Match 1 dating site

By: Jason Lee – Updated for 2022

If there were such a thing as a titan of the online dating world, Match would certainly be towards the top of the conversation. As one of the largest and most popular online dating sites in existence, Match.com had some seriously big shoes (or glass slippers if you’re a romantic) to fill. But no pressure, right? Well, either way, we’re ready to find out by digging in deep with our Match.com reviews.

In the coming sections, our team takes the proverbial lid off of this dating site giant and breaks it down into a bunch of little small pieces. Our goal with our Match.com reviews is to try and give you the most honest and accurate picture of what to expect here. We assume you’ve come here wondering if this site is worth your time, money, and effort and we want to answer that question.

Match.com – The Bottom Line Up Front

So, the million dollar question of any Match.com reviews is always whether or not the site is worth it. And the answer really depends on what you’re looking for. If you’re looking for somewhere in between casual dating and a serious relationship, it’s probably going to be worth at least checking it out. If you’re someone who is certain you want a serious and committed relationship, you might have better luck on a site like eHarmony.

Match.com has always been a strong player in the online dating marketplace. That being said, some of the other options out there have done a lot to continue evolving whereas Match seems to be similar to what it was a few years back. Remember, our Match.com reviews are regularly updated and checked against past reviews to look for growth or changes.

So, is it worth it? If you’re not totally sure what you’re looking for (casual vs. serious), its certainly worth checking it out. If you’re in that boat, we’d also encourage you to check out Zoosk, which we’ve linked to below. It’s a similar type site that has an enormous userbase and a very affordable membership. If you’re looking for something more committed or serious, it could be a good fit or you might have some better luck at a place like eHarmony (also linked below).

Best Match.com Alternatives

Overall Match.com Rating

7.75/10.0

Pros and Cons of the Match.com Dating App

Who Match.com Is Good For

• Singles not sure if they want serious or casual dating
• People who want a more traditional “catalog” style of online dating

Who Match.com Might Not Be Best For

• People certain they want a serious relationship
• People who want only casual dating
• Singles looking for more robust matching help

Match.com Review – Table of Contents

Fast Facts About Match.com

• Site Name: Match.com
• Paid or Free: Paid with limited free options
• Average Sign-Up Time: About 5 minutes
• Paid Membership Pricing: Plans starting at $15.99 per month
• Unique Match.com Facts
  • Founded in 1995 and is headquartered in Dallas, TX.
  • Match.com serves over 50 different countries.
  • The company is owned by Match Group, a company that owns several online dating brands.

What is Match.com?

Match.com is an online dating app and website owned by the Match Group that was launched in 1995 and headquartered out of Dallas, Texas. The dating software is accessible from desktop or on a phone or tablet via Google Play or the iOS store. Match works by following a traditional “catalog-style” approach to dating where you create a profile and then are able to search through other potential match’s profiles if they meet the criteria you have selected.

Generally, Match is known most for helping singles who are looking for more serious and committed relationships. That being said, there are quite a few people who still use the app for casual dating, which might be a turn off for some people.

Match.com Features Overview

We love great features and our Match.com reviews certainly had a good amount of stuff for us to look at. Below, we’re going to take a look at some of our favorites and the more notable features the site has to offer.

Upfront, though, how do the features overall compare with other dating sites? Pretty comparable, although we haven’t seen a lot of new features added recently. On one side you could say it’s the don’t fix what isn’t broken camp, but on the other side you could say it’s falling a bit behind the curve. Specifically, we’d like to see something like the eHarmony video feature added.

Let’s look at the features that stood out during our Match.com reviews.

Discover

When you click on the Discover button from the top menu, you’re taken to a grid view of all of your matches. This view gives you a lot of options for sorting and searching through your matches. You can quickly change your age parameters and location parameters from the top of the page. Additionally, you can sort all your matches by the following options:

• Match Picks – Their personal method for showing you matches
• Activity Date – Who was online most recently
• Newest First – The members who joined most recently
• Age
• Photo Count – Whoever has the most pictures loaded up
• Username
• Distance – How far they are away from your home location or the location you searched
• Mutual Match – People you have liked that have also liked you.
• Reverse Match – These are matches that are looking for someone like you. (You might not have selected that you’re looking for someone like them).

This is pretty awesome because they give you a lot of different ways to search through your matches. If you’re someone who likes to flip through and find something you like, you’re going to like these Match.com options. We call this the catalog style of dating which can be a nice fit for some people or possible overwhelming for others. It’s a personal preference thing.

Discover used to double as the site’s search function. However, that’s changed and search is now it’s separate thing. What Match did was merged Discover with Daily Matches (swipe-style dating). Here’s how that works:

Match.com presents your daily matches to you in a fun little format. It’s a “tinder-style” presentation, except not as blah as Tinder. Basically, they show you a picture of a match along with a mini-profile of that person. You have the option of clicking Skip or Yes if you’re interested! They’ll show your pictures to some of the same people and if you both click Yes, the site will let you know!

Even if your potential match doesn’t use this function, it’s still a great way to see your matches not just in a boring list format. Here’s what it looks like. Again, we blurred out things and removed the private information.

Events

Match.com does something you really don’t see many other places in the industry. They attempt to take the online dating experience offline. How? Well, they have what are called Match.com events. The smallest commitment events are webinars where they teach you tips and strategies to be a more successful dater. The next level up are their mixer events where the site hosts an event at a local establishment and invites all the singles on Match.com from that area. There is usually a small cost to go to the event, but you usually get something for it (not to mention the chance to meet someone special).

The top of the food chain of Match.com events are their trips. Match has trips all around the world that you can pay to go on where you’ll get to meet other singles while having a blast. Volunteering in Ecuador? Tanzania camping safari? Lake Tahoe Ski Week? Exploration of Israel? These are just a few of the trips we saw listed the last time we checked the site.

One other thing that caught our eye about the events during our Match.com review was that you could attend events in other cities if you were traveling. Out of town on business and have a few nights free? You can change the city on Match.com and search to see if there are any events going on there. If there are, you’re invited!

How easy is the site to use?

It’s safe to say that our Match.com reviews are off to a pretty great start, but we still have quite a bit that we need to look at. The next thing that we want to take some time to analyze is the user interface of Match. Basically, how easy is the site to use? Does it make you want to throw your computer into a swimming pool or does it offer an inviting experience?

First, let’s look at the overall feel of the site. During our Match.com reviews, we found the site pretty easy to use. We had no real problems finding the things we were looking for, everything was laid out well, and it was an overall enjoyable experience. Now, the layout has changed a little over the years, but it’s not really a positive or a negative—just different.

Here’s what the profiles on Match.com look like. Again, we’ve blurred out the photos and personal information.

Notice the layout of the Match.com profiles. They’re clean, sleek, and present the information you want to know quickly and organized well. You quickly see their main photo and profile info, and then you can see their photo gallery with all of their other photos down below. If you click on one of these photos, it will pop up in a lightbox so that you can see it larger and clearer.

You will notice something a little strange, though. What is Jim Gaffigan doing on Miss Britney’s profile? Is that her dad watching over us? Nope, it’s an advertisement. While we think Jim is hilarious, we’d prefer not to see ads while we’re doing our Match.com reviews or while we’re doing our online dating. The good thing is the ads on Match.com are limited, and they don’t really get in the way. They also seem to be higher quality products and services, so you don’t have to worry too much about seeing something you don’t want to. Still, we’d love to see those nixed from the picture, and that’s why we docked some points.

There is a second half of the profile when you scroll down that shows what the two of you have in common and what they are looking for. Here’s what that looks like.

Everything else you would need from Match.com can be found along the top menu bar that conveniently follows you around fixed as you look through potential matches and profiles. The five tabs you have are:

• Discover
• Search
• Likes
• Inbox
• Events

The Quality of Singles at Match.com

This is always one of the most important questions that people want to get answered. Are there lots of awesome singles on this site or is it filled with fake profiles, flakes, and creepers? For that reason, it’s right where we decided to start our Match.com reviews.

When we logged on to check out the site for the first time years ago at 2pm on a Friday afternoon, there was a note that said there were 126,874 singles currently online. That’s certainly an incredible number and the site already had our attention!

But, just because there are a lot of people using the site doesn’t mean they’re quality. Sure, Match.com already passed the quantity test with flying colors, but what about the quality test? Well, here’s what we did to find out and what we saw.

We began running “test searches” in a lot of different areas across the United States. We searched for all different age groups and in small and big cities. Once we had our searches, we started looking through the profiles listed and wanted answers to these main questions.

• Are the profiles filled out by real people?
• Are their profiles with pictures that are real?
• Have the members shown been active recently?
• Do they seem like quality, attractive people?

The results? Pretty good. While there were some profiles not filled out completely, it did look like Match did a nice job of cleaning out the fake profiles. Now, we didn’t interact with anyone during our Match.com reviews (we want to keep it ethical), so we can’t say one way or another anything about bots or anything like that.

When you use the Discover tab, you’ll see all of your matches that meet your search criteria in a grid format like the screenshot below. You will notice that we’ve gone ahead and blurred out all of the photos because this is an actual screenshot from our Match.com reviews. We wanted to protect the privacy of the members in this area.

Regarding the different ages, males and females, and locations we checked in our Match.com review, we never had a problem finding a lot of quality matches with every search. Additionally, each person’s profile is attached with an indicator that lets you know if they are currently online, are active, or have been active recently. Basically, it’s a quick way to see if someone is still on the site looking for love or if maybe they’ve found someone and are no longer using the site.

Update: It looks like the profiles on Match only show you if they’re online or not now. We were unable to find the feature that said if they’ve recently been active during our last set of reviews of the app, which is a bit of a bummer.

How to Sign Up at Match.com

While we led off with the quality of matches and the features as the first part of our Match.com review, the first place we actually started was with the sign-up process. You can’t see any of the matches until you create an account so obviously, this was first on the list.

The entire Match.com sign up process takes about five minutes max. The first thing you will have to fill out is some basic profile admin information. Ugh, paperwork, we know. Don’t worry, it’s really not that bad. It’s literally your email address, password, and your birthday. This screen will also give you your first glimpse into some of your matches in the background. We’ve, of course, blurred them out here to protect their privacy.

They do require you to fill out some information about yourself before they let you start searching through your potential matches. Below, you’ll see a screenshot of what things looked like when we went through and signed up.

Once you click on the let’s get started tab, you’re first given a serious of questions to answer about yourself. Don’t like talking about yourself or nervous what Match.com might ask? No fear, we’ve listed out all of the questions for you here. Everything is multiple choice except for the “Tell us a little about yourself question.” That requires a minimum of 100 characters, and there is no way to skip it.

Here are the questions you’ll be answering during the “Get to know you” section of the Match.com sign up.

• What type of relationship are you looking for?
  • Just browsing singles
  • Date, but nothing serious
  • Serious relationship
  • Long-term relationship
• Height
• Body Type
• What is your relationship status?
• Do you have any kids?
• Do you want children?
• What is your education level?
• Do you smoke?
• How often do you drink?
• Which ethnicities best describe you?
• What is your religion?
• What is your salary?
• What are your interests? (You have to select five from a list of 27 different options)
• Looking for something specific?
  • You can select any of the criteria from the questions you already answered. When you click on an option, a menu pops up for you to select which criteria in that category you are looking for. You can also select whether that is a deal breaker for you or just a preference.
• Tell us a little about yourself (100 character minimum)
• Photo

You’ll notice that the last thing you have to do to complete your sign up is upload a picture of yourself. While it may look like you have to upload a photo, there is actually a way to skip this if you don’t feel like uploading something right away. We recommend uploading a picture because it will get you way more attention, but if you haven’t picked one out yet and need a minute we understand.

The skip button is somewhat hidden (probably to try and entice you to upload a photo), but during our Match.com review, nothing gets past us. We’ve added a screenshot below to show you where it is in case you want to bypass this for now and get to the matches.

The bottom line here is the sign-up process was quick, easy, and didn’t cause bodily harm. Sure, you have to write 100 characters about yourself, but this sentence is over 100 characters, potato. Sorry, had to add a random word in there to click it over the 100 character mark. The point is that 100 characters is literally one sentence. We’d hope that you’d want to take that time to really write about yourself and start building an awesome profile for other singles on Match.com to get to know you.

Price How Much Does Match.com Cost?

The pricing structure at Match.com is split into two plans known as the premium plan or the standard plan.

The premium plan gets you everything that the standard plan has plus a few additional features. What does the standard plan get you and what are the additional features? We are so glad you asked!

The standard plan features are:

• Send email messages
• See and respond to email messages
• Priority access to Match Events
• See who’s viewed you
• See who’s liked you
• Stand out with a Super Like
• Remove members from view
• Search for matches
• Receive top picks
• Create a profile and appear in search results
• Post photos
• Send likes

The additional features you get if you choose to go with Match.com’s premium plan are:

• Email read notifications
• Monthly boost
• Unlimited rewinds
• Weekly Super Like
• See Who’s Upgraded

Payment options for Match.com

• Credit or Debit Card – Visa, MasterCard, Discover Card, American Express, Diner’s Club, and JCB
• PayPal
• Visa Checkout
• MasterCard MasterPass

One additional thing we saw during our Match.com review that we would like to point out is that all accounts are set up for auto renewal. This means that if you don’t uncheck this option your account will automatically be renewed and you will get charged again. This is done for your convenience, but if you don’t want it to happen you can just uncheck the option from your account settings. If you choose to renew, you can just uncheck it prior or just purchase another membership and your account will stay active.

Customer Support Options

The customer service section of our Match.com review was another positive for the site. While the options were limited, the option they did offer was pretty good. Additionally, they had a fully fleshed out FAQ section that you could search and get a ton of information from. It looks like they spent a lot of time or money getting someone to write out answers to every question under the sun which is awesome.

As for contacting them directly, they have live chat available Monday through Friday from 8am to 5pm central standard time (CST). We would like to see some support available by email and available over the weekend.

Match.com Alternatives (With Free Trials)

FAQ

What is the success rate of Match.com?

While Match doesn’t give an exact success rate of their matchmaking – they do tout themselves as the number 1 dating site on the web. Unfortunately, it’s tough to validate these statistics.

How long does Match.com take to work?

Match can start working right away after you finish writing your profile. Your options will be limited unless you upgrade to a premium plan, but you can start searching through potential matches right away.

Does Match.com have fake profiles?

While every online dating site will have its own fair share of fake profiles, our Match.com reviews showed that the site does do a pretty nice job of screening for fakes. Every profile and every photo is screened by the staff before it’s posted. This can cause some delays in things getting started for you, but it’s probably an overall net win.

Can I get my money back if I am not satisfied with Match.com?

Once you pay for a subscribing membership, you cannot get any refund back if you’re unsatisfied. If you’re unsure about if you’ll be satisfied, try the Match Free Trial membership first. Millions of people are finding success in love on Match, so you probably will too.

Can you cancel Match.com after a month?

While you can cancel, you’re not going to receive any refund. All Match subscriptions are billed in one lump sum, no matter the length of the membership term.

Does Match.com have a free trial?

Match has a great free trial membership that only takes a few steps to get signed up. With a Match Free Trial you can take a sneak peek at the awesome search features and their attractive member community. Check out the “like” or “pass” browsing format, which is a fun way to check out all of the singles matched just for you.

The free trial even allows you to use their powerful search functions, including by attributes, mutual, and reverse searching. You can even save your searches that get you successful results. Check out our Match Free Trial review here.

How much is a one-month subscription to Match.com?

While Match does not offer a one month subscription, they do offer a reasonable 3-month membership for a lump payment of $89.97. Match is a great value as the number one dating site. Many other lesser-rated dating sites cost much more or don’t offer shorter terms. View our full cost breakdown on Match here.

Does Match.com have an app?

A mobile app is available for all Match user accounts. The Match app gives you the same features that you have on the website, but now you can easily search on the go. Responding to messages in the mobile app (with a paid subscription) is also easy. Notifications come through on your phone so you never miss a message.

Does Match.com still exist? 

This dating site is live and well. With an active member community of millions across the U.S., you’re sure to find many interesting singles no matter where you’re located. Match exists and is ready today to help match you with someone special!

Does Match.com really work? 

Match is a proven online dating site that focuses on matchmaking singles looking for long term love. Hundreds of couples are finding love on Match every day. Match even has a special site to collect those stories, so you know they’re getting a lot of positive feedback!

How long has Match.com been around? 

Match has been bringing singles together since 1995. That’s 25 years of matchmaking experience – a lot longer than many of the other dating sites out there. Match really knows what they’re doing and the site is very popular – so it’s not going anywhere soon.

Written By:Jason Lee

Jason Lee is a data analyst with a passion for studying online dating, relationships, personal growth, healthcare, and finance. In 2008, Jason earned a Bachelors of Science from the University of Florida, where he studied business and finance and taught interpersonal communication.

His work has been featured in the likes of The USA Today, MSN, The Motley Fool, Net Health, and The Simple Dollar. As a business owner, relationship strategist, dating coach, and officer in the U.S. military, Jason enjoys sharing his unique knowledge base with the rest of the world.