OkCupid Review
OkCupid Review Ratings
Summary: Finally, a free dating site that offers some serious competition to the paid alternatives.
3.7
OK Cupid does everything that paid dating sites do and we have to say, it doesn’t do it badly at all. Easy to use, and what’s even better – fun to use – it has a lot of potential to become one of the most popular dating sites here in UK just as it is in US.
Profiles, matchmaking and the people on OKCupid
Some free online dating sites have a reputation of being a bit dodgy, full of desperate people, fake profiles and chancers. Well, don’t count OK Cupid to be one of them – from everything we’ve seen on the site it’s probably just as good as many paid dating sites and even better than some of them. It’s also friendly towards people of all orientations, perhaps more than any other mainstream site we’ve reviewed.
Putting together your profile takes a fair bit of time but has been cleverly developed. A lot of thought has gone into coming up with the questions that make up your profile. As with many paid dating sites, OK Cupid also has a compatibility feature which they calculate according to the answers that you give to a set of questions that they have selected on the site.
There are hundreds of questions and the more you answer, the more accurate are the compatibility results. The questions vary from those concerning your personal preferences to your political views or to intellectual questions and even more abstract matters. With every question you answer, you can also select what you would like your match to give as an answer and how important this is to you. Later, while searching or browsing you can naturally view all the answers that other users have given to the questions unless they choose to answer privately, which is also an option.
Of course, since there are so many questions on OK Cupid, you don’t have to answer hundreds of them immediately, you can just do fifty or so at one go and later come back to it. Remember – the more you do, the more the system gets to know about you and the better the choice of matches is going to be.
An OkCupid profile page – clean and useful design design but like most free dating sites – lots of ads!
Completing your profile
Other than the questions, there’s also the more conventional part of profile-filling to be done with all the usual stuff about who you are, what your appearance is like, what’s the level of your education etc. You can write longer answers about what you do, what you’re like as a person, and of course we encourage you to do this in order to increase your chances of standing out and getting noticed. You don’t have to be overly clever or massively funny but remember – there are certain things that ring true with most people. Who doesn’t like to hang out with their friends? Who doesn’t like snuggling up on a sofa with a good bottle of wine on a cold winter’s night? Who doesn’t like to find that special someone to spend some quality time with? Everybody likes that, but does pointing it out necessarily get you noticed? Try to be original and say something that makes you unique – that makes you YOU.
Once you’ve completed your profile and start browsing some others, you’ll find that they are actually pretty informative. You get the summary in a little box where it’s also immediately indicated how closely you are matched, whether the other person is online or not, how often he or she replies to their messages (and if they get messaged often), and of course you get the age, sex and location as well. When you scroll down you can see all the personal preferences and other details that they have written.
On different tabs at the top of the profile page you can browse through people’s photos, the comparison of the compatibility questions as well as how different his or her personality is from other people of his/her age and sex. You can mark someone as your favourite or hide their profile from you. A very good thing is also the list of similar users right next to the profile that you’re looking at, providing you with plenty of options and saving you from doing the search over and over again.
Searching for matches
Now, about search, there are several options. First, there’s the basic search, where you can search with age, sex and location, online status, photos and relationship status. If you want to do a more advanced search, based on looks and/or personality, you have to subscribe to the paid version of OK Cupid (and we come back to that later) but to be honest, there’s really no need as the basic search is pretty comprehensive and comes back with a lot of results. Not only were we happy with the amount of results we got but we have to say that the member profiles here were pretty high quality, not unlike those on paid sites – not always the case with other free sites we’ve tested. Generally people were no less attractive, thoughtful or honest than we encounter on paid sites. Maybe they’re just less willing to make the financial commitment of being tied to a dating site.
Also, there’s a quickmatch option which works a bit like Tinder – you mark whether you like someone based on a quick look of their profile and photo – and if you do, they get notified and can get in touch with you if they in turn like your profile. We’ve noticed a lot of dating sites are doing their own mini-version of Tinder these days. Oh well, they’ve got to compete somehow, right?
By the way – if you visit someone’s profile on OK Cupid, they can see that you’ve been to their page and of course, you can also see who’s been on your’s. You can turn this feature off, but then you can’t see who’s visited your profile, unless you’re a paying member. Paying members can choose to see visitors to their page but not leave a trail themselves.
We like how easy it is to use OK Cupid. It’s quite well designed, clutter-free (although you do get ads on the site) and user-friendly – in other words, it works.
Extras
OkCupid has apps for the iPhone and Android as well as a mobile browser version so you can use OkCupid on the move, or when you don’t want to move from your couch. Also, as with many other dating sites, you can also connect your OKCupid profile to your Facebook and Instagram page and import photos easily from there.
Should you pay for OK Cupid?
Finally, a few words about OK Cupid’s paid option. We’ve already established that as dating sites go, OK Cupid is a very good site and probably the best when it comes to free dating sites. However, should you like to subscribe to their paid version you’ll get some extra features in addition. Some we have already mentioned – like browsing profiles invisibly and being able to perform the advanced search. You can also see the full list of people who have rated you with four or five stars, you get message read receipts, you can change your username, you can see how recent the photos of other users are, and you can store up to 300 messages in your OK Cupid mailbox. Is it worth it? Not for us, the free site does the job just fine.
OkCupid alternatives
If you’re seriously considering paying for those extra features then before you do so we recommend considering subscribing to Match or eHarmony instead – especially if you’re looking for a long term relationship. Why? Well, much as we’re impressed with OkCupid we found more people looking for a serious relationship on the best paid dating sites compared to OkCupid. When people invest their hard earned money it tends to focus the mind a bit more!
OkCupid review: Pros and Cons
It’s a very user-friendly site with different features to make it effective and reliable.
The ads. Even though it is essentially a free site, you still have to pay to use all the features.
Nice, you made it to the end of our OkCupid review, good luck if you decide to sign up 🙂
About the Author
Aet Suvari has been reviewing and writing about the world of online dating since 2008 and the launch of Online Dating Help. A stickler for promoting ethical practices within the UK dating industry she champions the sites that get it right while highlighting those holding it back. You can follow her on Google+
