7 Great Ways to Test The Quality of Your Online Community Platform

An online community platform is a must-have to build engaging online communities for everyone. Hundreds and thousands of community platforms exist on the internet. How can you know your sites can stand out among them?

Choosing the right community platform can be tricky and challenging. If you want your brand to have an enormous impact on the minds of your audience, you need to be very specific.

Here are some ways to test your online community platform before releasing it to your audience.

1. Understand Your Online Community Platform Requirements

What do you want to bring to your audience? What is your community all about? These are the questions you need to answer first. Once you know the answers, you will have a better understanding. This will help your brand or community to develop.

Knowing the answers will establish your brand better in front of the audience or your targeted market. All of the requirements also need to align with the features you use inside your community platforms.

To get all of the features to enhance your community platform you also need a great plugin. A plugin that can give you complete features to use, available in free and premium versions.

The plugin is Youzify. Youzify as the number one WordPress plugin is here to help you build an online community. When you do a performance test, you are also able to test Youzify and experience all the handy features to build a mesmerizing community.

2. Build a Demo Environment to Test Your Community Platform

After you check and define your priorities and requirements, now is the time to create a demo environment. What is meant by demo environment?

This refers to an environment where you can make a test into your features and functions inside the community platform you build.

Your demo platform should give you some room for customization options to reflect what your community and brand are doing. You also need to ensure that your demo platform provides your users with a similar experience to your online community.

This also lets you see how your audience will use all features and functionality of your community.

3. Test Your Community Platform by Adding All of Your Brand Assets

Still, in the demo environment, you should be able to access all the elements you want to give to your users or customers.

That is why you should add all of your brand assets to check whether it has the right feel or not. Whatever it is, your demo environment must feel as it is yours. So you can do whatever you wish to do inside the demos.

By doing so, you have the first seat experience from the customer’s point of view. You must try to showcase all the features of your online community in a demo environment.

4. Onboard Your Community Platform Properly

Next, you need to properly integrate your community into your demo environment. If you want to get actual feedback on your community, you need to invite people. People who are actually involved in your community.

The best choice is to pick around 10 to 15 loyal community members and invite them to the demo environment. You need to include them in your review process and ask them to give you appropriate feedback on your platform.

You can also invite stakeholders and other key decision-makers in your organization. This will help your community grow in the direction you want it to.

5. Test It Out

After you prepare all the demo environments, it is time for you to test them out. By doing this test, you can monitor the performance of your community.

Upload all your brand assets and see how your community is doing. You can also create content, manage groups directory, or any community website features. Try sending private messages to your customers to fully engage your community.

This way, you can give your demo environment a sense of a real community. To get full demos, you also need to install a plugin. A plugin which able to build your community sites.

Youzify, for instance, is one of the most comprehensive community website plugins. By adding this plugin, you can check the style of profile header, members and groups directory, and memberships area.

6. Make a Survey to Know Your Community Platform Quality

Once the test is done, you should evaluate all the different aspects of your platform. To perform a survey, you can use different tools to automatically collect user feedback and experience during the testing phase.

This step is crucial because it will help you understand what exactly your online community is missing and how to address your shortcomings.

7. Check The Feedback

Feedback is something you can rely on to know the quality of your community platform. This enables you to understand your customers and what is best for them.

This allows you to improve the functionality of your community and provide a better experience for your users. You can also consider reviewing the feedback carefully and rate all your options accordingly.

Conclusion

You need to always perform a test before launching a new online community platform. To accompany the check and balance, you will need a plugin that can create an ideal demo environment.

Youzify is your answer to launch a full-scale test for any online community you are building. Create your demo using Youzify to give your users a perfect experience of an online community