Creating a membership site is one of the most effective sources of monetizing websites and earning a reliable amount of money each month without having to work for those extra hours, by putting a membership system in place you can create a product once and then earn recurring income from it.
A membership site is one in which your visitors have to subscribe to your site by paying a small amount of money to unlock your content. When you have a membership site, you (as the admin) can have full control over what part of your content can be accessed by your visitors. For example, you have set up a site with various online courses. Each of these courses will have distinctly different materials for your visitors, depending upon their needs or interests. But these materials will not be accessible for all. Anyone who wants to read them will have to pay you a specific amount.
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You obviously can always keep it exciting for your members, by providing incentives and other added benefits as well. There are different kinds of membership sites. Some sites charge a one-time payment, while others may charge a monthly, quarterly or yearly payment to unlock their content, products or services.
WordPress Membership Plugins
You will find various plugins available in the market, which can help you monetize your site or blog by paid membership programs. These plugins make it absolutely easy for you to build an effective member based website, with no shortage of options, for your users.
However, membership sites are known to be resource hungry. This makes it extremely important for you to choose the right provider that enhances performance and reliability. There are tons of affordable WordPress hosting providers that will definitely make your life much easier.
The WordPress market is flooded with tons of Membership Plugins. But only a few are good enough to be considered for your website. Keeping that in mind, we have brought to you a list of 10 Best WordPress Membership Plugins that you might like to know about before making a purchase. Each of these plugins comes loaded with amazing features and are extremely user-friendly. The best thing is that besides being highly advanced and super flexible all the products listed here comes with a very affordable pricing. So, let’s get started.
S2 Member
S2 Member is one of the oldest and most well respected member plugins around, the plugin now has over a million downloads since it was created. If you are looking for a plugin which has lots of features this is the one – It integrates with many different payment processors and has a huge feature list. It’s available in a few different version – a Free framework which contains the basics you need to create a very simple site with PayPal buttons, a Pro version which costs $89 one-time for lots more features and Pro unlimited version which costs $189 and allows you to use it on as many websites as you like.
Amember
Amember Pro is another member system which has been around and continuously developed for many years now. It’s available as a standalone system which you can install on your hosting or you can integrate it with a number of platforms including WordPress via the use of their own plugin. It has all the main features would expect from a membership plugin and has a very nice and easy to use dashboard. Amember is very popular among WordPress vendors and a lot of the top WordPress plugin and theme shops use it to run their own sites.
WP-Emember
WP eMember is a very well regarded plugin which has been in development for many years again, it costs just $59 for the full plugin and is one of the easiest ways to create a membership site with WordPress – either with a brand new site or by adding a new section to your existing website. It’s packed full of features that you will need to easily build your members area with no bloated features you will never need. You can use it to protect posts or pages on your site and mark them as members only, display partial content as a teaser, you can create unlimited membership levels and so on.
MemberPress
MemberPress is a highly advanced and professionally designed membership plugin, that comes with the latest web trending features. With this plugin, you have the ability to control access to the content on your site, opening it up only to your team members.
The plugin automatically grants and revokes access when a member joins or unsubscribes to your website. It also adds to the powerful features of online marketing by selling and accepting payments with PayPal express checkout and Stripe. You can easily install this plugin on your website and start charging instantly for access.
Using this robust plugin also ensures that your digital products are sold off securely. So now you have a plugin that is not only versatile but immensely powerful too. The users of this plugin have highly acclaimed it for its functions and simple user interface. Another good thing about it is the support team. You can reach out to them at all times and they will help you sort out all your problems within minutes.
This plugin is an amazing one if you want to create, manage and track membership subscriptions with confidence and ease. This fantastic plugin beautifully integrates with your already existing WordPress site. The plugin works wonderfully and its features are truly the cherries on the top.
It comes under different pricing plans, so you can choose the one that best fits your requirements. If yours is a new membership site, then its best that you select the Business Edition. It is available at just $119 per year. If you are an advanced membership site builder than the Developer Edition which is available at $239 per year can be your best choice.
Magic Members
This plugin is exceptionally useful for educational membership websites. The Magic Member plugin is known for its exceptional content dripping abilities. It also includes multiple payment gateways and amazing integration with e-mail newsletters such as Aweber and Mail Chimp.
The plugin has got a download manager included to manage all the digital downloads. A great feature is also the pay per view access to specific video contents. If you are selling a course, the feature of sequential course delivery will be right up your alley. The single licenses version of this product is available at just $97. This includes a quick support guide, free updates for a year and of course instant access.
Wishlist Member
If you want to have your membership site withing minutes, without any programing then WishList is the plugin you need to have. This is a premium membership plugin that is renowned for giving you immense control over your content and methods of delivery of the same to your members. A number of Standard functions are included in the plugin that works flawlessly, with unlimited membership levels and control.
There is also a great feature of sequential content delivery which allows you to release your content according to order or time. Membership levels are also auto upgraded according to your specifications. Being the admin you are powered to view your members, their registration status, membership level and more.
The plugin can be directly integrated with your WordPress site that you have been using. This makes it easyy for you to manage it as you are not forced to enter into a new realm that needs a new understanding. You can create a free, trial or paid membership level or combine all the three together for your users.
The plugin also has the option to create a multi-level access for your members. Another brilliant feature is Subscription Length Control option.With this feature, you can control the length of the duration through which your members can access the content. You can also make the subscription auto-expire within the time that you may want to specify.
The Custom Error option will automatically direct your visitors to the error page if they try to access content or products that they are denied access. With the Partial Content Display option you can display a part of your content to non-members. If they want to gain full access to the entire content they will obviously have to be a member of your site. Displaying some gripping content is a great way to tempt visitors to be a paid member.
The plugin also integrates very easily with PayPal and ClickBank. You can also allow secure RSS feeds to be displayed. Another feature is the free preview with protection to entice more subscribers to become members.
On top of all this, you will get great technical support as well as detailed documentation on how to use the plugin and get the best out of it.
This plugin is available at $197 for a single site and at $297 for multiple sites.
Restrict Content Pro
Restrict Content Pro is a fully featured powerful membership solution for WordPress users. The plugin is very intricately designed and it seamlessly integrates itself with the backend of your site. There are limitless possibilities with this plugin. It gives you complete control over how your content can be accessed.
You can create unlimited subscription package levels and provide level specific access to your content. It also gives you the option to sell digital products and accept payments through some of the major payment gateways like Stripe, PayPal Standard, and Express etc.
With Restrict Content Pro you can generate a CSV to all your active members. The settings can be changed to members of a particular subscription as well. You can even create an unlimited number of discount codes and offer percentages for your visitors. The Reports feature will show you how well your site is performing. And this does not need any extra work. The developers have taken care of it.
The Email Members help you send an automated email to your new member welcoming them to your site. It will also remind them about the date of expiry and the send them a payment receipt. This feature will make you appear more professional.
The plugin even offers a Premium support and regular updates to all its users. Moreover, they have lucrative deals for almost any budget with some great pricing options available vis-a-vis: Personal, Plus, Professional and Ultimate. The plugin also comes extensively documented so even if you have a problem setting it up, you surely can go through the walk-through that is available on the web.
The plugin is available under different pricing plans ranging from $99 to $499. So depending on the requirement of your site you can pick the one that you think will suit you best.
MemberMouse
Membermouse is another powerful and scalable membership plugin in the market. It is known for being very user-friendly in spite of having some of the most advanced features. The basic working is the same as it allows you to restrict access to any content like posts, pages etc controlled via a grant access button.
You will even be able to specify which membership level can access what content, in a very simplified manner that can be mastered within minutes. The drip-feed feature allows you to release your content automatically upon a specified time. The reporting suites of Member Mouse are some of the most accurate and detailed information.
The key metrics can help you target important areas through which you can increase profits etc. The key feature is the split test pricing which lets you optimize your pricing strategy to maximize subscribers and revenue. It is one plugin that will help you maximize your revenue without any programming.
With its Customer Management feature, you can not only grow your email list but also easily register new members and accept orders with your flexible checkout pages. You can also have an overview of the engagement statistic from your dashboard.
The plugin offers excellent support automation allowing your customers to serve themselves in easy steps. So they can update their profile, cancel subscriptions, and do a lot more. You can set it up like installing any other WordPress plugin, directly on your site. It is easy, fast and reliable.
You can try out this plugin for 14 days free of cost before you finally hit the purchase button. See if you like the way it works and if you are satisfied with its features and services this beautiful product is definitely worth buying.
Rainmaker Platform
This platform has gone a step further and turned itself into a membership site-in-a-box. All your hosting, e-mail, site builders etc are included in one neat package providing an all-in-one solution. The Platform is immensely powerful with some of the most practical and useful features bundled in together.
It can also integrate affiliate programs to your site and add or restrict access to forums for your members to interact. It lets you create an unlimited number and level of memberships too.
There are also options through which you can sell any number of digital items and accept payments from a large number of vendors. Rainmaker is incredibly powerful with amazing functions for your business.
Select from the number of subscription packages available for this plugin. The prices for this range from $145 to $165.
WP-Members
This is an amazing free plugin for memberships on WordPress sites. Again, the basic working is the same. It has an auto-generated excerpt feature which is very useful for generating excerpts for restricted content with SEO optimized excerpts.
Though there are limitations of this plugin, it is free and the features included are more than enough for basic functionality. It has already bagged a 4.9-star rating and has more than 70,ooo active installs. The plugin is fully customizable and you can use over all the 100 action and filter hooks to do that. In case you want more features in your plugin, you can easily extend them by using the premium add-on modules from its support site rocketgeek.com
The biggest limitation, however, is that you can’t charge for memberships, for which, however, you can upgrade to the premium version which comes at a decent cost.
You can block your posts and contents individually or both as well if you want. You ( as the admin) also need to approve a member before he/she joins the others in the group. The admin is automatically notified about each new registration.
WooCommerce Memberships
WooCommerce is an excellent e-commerce solution which is very popular in the digital world. WooCommerce Membership is an add-on which allows you to create awesome, scalable membership websites. Restricting your content with this plugin is going to get easier than ever.
You can not only restrict your content to your members but can also drip specific content and schedule a time for members to have access.
The functionalities are immense. They have lots of payment gateways integrated as such increasing your versatility as well. It is dedicated to membership requirements with standard functionalities and tons of add-on features.
You can create member only discount codes and also offer physical products exclusively to members by combining your website to that of any e-commerce store. The plugin will also hide your content or products from non-members. If you want, you can make the product view public. But make it purchase-able only by the site members.
Not only this. You can even include a membership with product purchase or manually assign memberships too. You can also export members to a CSV file to make member data out of WooCommerce available for them.
The plugin has also simplified the process of communicating with your members by adding the Membership Note option that you can share with your members via email. The Basic Reporting feature of the plugin will help you find out your stats. With this system, you can find out how your site is doing and what revenue it is earning.
The plugin also has the option to let you add a membership discount per plan or per subscription. You can also send an auto-generated single or multiple reminders to your members before a specific event. Add another coat of security to your already secured site, by adding a re-captcha verification for your paid member subscription.
This amazing plugin is available from $149 through $249 per year. So try out this plugin now and enjoy its brilliant features and services.
Conclusion
We have very carefully selected the Best Membership plugins out there, specifically to help you out in your search. It should, however, be noted that your requirements could be different from others. And as such you are advised to look into the products and use their trial versions to see whether or not they work for you.
The products listed here are popular and immensely successful in the digital world. They are very effective and are also used by some of the giants of the industry. You too definitely deserve to know about them before you make your purchase.
I hope you have liked our collection. Do let us know through your comments, which plugin did you like the best. Do you also know about any better plugin that we missed? We are eager to hear from you.
Kaveri is a full-time freelance writer who loves writing about WordPress and Digital Marketing.