There are over 8,000 dating sites on the Internet right now, and new platforms are launched monthly. Though their concepts and target audiences vary greatly, it may seem that the system is always the same. It’s not exactly true.
Every platform, especially an international dating site, is a complex ecosystem. Its effectiveness determines the quality of experience for a user, and our main goal is to understand all the benefits and drawbacks of using a particular platform and find out what exactly you’ll get from the site.
What criteria do we consider when ranking dating sites?
Ideally, every dating platform should meet the highest quality standards. What are they? Here are the criteria we focus on when analyzing dating platforms:
👤 User base
We analyze international dating websites that are usually promoted as places where you can meet people from a particular country or region, for example, find Asian mail-order brides or meet singles from Europe. Our experts check whether the number of members from the target group is really that impressive, whether they are real people, and, respectively, how high the chance of finding the perfect match is.
❤️ Profile quality
A good international dating website provides a user with an opportunity to create a competitive profile for free and encourages members to add as many details as possible. The more profiles with photos, videos, detailed bios, and posts from users, the better. Ideally, a user should be able to browse a random page and understand whether the person meets their criteria or not before and not after contacting this member.
🔍 Search features
Different sites use different approaches to suggest the best potential matches. Some offer classic search filters and let members manually search for their best partners, some offer both classic search & swiping, and some use sophisticated algorithms to find the best matches automatically. In any case, every member should have an opportunity to distinguish the best profiles from thousands of others with a few clicks.
💬 Communication features
In the international segment of the dating market, features matter more than anything else. When you’re trying to build an emotional connection with someone living in another country or even a continent, you need something more than just a good online messenger. Our experts always make sure that there is a decent set of features (audio & video messaging, letters, video chat, call service, virtual gifts, gift delivery, etc.) that will allow you to build an emotional connection at a distance.
🔒 Security and moderation
The site must be safe—personal data should never be shared with third parties, payments must be secure, and moderators should delete all the low-effort or fake accounts in the shortest time possible.
👍 Reputation and feedback from members
We never write reviews without spending enough time on the site, communicating with users, and testing the features. Still, we can’t rely only on our own experience. Our experts try to find all the information about the site that real customers have shared and consider this, spotting the potential difficulties they may not face.
Don’t get us wrong—there are no perfect websites, and we don’t recommend platforms that get 10 out of 10 points for each of the above-listed parameters. In reality, a site always has pros and cons, great and not-so-good features. Our main goal is to find sites that have more benefits than drawbacks and let you know what you can get from the platform.
Insights into the analysis process
Now you know the criteria we base on when analyzing and ranking the sites, but we’d also like to share some insights into how exactly we create our reviews and rankings. This process is more complex than it may seem at first glance, and the main stages are as follows:
- Monitoring the market, finding the sites that seem to be decent and may be interesting to our site visitors seeking love internationally.
- Doing background research on the site (if it’s an obviously scam platform, we stop the research).
- Setting up an account on the site, testing free features, evaluating the quality of members’ profiles, and analyzing the user base.
- Account upgrade (we either buy credits or premium plans), communication with other members, and testing all premium features.
- Evaluating the experience based on all the above-mentioned criteria, searching for reviews from other users, and comparing them with our own experience.
- Comparing the site with similar platforms, indicating all pros and cons, giving scores for each important criterion, and benchmarking.
Basically, that’s deep analytics—we not only try to learn everything about the site and communicate with other members as a real user but also compare it with other platforms, spotting all the pitfalls and perks for a user.