WellHello describes itself as an adult community. On its welcome page and promotional pages it uses the tagline “WellHello, Your Fun Dating, Hookup, and Swingers Site With Style.” At least as a concept, what WellHello purports to offer can be interesting to a large segment of our readership. With that in mind, we conducted an evaluation of WellHello in order to determine what sort of user experience can be expected — and more importantly, what results can be obtained. Here is our in-depth WellHello review.

— Pros and Cons of WellHello —

Pros

• Registration is fast and free

Cons

• Need a paid membership to use most of its functions
• Fake profiles are present
• Matches are often too far away to result in hookups

— In-Depth WellHello Review —

WellHello is marketed as a dating and hookup site for singles and swinging couples. With a strong marketing effort utilizing pop-up ads on adult networks, pay-per-click ads on search engines, and SMS text campaigns — WellHello is a dating site that is making a concerted effort to brand itself as the “go to” site for the hookup lifestyle.

— First Impression and Registration on WellHello —

Due to the intensive marketing that WellHello is conducting, your first impression of WellHello will come from either its standing welcome page, or one of its capture pages. The latter are glitzier and focus on getting you to start the registration process more on impulse than anything else. The capture pages offer no further information beyond the registration box. The official welcome page offers slightly more information — including what are presented as testimonials from satisfied users.

Registration involves a simple process. You are required to enter your gender, a valid email address (which will be used to verify your registration), a password to access your account, your zip code and your date of birth. Unlike the majority of other sites that require a second or third tier of profile building information, WellHello allows you immediate access to its platform by solely submitting the first tier of basic information.

Immediately upon registering, you are redirected to WellHello’s membership page. You will notice that a small line of text appears below your username indicating that you must validate your email address. A verification link was sent to the email that you registered. If you do not click on that verification link within 24 hours, your account is canceled.

— WellHello Features —

For a hookup and dating site that markets itself as an adult community, WellHello does not have the feature set commonly associated with “community” sites. The features on this hookup site are in fact, pretty standard. There is a search function, an internal messaging system, a place to store your favorite profiles and that’s about it. Other adult hookup sites that tout themselves as “communities” offer more robust features — similar to those found on a social network. This was a disappointment to us, considering the hype from their marketing material — we expected something more.

The search function allows you to search for other members based on gender, age range, and location. About the only thing that we found interesting about this otherwise plain function was the way members interface with it. When you activate a search, an interface bar descends from the top of the page and by means of dragging scales, you enter the parameters of your search criteria. It’s basically a new coat of paint on an old idea — but at least it looks good.

The messaging platform allows for messages to be sent and received “email style.” You can also connect via instant message if the other member is online and accepts your request. There is a feature called “Live Cam Girls Near You” that allows for video chats to take place.

While these features may sound standard, you may also be saying to yourself, “but that’s all I need.” While that would be true in most cases, there are certain caveats that we discovered with WellHello that affect the overall user experience.

— WellHello User Experience —

When you first register on WellHello, you enter the site as a free member. This brings with it a few negative experiences. First, you will find display ads on the site. While they are few in number and don’t clutter your screen, some do contain design elements — such as poorly coded video loops — that can slow down your machine. Second, the free version will nag you with annoying “chat requests” and incoming “messages” from what are passed off as real female members. A review of the terms and conditions confirmed what we had suspected. The majority of those messages were from what WellHello terms “Love Hostesses.” These are — in their own words — fictitious profiles used to enhance the site experience and collect data on the preferences of its members. The TOS clearly states that the communication of those profiles is handled entirely by chatbots.

The reason for doing this is to encourage free members to become paid members. The only way to start a message thread, or respond to a chat request, is by becoming a paid member. This is not a tactic exclusive to WellHello. While we do find the presence of such profiles irritating, it does not necessarily take a hookup site and run it into the ground.

— Cost of Using WellHello —

In the case of WellHello, we paid for a one-month membership to see what the user experience was like on the other side. A one-month membership has a cost of $29.95. This can be lowered to $9.99 per month if you pay for 12 months in advance.

As paid members, the first thing we noticed was that the display advertising was removed. Next, all of those relentless messages and chat requests from the chatbots stopped. We still received one or two messages in our inbox from the bots — we suppose this is done so you don’t have to face an empty inbox when you check your messages.

In terms of the type of people that you connect with — well, over a ten day period during our WellHello review, we did make online contact with four members on the site. Three responded to our initial contact, the other contacted us first. Of those four, they all identified themselves as women. None would engage in a video chat, all communicated with us via message inbox or instant messaging. The main problem we encountered with our contacts was that only one lived within 50 miles of our location. The remainder were too distant to expect a real hookup.