Testing your community before inviting real members helps you catch issues early and ensures everything works as expected. You can test sign-ups, invitations, subscriptions, courses, channels, and emails by creating test member accounts inside your own community.
In this guide, we’ll explain two easy ways to do this.
You can create test member accounts that behave like real users. These accounts can be used to:
Accept invitations
Sign up for subscriptions
Access channels and courses
Receive onboarding and notification emails
Test members should use email addresses you control, so you can receive and review system emails during testing.
If you use Gmail, you do not need multiple email inboxes to create test accounts.
Gmail supports plus addressing, which allows you to add a + and extra text to your email address. Emails sent to these addresses will still arrive in your main inbox.
All of the following are treated as unique email addresses by most platforms, but they all deliver to the same Gmail inbox:
Example:
If your real email is janedoe@gmail.com, you can create one test member using janedoe+test1@gmail.com and another using janedoe+clientdemo@gmail.com. Each email will register as a separate member in your community, but all invitation and login emails will still arrive in janedoe@gmail.com.
You can use each variation to create a separate test member account.
Using Gmail Plus addressing allows you to:
Create multiple test users without setting up new email accounts
Test different sign-up flows, invitations, and permissions
Identify which flow triggered an email (based on the + label)
Stay within platform limits without requesting special exceptions
This makes it easy to fully test your community setup before inviting real users.
Clearly label test accounts so they are not confused with real members
Remove or deactivate test accounts once testing is complete
Avoid sending bulk invites to test addresses unless you are intentionally testing that flow
