Is okcupid a good site for online dating?

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Arguably the biggest free dating site on the planet, OKCupid is the latest online dating site to get our review treatment...

Our OKCupid Review

Make no mistake, OKCupid.com is a major online dating brand. Once mainly US focused, it is now widely recognised by UK daters too. The site is known for being free to use for most of the things you need as a single person looking for love online.

The free dating market isn't quite as competitive yet as the subscription based landscape, but with the emergence of Tinder, things are changing. In the UK, PlentyOfFish (see our POF review here) used to be the main player. But with the emergence of OKCupid, the market has welcomed a site that has optimised it's features and design over a period of many years in the US and is now taking the UK by storm. Indeed, against POF, the site looks like it is in another league; sleek, slick and stylish.

How Does OKCupid Work?

This style isn't just down to the appearance of the site either. One of the things our reviewers liked most about OKCupid.com was the cool and interesting tone that the site has. It's a playful and quirky site in a sea of boring, monotonous dating websites. An example of this is the sign up process or, even more so, the profile creation process. This is normally a list of open ended questions that scare the socks off nervous singletons. With OKCupid, rather than facing a blank box and having to conjure up an answer for a question such as “Write about your personal strong points”, users are instead asked quick, simple questions that populate their profile, making the process far less interview-like and far more fun. An example question might be, “Are you a morning person?”, with your “yes” or “no” checkbox answer doing the hard work for you and inserting something along the lines of “I'm not a morning person” into your profile. This is a great way to extract information for a dating profile, ensuring that you'll get more attention because there is more information about you.

Despite all this fun stuff, the site could still be described as 'no nonsense' due to the fact that it focuses purely on the dating experience and lacks any interesting free features or even written content, such as blogs. With a site as popular as OKCupid, you'd think this type of thing would be easy to add on the site – Match.com (see our Match.com review here) for example, which is owned by the same group, has several bloggers as well as all kinds of other articles and information for the newbie dater to sift through.

That being said, if you're willing to pay there are some features available. 'A list' upgraders can choose from options like removing ads, receiving information on when your outgoing messages are read, invisible browsing, advanced searches, increased inbox size, the ability to change usernames and a few others.

The site design on OKCupid deserves a mention. It is simple and smooth, with a helpful navigation bar that quickly informs you of new 'likes' or visitors to your profile.  It also includes a shortcut to the QuickMatch area, which is essentially a 'Hot or Not' type of search mechanism that is common on many sites, except that here instead of showing one potential match photo at a time, it displays several pictures from the same member. It's a nice twist to a feature that can be a little boring and gives you a better look at the person you're being offered to contact, without slowing the process down.

The final noteworthy aspect of OKCupid.com is that the site claims to learn the “type” of people you're keen on as you go through your search journey and click/ like profiles, so it can suggest new similar members for you. If this works, it could be a real time saver. From our review the initial findings on this were quite positive.

Our Conclusion: Should You Join OKCupid? 

There's not doubt that OKCupid is a dating site to be reckoned with. It's free, more stylish than POF and can even bring a smile to your face with its quirkiness. But at the end of the day this one comes down to personal preference...do you want a site that focuses on searching and doesn't bother with accompanying content? Are you happy to set up dates with people who aren't willing to pay a fee to boost their search for love?

As we mentioned, OKCupid is primarily a free dating site and therefore does have a high number of members. For that reason along with the other positives above, we'd definitely recommend OKCupid as a free dating option to go along with the subscription sites you currently use, particularly if you're based in the US or Canada where the database size means you'd be crazy to not give it a chance.