The process of creating paid subscription sites has become a top requirement for many website owners at all levels, as these sites are suitable for organizing a large number of businesses and commercial activities online.
Membership and subscription sites operate a system that allows visitors to register for one of the paid packages on the site, which allows them to view content that only subscribers can access. This gives the site owner the opportunity to give more privileges to members who subscribe to paid services within the site, and free content can also be provided. Also on the same site for other non-subscribed members.
In this article, you will learn how to create a website for paid memberships and subscriptions, so that you will be able to display your services through the website and allow visitors to subscribe and pay the cost of the service they want to obtain. This, in turn, will encourage visitors and site visitors to subscribe to your site and purchase a membership to view your exclusive, distinguished content.
Who benefits from membership sites and paid subscriptions?
Membership sites benefit a large segment of commercial activities, and the following is a list of the most prominent entities, institutions, and sites that can effectively invest the system of memberships and paid subscriptions on their sites:
- Educational sites that provide their educational courses to subscribed members only
- Gyms that provide exclusive content only for their paid subscriptions.
- Medical centers that provide content related to their subscribed members only.
- Advertising agencies that offer advertising packages as well as website design agencies
These or other types of businesses benefit from creating their own membership system, but you, regardless of your type of business, will obtain benefits from providing paid membership services as follows:
- Gain more customers : If you provide a service within a specific geographic scope, you can expand your business by providing that same service to larger segments of customers because there is a wide audience base to target online, and thus you have a great opportunity to gain more customers interested in your business. .
- Saving effort : Membership sites allow providing services to customers with the least possible effort, as the service is prepared, which may be an article or a book, for example, and the ability to download the book is made available only to members who subscribe to paid plans, so you do not need to repeat the content every time you want to sell it. .
- Increased audience confidence : In general, visitors trust content that has a free version and a paid version. There is always a general psychological perception among users that valuable content must have a price, so they always think that the paid version will be full of information that the free versions did not mention. Thus, the audience’s engagement with the content increases even more.
- Collecting more accurate data about visitors : Some business owners create a system of memberships and subscriptions within the site, not with the aim of making more money, but in order to collect user data and benefit from it in targeted marketing operations. Here, the subscription is free, and in return, the visitor is asked to register his email. And his contact information, thus collecting information and data that can be used for marketing and sales purposes later.
Steps to create a membership and subscriptions website
Using WordPress, it is possible to build and launch a membership website in simple steps without the need for any complex programming skills. We can summarize the stages of creating a membership website in the following points:
- Domain reservation: The first step is to reserve a domain (website domain name), which is considered the interface to access your website.
- Hosting reservation : You must purchase and reserve website hosting , which serves as a storage site for the site’s files and data and is responsible for operating the site and its appearance to visitors.
- Installing WordPress on your hosting : The last step before moving towards practical application is to install WordPress on your hosting, as WordPress provides many options that help launch and design a membership and subscriptions website with the least possible effort and in record time, as you will see throughout the article.
If you do not have a website previously, I advise you to read the guide to creating a WordPress website , and after your site is ready, you will customize it to become a membership site, as we will explain in the following lines.
Add Member Press to create a membership system
The first practical step is to install one of the add-ons that create the membership and subscriptions system on the site, and one of the most famous of them is the Memberpress add-on because it provides all the options that help create the membership and subscriptions system, whether paid or free, on the site with ease and in easy steps.
You can see the article How to Install WordPress Plugins for more information on how to install plugins on a WordPress website.
General settings for the Memberpress plugin
After successfully installing and activating the plugin on WordPress, we will move to the WordPress control panel to find a new tab in the settings sidebar called the Member Press plugin . After clicking on the add-on icon, you can enter the Settings tab to open the settings page in front of you.
1. Prepare add-on pages
As you will notice, when you enter the settings page, an interface opens in front of you that contains many tabs at the top of the page, including the Pages tab shown in front of you in the previous image.
When you enter the previous Pages tab, you will find three pages that were previously created by the extension, and they are as follows:
- Thank you page : This is the page that appears in front of the visitor immediately after subscribing to one of the memberships available on the site.
- Account page : This is the page for the subscribed member’s account, through which he can change or update his data at any time.
- Login page : It is a page that contains a login form for registered members of the site.
As you noticed in the previous image, each page has a “ View ” option next to it, through which visitors can preview the display and view of the page and how it will appear. There is also the “ Edit ” button that you can click on to modify that page in terms of its appearance and content.
The following image shows what one of these pages looks like, which is the “Account ” page for the registered member’s data:
2. User account settings
Also, when you enter the Account tab within the settings page itself, a page will open before you to control the settings for the accounts of members registered on the site, which is divided into three basic options, which are as follows:
- Permissions option : In this option, you can adjust many things, such as controlling the appearance or hiding of the WordPress editing bar on the members page, as well as allowing members to control the status of their subscription, such as pausing or activating it, and other settings.
- Registration option : In it you will find many options, such as the ability to appear or hide the discounts or discount coupon field within the member registration form, and other settings through which you control the method and appearance of the registration process for members.
- Login & Logout option : In this option, you can set the link to which the visitor will be directed directly after logging in, as well as the link to which the visitor will be directed after logging out.
Note: Most of the Member Press add-on texts are in English, and if you need to translate these texts, we advise you to translate them using the Loco translate add-on that we talked about previously .
3. Payment and subscription collection settings in the add-on
Also, the “Payment” tab is one of the most important tabs that you must set up initially before creating memberships and subscriptions.
You will find that the Payments tab displays the ability to configure payment methods for memberships and subscriptions within the site.
You can choose from the Gateway box the appropriate and preferred payment method for you, where you will find payment options such as the Stripe payment gateway as well as the payment method through the famous PayPal website. Choose the payment method you prefer, which will allow members and subscribers to pay for the subscription through it.
4. General settings in the add-on
There is also a “ General ” tab in which you will find some other general settings for setting the preferred language, as well as the preferred currency in which members can pay the subscription fee and other general settings, as shown in the following image.
5. Create memberships and subscriptions
After completing the settings for the membership and subscriptions system, we now begin the next step, which is creating the subscriptions we want within the site, where we will work to create subscriptions at different prices. To start creating subscriptions, we go to the Memberships tab as in the picture:
The previous image represents the page for creating paid subscriptions on the site, in which we will find the “ Add Now ” option at the top, which when we click on it opens the page for creating a new subscription or membership, as in the following image:
On the page for creating a new subscription or membership, you can enter the title of the membership or subscription, such as “10-day subscription,” and in the box below, you write the subscription description, which explains what the member gets in exchange for the subscription.
On the right side, you will find the options box for the subscription price, through which you can determine the subscription value, as well as specify the subscription payment rate, whether weekly, monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, annually, or other options.
On the page for creating a new subscription on the site, you will also find at the bottom a box titled Membership options, in which you will find options to control some things, such as writing the text that appears on the membership subscription button, such as “Register now” or any other text you want. You will also find options related to sending an email to the member immediately after subscribing to membership.
The following image shows what the page of one of the subscriptions created on the site looks like:
As you noticed, it is a simple page. You can control its shape and appearance from within the editing page for adding and attaching many options to it, such as images, links, changing colors, backgrounds, and other things in the form and format you desire.
6. Create a “Pricing Plans” page
The next step after we designed the subscription pages on the site is to design the “ Pricing or Subscription Plans ” page. Of course, you can create any number of subscription formats that you wish, it is completely up to you.
To create a price line page, we will enter the “ Groups ” tab from within the add-on settings box as in the picture.
As you can see in the picture, when we enter the Groups tab, we see the “Add New” button at the top. When we click on it, an editing page will open for us to create a price plans page and subscription formulas on your site, as in the following image.
As we see in the image above, from within the Edit Subscription Plans page, we can set the “ Page Title ” as well as “ Page Content .” You can also customize some other options, such as the featured image and others.
Inside the editing page itself, at the bottom, you will find a tab titled “ memberships ,” which appears as in the following image.
You can click on the ( + ) button and add the subscriptions you created previously to appear within the “ Pricing Plans ” page.
After completing the setup of the price plans page, we must choose the subscriptions that we want to display to visitors. After completing this, you can publish the page and go to preview it after publishing, and it will look similar to the following image.
7. Set up closed content available to subscribers only
After you have learned how to create subscriptions within the site and how to create and configure the “Pricing Plans” page, we will move to the next step, which is preparing to specify the content that you want to make exclusive to subscribers to your site.
To set up options for protected content and customize the content to be displayed to visitors who subscribe to paid memberships only, we must enter the “ Rules ” tab from within the control panel.
When you enter the Rules tab, you will find the “ Add New ” button, which you can click on to enter the protected content settings page for site subscribers only.
The following image shows the page for setting the content that you want to make exclusive to members or subscribers to the site only. From within this page, you can write a title for the content you want to protect. Also, from the “ Protected content ” option, you can choose from the types of content available within your site.
For example, in the previous image, we chose the “ All posts ” option. This means that all articles published on the site will be closed and are not allowed to be viewed except by members who subscribe to paid memberships only.
On the same page, we will choose the type of subscription to be allowed to view the site content from the Membership option. In our example, we chose the subscription entitled “30-day subscription.” In this case, all site articles will be blocked for regular visitors and displayed only to members who subscribe to the 30-day plan, and no other member or visitor will be able to view this content until after subscribing to that plan.
In the same way as before, you can enter the Rules tab again and customize any other content on your site so that it is only available to subscribers to a specific type of subscription within your site.
8. Create subscriptions for educational courses
The Memberpress add-on also allows you to create educational sites that offer various educational courses and are divided into more than one subscription and membership at different prices that you specify.
This can be done from within the “ Courses ” tab of the control panel toolbar, as in the picture.
It is worth noting that you must purchase the add-on and subscribe to it to obtain the additional features, including the Courses option, which allows you to create and organize educational courses in the form of paid subscriptions on your site.
9. Sending a notification before the end of the subscription period to members
The add-on also provides a very important option, which is the ability to send an alert that reminds the member that the subscription period for his membership within the site is about to expire. You can customize alerts from within the “ Reminders ” tab in the add-on control panel options, as in the picture.
The previous image represents the page for creating a new alert, where you can write a title for the alert, and specify a duration of 2 days, for example. In this case, an email alert will be sent to the member only two days before the end of his subscription period, in order to remind him to renew the subscription before canceling it.
10. Controlling the accounts of participating members
Through the “ Members ” tab of the add-on, you can control the accounts of members who subscribe to one of the memberships within the site. Within the tab, you will see a page containing the names and information of the members registered with you in one of the subscriptions or memberships, as in the following image.
As we note, next to each registered member will be the “ Delete ” option, through which he can delete the user’s membership from the site and thus he will lose all subscriptions that he previously registered for.
There is also the “Edit ” option , which enables you to open the editing page for the member’s account on the site, through which you can control the member’s subscription plans or cancel them completely.
Also, in the “ Transaction ” tab within the add-on settings panel, you can at any time view new subscriptions and financial transfers from new subscribers to the site, as in the picture.
11. Show extension widgets
The add-on provides 3 “ custom icons ” widgets through which some secondary options can be added to help members and subscribers access their account and subscriptions easily.
To customize widgets, you must go to the “ Widgets ” option from within the WordPress control panel, and you will find the three widgets for the plugin, as in the following image.
We notice the available widgets highlighted in red, which you can drag and drop into any part of your site designated for widgets, such as the footer, sidebar, or any other part.
The widgets show some helpful options for subscribed members, such as showing the subscribed members login box, as well as showing the current subscriptions for the registered member so that he can easily view the details of his subscriptions.
12. Show the price plans page in the main menu of the site
One of the important things that you must also customize with regard to memberships is to show the link to the “ Price Plans ” page to new visitors in the main menu of the site, so that new visitors can view the price plans and subscriptions available within the site and choose from them easily.
In order to display the price plans page link within the main menu of your site, you must go to the “ Menus ” tab from within the WordPress control panel, and the following settings page will appear for you.
As the image above shows you, when you enter the Lists tab and choose the main menu, you will find the “ Groups ” tab, inside which a link to the “Pricing Plans” page appears, which we explained how to create previously.
All you have to do is select the page, click “Add to list,” and then save the list. Thus, the price plans page for paid subscriptions will appear on your site within the site’s main menu, and new visitors can easily access it.
13. Control the appearance of content for members who do not subscribe to paid plans
When you publish new content, such as an article or a new page on the site, you can determine whether you want to block it completely from visitors who do not subscribe to paid plans, and you can also show a small part of it, so that it prompts the reader to subscribe to the site to complete reading.
You can also control many of the options that appear to visitors who are not subscribed to your site from within the edit page of any new article or page that you create within the site, as in the following image.
As the previous image shows you, on the edit page of one of the articles or pages, you will find below a box titled Memberpress unauthorized access. When you click on this box, an options box will appear before you that enables you to show or hide the content or part of it to unsubscribed visitors, which are as follows:
- Excerpts : Through it, he can choose to show a small part of the article, page, or published content, or hide it completely in front of unsubscribed visitors.
- Unauthorized message : You can choose between “Hide,” which hides the message telling the visitor that he is not allowed to view the content on the site, or “Show” that message to him.
- Login form : From this option you can show or hide the login form for unregistered members.
Thus, we have provided a detailed explanation of how to create a site for paid memberships and subscriptions, and we have tried to focus on the most important settings and options that will help you complete the setup and configuration of the subscriptions system within your site completely.
In the end, let me give you an important piece of advice regarding the paid membership system on your site, which is that the content designated only for members who subscribe to the site should be distinct and different from the free content available to all non-subscribed members and visitors, so that it provides additional and distinct value to subscribed members only
