Best Ways & Examples of Linking Online Community on Your Website

In this blog post, we explore innovative strategies to put your community front and center, ensuring it gets the attention it deserves. Discover a variety of key locations on your website to highlight and link to your community.

Where to start:

• Top Navigation: Make it easy for visitors to find your community right from the start.
• Support Menu and Portal: Integrate your community links where users seek help and resources.
• Landing Page: Feature your community prominently, either above or below the fold, to capture immediate interest.
• Footer: Ensure your community is accessible from any page on your site.

In addition to these prime spots, leverage community-centric content to showcase its value:

• Community Created Content: Highlight user-generated content to show real engagement.
• Community Stories: Share success stories and experiences from your members.
• Community Members: Put a spotlight on active and influential members.
• Community Stats: Use impressive statistics to demonstrate your community’s impact and growth.

Remember, more visibility is better when linking your site to your community. Don’t stop at your main site—extend these links to:

• Customer Support Portal: Make your community part of the support experience.
• Product Documentation: Embed community links in guides and manuals.
• Social Media Channels: Drive traffic from your social profiles to your community.
• Emails and Newsletters: Include community links in your regular communications.

The goal is to embed your community into every possible touchpoint, creating a seamless and integrated experience for your users. This approach not only fosters a stronger community but also enhances overall user engagement and satisfaction. Now, let's look at some examples!

Community above the fold

A powerful way to highlight your community on your website is to put it ‘above the fold’, meaning putting it at the top of your website and thus viewable by every page visitor.

At Metalware, a simple button with the CTA (call to action) “Join our Discord” can already make a difference:

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Or like the team at Lego. Whenever you go to https://lego.com they’ll ask you if you want to go to the shop or their online community (aka The Play Zone).

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Other ways to highlight your community above the fold is by using this space to showcase content from your community.  This how Unreal Engine shows the power of it’s gaming engine while at the same time promoting their developer community and forums.
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Community in your Navigation

Another great way to put your community front and center on your website is by making it part of your navigation as a top level item. For example SAP has a link to their community in their top page navigation (also putting it above the fold at the same time).

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Community as part of your landing page

At Airbyte they even dedicated an entire section of their landing page to showcase their community. This is a great way for you to show the value of joining the community in a single blink of the eye.

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And Talkbase has not just a community section on their front page, they’re also showcasing their community members, another great way of making your community not about your brand, but about the people.

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Community as part of your help or support center.

Placing a link to your community in your help and support sections can help divert part of your support requests to the community, allowing your support engineers to focus on the more urgent and difficult support requests while using the community as a resource for people to find answers to their questions on their own.

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At Atlassian, the community is linked as the first resource on their support portal, putting it front and center as a first line support resource.

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And at Salesforce you can find their different communities right on their Help Portal.

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Community in your footer

Your footer could be another great place to put a link to your community, a footer is often used across multiple pages on your site and can be of great help to people navigating your site.
Giving the community a place here enforces its value to both your company and your customers.

How Calendly placed their newly launched community in their footer along with placing it in the top bar on their landing page under the resources dropdown.

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For 55Degrees their community is listed together with their other resources in their footer, and thus on every page on their website.

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As you might notice when diving into the above examples: linking to your community on your website isn’t something you only do once. You want to link from as many places as possible to create the maximum amount of value for your community and your company by driving as much traffic as possible to your community.

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