SoulSingles presents itself as a dating site for African-American, Jamaican, and Haitian singles. Part of a larger network of ethnocentric dating sites, SoulSingles positions itself as a site for long-term relationships. Of the many ethnic-specific dating sites catering to African-Americans, SoulSingles is one of the least known. Our testers evaluated the site to determine its strengths and weaknesses. Will it have both heart and soul? Read our review and find out.

— Pros and Cons —

Pros

• Highly intuitive and simple user interface
• Platform backed by the World Singles Network
• Fast registration process

Cons

• Full functionality requires a paid membership
• No mobile apps available
• Very small user base
• A lot of abandoned profiles

— In-Depth SoulSingles Review —

When we first visited the welcome page for SoulSingles, we were neither impressed nor disappointed. If anything the site looks rather generic. Above the fold you’ll find an image of an African-American couple seemingly in loving Bliss. Next to that image, there is the requisite short registration form. For those of you that are used to templated dating sites, this welcome page definitely fits that description.

Reading through the basic information provided on the welcome page, nothing stood out as being original. Gauging SoulSingles strictly on its aesthetic, we would have considered it to be nothing more than an entry portal for a larger site.

Upon doing background research on SoulSingles, we discovered that our assumption was not that far off. The site is owned and operated by the World Singles Network. This network is a collection of ethnocentric dating sites. Each one operates independently while sharing a common architecture.

— Registration Process —

The registration process for SoulSingles is pretty simple. On the welcome page you must select your gender, the gender of the partner that you are looking for, your date of birth, a valid email address, and your location. With that, you are granted immediate access as a free member to the site.

It should be noted that SoulSingles will send you a verification link to your email address of record. If you do not click on that link within 72 hours of your initial registration, your account will be invalidated.

During our testing, the majority of our testers received this email almost instantaneously. There were, however, two testers who did not receive the verification email until more than an hour had passed.

— Building Your Profile —

SoulSingles allows members to build their personal profile whenever they choose. You can do so immediately after registering or later on. The advantage to selecting the latter option would be that you can browse existing profiles and use them as inspiration to develop ideas for your own.

The personal profiles on the site consist of a profile picture, up to five additional images, and an ‘About Me” section in which you can include any detail that you want to mention about yourself, the type of person that you are looking for, or life in general.

When filling out your personal profile, you are requested to describe your physical and personality traits in the form of questions which you respond to by selecting options from a drop-down menu. Some of the attributes include height, weight, body build, eye color, etc. You get the picture, it is pretty routine. One of the questions involves specifying your ethnicity. The options are African-American, Haitian, Jamaican, other Caribbean, African, and mixed race.

SoulSingles does not include any complex questionnaires designed to gauge your personality or outlook on dating.

— Very Plain Features —

When you are in the member’s area of the site, do not expect to find anything extraordinary. The only features that are offered are an internal messaging system, a search engine, and an instant chat module that includes the option for video chats.

— User Experience and Matchmaking Quality —

The fact that a dating site has a simplistic set of features is never a reason to automatically discount its effectiveness. In the end, all dating sites should be measured by the level of results that they provide.

In the case of SoulSingles, all of the features are easy to access and intuitive to use. In that regard, we would give the site two thumbs up for ease of usability.

Where we did have issues with the site were with the relative weakness of its search engine and the lack of relevance of its user base.

The search engine merely indexes and retrieves other member profiles based on their profile attributes. SoulSingles does not offer algorithmically assisted search results like other modern dating sites do. That means that the compatibility of the profiles in each search result may not be as accurate as you are used to.

Couple that with a small user base and you have a recipe for disappointment.

Many of the profiles on the site appeared to be outdated or abandoned. In our tests, roughly half of the results had to be discarded for that reason.

We found the entire search process on SoulSingles to be frustrating and disappointing. Not only are you limited in the customization of your search, but the search results that you do receive are lackluster.

— Cost —

If SoulSingles operated entirely as a free dating site, we would probably rank it as satisfactory. Unfortunately, the free version of the site is extremely limited.

In order to be able to use the site’s communication features, a paid membership is required. A one-month subscription has a cost of $24.99. This is a price that we find way too high for a site of this mediocre caliber. You can save 20% by paying for three months in advance and 40% if you opt for the six month package.

— Site Stats —

When we crunched the numbers, we realized that the problem with SoulSingles came from its small membership base. The site has less than 25,000 members. When you take into account all of the inactive profiles, that number is slashed in half.

Also, the gender ratio is at two men for every one woman. It doesn’t take a math wizard to calculate that the chances of finding a partner on the site with those stats are slim.