platform services built on Salesforce with your Experience Cloud sites. When we say platform services, we mean tools that are built on the Salesforce platform and can be used with many Salesforce products, including Experience Cloud. They aren’t tools that necessarily exist within the framework of Experience Cloud. For instance, you can use Flow Builder, Process Builder, or Apex triggers and classes with your site.
Salesforce CMS (Content Management System) is a Lightning app where you can create, store, and manage all your content. Built on your Salesforce org, it exists outside of your site and provides a shared resource that you can use across multiple apps and sites. From that single location you can pull content into many sites and apps without having to recreate and manage the content.
Security
Your site is often the face of your company, useful for communicating with many types of users. To address complex access needs, you need a tailored approach to security and scale. The security settings are managed in several places, and some affect all sites while others are site-specific. Most settings are found in three separate locations: the Settings area in Experience Builder, user permissions in your Salesforce org, and your overall settings for Experience Cloud in Salesforce Setup.
Presentation
The presentation layer is where all the pieces come together and includes the Experience Builder templates and components. You can choose how your site displays to your audience and address accessibility concerns. Experience Builder components often draw from your Salesforce org to populate data and process actions taken by your users. Your personalization and security settings dictate what your users see and how they can interact with your site.
Analytics
When your site is live, you want to understand how users are interacting with it and how you can improve it. Using the Dashboard and Moderation tiles in Experience Workspaces, you can supervise your content and track user data with reports and dashboards. However, the analytics tools built on Experience Cloud are limited. To fully maintain the health of your site and deeply understand user interaction, we suggest implementing tools like Google Analytics or other third-party scripts.