Experience Cloud doesn't have to be your only option

A few months ago, we decided to try an innovative approach with our own support portal!

We took our support site, which had been running on Salesforce Experience Cloud for years, and replaced the portal with a new solution built entirely with StoreConnect. It is powered by Salesforce, ready for Agentforce, and we just went live.

Experience Cloud is a powerful tool that many teams reach for first when they need to expose CRM data to customers, partners, or external users. It offers deep integration with Cases, Knowledge, Accounts and Opportunities. That promise is real, and it worked for us for a long time. However, for straightforward customer portals and support sites, it can sometimes become more complex than necessary, requiring significant maintenance, specialized developer skills and complex user management.

Here is what we were managing before the switch:

• Complex user administration. Managing individual portal logins often requires creating a high volume of extra user records in Salesforce, leading to a more complex org and extra compliance tracking.
• Performance optimization needs. Keeping complex pages, component overhead and heavy scripts running at peak speeds requires constant optimization. Our previous setup had a Lighthouse performance score of 72.
• Specialist skills required. Updates often require deep familiarity with Aura or Lightning Web Components (LWC). This is great if you have dedicated Salesforce front-end developers, but it can be a bottleneck for traditional web teams.

We wanted a simpler, more direct way to help our clients.

By rebuilding our support portal with StoreConnect, we maintained the exact same Salesforce data and secure access, but streamlined the entire architecture.

Here is what changed for us:

• Simplified user management. Our portal no longer creates a pile of extra user records in Salesforce. We just use clean Accounts and Contacts, leading to a simpler org and easier compliance.
• Instant speed boost. Our Lighthouse performance score jumped from 72 to 96 with basically zero optimization work. Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO all shifted safely into the green.
• Empowered content teams. The entire content team now writes and updates pages in plain Markdown. Non-technical team members can contribute instantly without wrestling with complex component builders.
• Standard web skills. The platform utilizes industry-standard HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Liquid templating. Hiring, upskilling and maintaining the site is straightforward and cost-effective.
• Dynamic and extendable. We enjoy full real-time synchronization with Salesforce core objects. Users can directly edit custom records and fields right in the portal, and those changes write straight back to Salesforce safely.
• Built-in Markdown support. StoreConnect features native Markdown support, which allows LLMs to easily read the information they need without parsing heavy visual design elements. You can even see this in action on our Getting Started page or by checking out our llms.txt file.
• An agentic foundation. Because the entire site structure resides inside Salesforce, it is perfectly positioned to plug into Agentforce. This allows us to provide autonomous, 24/7 assistance to our clients and partners with full access to all documentation. Learn more in this free Guide.

An except from llms.txt file that tells AI where to look.
The result is a faster, more maintainable portal that feels great to use for our team and our customers.

Experience Cloud remains an excellent platform for complex enterprise use cases, especially when you need sophisticated sharing rules or deep internal workflow integration. But for standard customer-facing portals and support sites, StoreConnect offers a precise, purpose-built alternative that delivers speed, simplicity and cost efficiency.

We proved it on our own support site, and it is one of the smartest moves we have made.

If you are ready to see what StoreConnect can do for your customer experience, book a demo with our team today.