If you want to create a membership site in WordPress, you will find a variety of membership plugins for WordPress. These WordPress membership plugins allow you to set up a protected area on your website and make it available only to (paying) members. In this article, I’ll show you what you need to consider legally for paid memberships and which is the best membership plugin for WordPress.
What makes the best WordPress membership plugin?
Let’s say you want to create a membership site in WordPress. Or in other words – you want to provide certain content only for paying customers. Now let’s say that’s online courses (maybe look for LMS plugins here), digital products or a closed community.
That means you’ll probably need several or all of these features:
- Member page(s): Only logged-in members can see certain pages (or even just certain content on a site)
- Payment processing: potential members should be able to pay their monthly (or one-time) membership fees to you in a fully automated way, if possible. Of course, the members should also receive an invoice from you – if possible, everything should be automated by the WordPress Membership Plugin.
- User data should be secure: Security features should protect your member data on the server from attacks or hacker attacks.
- Analysis: You want to evaluate your content and track the visit times of your individual members content specific.
- Email marketing: Your members should be able to be contacted by email. Preferably via a newsletter system.
It is also important that your membership site is legally compliant in the EU (and of course in Germany). Because many membership plugins for WordPress come from international (non-EU) developers. Important is data protection and billing with tax rates from the country of the respective customer.
Depending on how complex you want your membership area in WordPress to be and what features you need, there are various paid and free membership plugins for WordPress.
Die besten WordPress Subscription Plugins
1. Paid Memberships Pro
PaidMembershipPro is available as a free membership plugin and in a paid version. However, the free variant of the plugin already offers a lot of great features. The features in the free version include Paypal, WooCommerce, ConvertKit, BuddyPress and Mailchimp. In addition, you can also use the WP Bouncer plugin with PaidMembershipPro. In the paid version there are 80+ addons.
Price: Free
2. Memberpress
The premium plugin MemberPress is the all-round solution for your WordPress member site. However, Memberpress also pays well for this. Nevertheless, it is the lightest and at the same one of the most powerful WordPress membership plugins.
Price: $179 per year
3. YITH Subscriptions
YITH WooCommerce Subscription is the complete solution to sell products or services with a subscription plan in your e-commerce, manage recurring payments and keep your customers engaged. By selling products on a subscription basis, you will receive regular payments and be able to monitor your revenue growth month by month.
Price: $199 per year
What is a WordPress membership plugin?
A WordPress membership plugin helps create login access to content. This type of plugin makes it easy to:
- Create email lists to send coupons or updates to customers.
- Share free content to build a following
- Charge money for content
- And much more…
WordPress membership plugins are different from gated content marketing. This is because gated content often only requires email opt-ins. Membership plugins for WordPress, on the other hand, usually require more information and payments.
What can a membership plugin do?
A membership plugin (or subscription plan) can help you turn your website into a membership platform. This way, you can create subscription content or courses for your community.
You can offer different levels of membership, from free to paid.
A subscription plugin also allows you to sell recurring or one-time access to digital content. This digital content can come in the form of specific posts, courses, newsletters, or an exclusive members area.
Which is the best WordPress membership plugin?
We have found Paid Memberships Pro to be the best WordPress membership plugin.
MemberPress has the most comprehensive options. The plugin has a wide range of features and excellent documentation and support.
The plugin is free and our favorite but may not be right for you. That’s not a bad thing! You know your business best.
The Membership Plugin Conclusion
From this overview you can see that there are many WordPress Membership plugins. Which one is suitable for you depends on your needs. Even if there are several free membership plugins, it may make sense to use a premium plugin.
Whenever money is made it doesn’t hurt to have a plugin support you can safely rely on. The all-rounder Paid Membership Pro is my first choice and can grow with your project.
- The best price-performance ratio: Paid Membership Pro
- The most comprehensive membership plugin: MemberPress
- The newcomer plugin: Memberpress
The Paid Membership Pro plugin is the only one that offers a free fully functional version. You may have to make cutbacks here. Nevertheless, this plugin has convinced me.
