5 Online Dating Features That Actually Help

Online Dating

5 Online Dating Features That Actually Help Singles

Gina Stewart

Written by: Gina Stewart

Gina Stewart

Gina is the owner of Expert Online Dating. As an online dating consultant, she helps men and women maximize their online dating experiences to get more dates. You can visit her website, www.ExpertOnlineDating.com, for more information or to contact her.

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Edited by: Lillian Castro

Lillian Castro

Lillian Guevara-Castro brings more than 30 years of journalism experience to ensure DatingAdvice articles have been edited for overall clarity, accuracy, and reader engagement. She has worked at The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, The Gwinnett Daily News, and The Gainesville Sun covering lifestyle topics.

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Online dating can be confusing – lots of buttons and graphics leave you wondering what to do, where to go and how to use them in the best way.

Your time is important, so here are some of my favorite features that help you be a better online dater and get you more dates faster.

1. Read receipts 

Knowledge is power. When you send an email, it’s good to know how it fared.

Read receipts tell you if your online efforts are fruitless. They come standard on some plans. If not, it’s worth the upsell.

If people aren’t reading your emails, it could be because you have a bad profile picture and they are uninterested. If they are reading your emails and not responding, you may want to reassess your approach.

The point is you want to know either way as a gauge of how successful you are in that respect.

2. Who viewed your profile

This is a great way to see who may be interested in you and if people you’ve expressed interest in looked back at you.

This is a standard feature on most sites, and you want to take advantage of it.

Make sure you are consistently checking who viewed your profile.

This is a great feature to see if your profile and emails are working for you.

3. Filtered emails

There are some weirdos out there. Let’s not make any bones about it.

Unfortunately some of them have figured out how to make online dating accounts.

The good news is a lot of sites have built-in features to help circumvent some obvious abuses of who you want to contact you.

Maybe it’s a person outside of the United States. Maybe it’s a person with a 30-year age difference. Maybe it’s someone with a different lifestyle than what you are looking for.

Many sites let you set up filters so these weirdos’ email efforts never cross your path.

4. Top placement in search results

In Google, websites pay big money to put their sites at the top of a search result. The same goal is true for online dating.

For you, a higher ranking means you are going to receive more clicks when people make searches.

More clicks means more potential emails, as people tend to start on page one when clicking profiles.

Some sites make you pay for this feature, but sometimes you can cheat it by consistently updating your profile.

5. Invisibly search dates

Sometimes a little covertness is your friend. Making your profile invisible can be helpful when you want to see important details about a date without looking like you’re stalking.

Or maybe if you’re window-shopping and not quite ready to make a move, looking around doesn’t have to cost you your first impression.

There also are a lot of site-specific functions I love, but what about you? Which online dating features do you find the most valuable?

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