Running a membership site comes as an amazing way to yield steady income. In fact, a lot of people have managed membership sites as a side-hustle. Some of them have even made it their full-time job.
If you’re thinking of building a membership site with WordPress, just do it. There are so many feature-rich WordPress membership plugins that support this. They save you from structuring the site from scratch as well as growing and managing your members.
This article will list out 10 best WordPress membership plugins in 2022. Their advantages and pricing are also looked at.
- #1 PPWP Pro
- #2 Memberpress
- #3 Membership For WooCommerce Pro
- #4 Ultimate Member
- #5 Paid Membership Pro
- #6 Simple Membership
- #7 WooCommerce Membership
- #8 Wishlist Member
- #9 MemberMouse
- #10 PDA Gold to Protect Files in Membership Sites
#1 Password Protect WordPress Pro
Password Protect WordPress (PPWP) Pro helps build your simple WordPress membership sites by locking content with passwords. You can protect the content from public view and grant its access to members only.
The plugin enables you to set up member areas for your pages, posts, and any custom post types. Only members with the correct passwords can read the exclusive content. They don’t have to enter emails or register their accounts.
PPWP Pro integrates seamlessly with WooCommerce and contact form plugins. You can require members to pay before accessing your content. Upon their successful order, it sends them a password or a quick access link (QAL) to open the premium content.
Key Features of PPWP Pro
- Create member areas by locking pages, posts, categories, or the entire site
- Assign unlimited passwords to a post
- Expire member access by password expiration date or usage
- Require payment from members via WooCommerce or contact form plugins
- Create different access levels
- Assign user roles to passwords
- Bypass member access using QALs
#2 MemberPress
MemberPress is one of the most favored WordPress membership plugins in the market. It provides an all-in-one solution to convert your WordPress site into a fully functional membership site.
You can create unlimited custom memberships with pricing, login, account, and thank you pages automatically set up for all users. The plugin gives you full control over content access. Its Content Dripping feature lets you display gated content to members based on a certain time or a membership condition met.
What makes MemberPress stand out from the crowd is its flexibility in catering to all types of user bases. People can use MemberPress for chefs and foodies, podcasters, fitness, life coaches, churches, art & designs, and tons more.
Key Features of MemberPress
- Provide powerful access rules
- Drip content
- Offer community forum
- Come with customizable coupons
- Easily build and sell online courses
- Create dynamic and sleek pricing pages for your products
- Seamlessly pair with WordPress subscription and affiliate plugins
- Allow downloading PDF invoices for any transaction
Price: Its Basic plan starts at $179/ year
#3 Membership For WooCommerce Pro
Membership for WooCommerce Pro plugin gives you a feature-rich, well-supported, and easy-to-use premium solution for all eCommerce store owners. You can use it to sell and manage membership plans without any hassle.
If you are looking to create or upgrade your WooCommerce membership site to collect recurring revenue, WooCommerce Membership Extension is all you need. The absolute WooCommerce Memberships plugin provides a restriction on access to any facility. It also helps add recurring revenue based on membership and helps engage customers using membership plans.
Key features of Membership for WooCommerce Pro
- Allow individual product discounts for membership owners only
- Select product tags, categories, and sections for WooCommerce members only
- Combine multiple membership plan benefits into one
- Send membership plan actions related to emails
#4 Ultimate Member
Ultimate Member is an ideal plugin to create a dynamic community for your members. Rather than multi-level memberships, this plugin sets the spotlight on user registration and user role, plus control restricted content access.
The plugin restricts pages, posts, and menus based on member status. Members of that community can send friend requests, send direct messages, follow each other, and view public posts.
Ultimate Member comes with an intuitive drag-and-drop user interface, making membership setup just a breeze.
Key Features of Ultimate Member
- Build beautiful user profiles
- Come with a drag-and-drop form builder
- Allow content restriction
- Display restricted content based on user status
- Prove mobile responsive
Price: Free. The Pro version starts at $249/year for premium extensions
#5 Paid Membership Pro – WordPress Membership Plugin
Paid Membership Pro amazes people with its great feature sets jam-packed in such a free plugin. It gives you all the essential features to build, grow, and manage your membership site. You can create unlimited membership levels and flexible payment options.
The plugin can manage thousands of members with ease. It takes user experience seriously with front-end login, password recovery, and profile editing features.
On top of that, Paid Membership Pro boasts various payment options. You have one-time payments, recurring subscriptions, custom trials, discount codes, etc. This flexibility deserves a thumbs-up as members find it less stressful when it comes to payments.
Key Features of Paid Membership Pro
- Build unlimited membership levels with flexible pricing
- Restrict content access to members only
- Import/export membership data, i.e. orders, reports on sales and revenue, expiration, etc.
- Allow front-end login, editing, and password recovery
- Restrict default content on pages/posts or custom content on custom post types
- Protect courses
- Include multiple payment gateways, such as Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net, Braintree, or 2Checkout
Price: Free. The paid version costs $279/year with support and updates for 1-5 sites.
#6 Simple Membership – WordPress Membership Plugin
True to its name, Simple Membership proves a perfect solution to build a simple yet flexible and well-supported membership site. This WordPress membership plugin brings to the party all the crucial features you wish to have. Content protection and limitless membership level access, just to name a few.
Dive into its working principle, Simple Membership enables you to lock pages and posts so that only members can view the protected content. On the other hand, non-members will be asked for a subscription to access the gated content.
One advantage of this plugin is you can display teaser content to attract readers and convert them into members. Anything secured inside the membership level is completely guarded off, even comments.
Key Features of Simple Membership
- Set up unlimited membership levels
- Protect photo galleries and attachment pages
- Lock parts of content on pages and posts
- Allow customizing the content protection message to non-members
- Handle membership management
- Record member payments in the payment logs
- Enable email activation or email confirmation for the free memberships
- Support on time and recurring/subscription payments
Price: Free.
#7 WooCommerce Membership
You’re running a WooCommerce store and would like to turn it into a membership site? Then you should give WooCommerce Membership a try. This membership plugin allows creating a membership system, blocking content access to non-members.
What’s more, this plugin offers plenty of perk options to increase conversion for your membership site. They include free shipping for members only, special discounts, and exclusive product offers.
Members can view what content they can access and which benefits they can get from their membership levels via their member accounts.
Key features of WooCommerce Membership
- Come with options to sell or assign memberships
- Drip content based on membership rules
- Automatically show members what perks they receive
- Offer shipping options to members
- Reward members with exclusive discounts
- Import and export members in CSV files
Price: $199 per year with 1-year of support and extension updates
#8 Wishlist Member – WordPress Membership Plugin
Wishlist Member is well-known as one of the most veteran WordPress membership plugins in the market. It’s hugely endorsed by the WordPress community thanks to its capability to build and manage a robust and trustworthy membership system.
You can use this plugin to create online courses, launch subscriptions, safeguard and monetize your premium content, or sell digital products. This plugin can handle unlimited membership levels, then provide many options to define content access rules and trigger targeted promotions.
Key Features of Wishlist Member
- Restrict access to content
- Automatically drip and schedule content
- Periodically archive content
- Create “sneak peak” or display partial content to hook users and convert them to members
- Support a wide range of payment methods
- Effectively manage members in one place with a comprehensive dashboard
- Seamlessly integrate with top page builders, email service providers, and LMS plugins
Price: $147–$397 (renews at $147/year)
#9 MemberMouse
MemberMouse does an excellent job as an easy-to-use WordPress membership plugin well catering to non-techies. It specializes in creating membership tiers and bundles, which members find hassle-free to buy one-off products.
Apart from blocking content access, MemberMouse lets you gain more revenue by upselling exclusive content. Besides the login page, members can access gated content via social media platforms.
To ease your management workload, MemberMouse comes with numerous automation in regard to member engagement, support, and marketing. This plugin also gives the green light to member import/export via CSV files, making data migration a piece of cake.
Key Features of MemberMouse
- Offer downsell and one-click upsell
- Include protected member areas
- Provide flexible content protection
- Drip content
- View transaction history
- Provide member activity log and engagement statistics
Price: MemberMouse’s pricing plans are a bit pricey, ranging from $29–$199/month.
#10 PDA Gold to Protect Media Files in Membership Sites
Mentioning a WordPress membership plugin without Prevent Direct Access (PDA) Gold, you’re missing something huge. The plugin greatly assists you in protecting media files in membership sites from unauthorized access.
Almost of membership plugins just protect WordPress pages and posts. This means that your files in membership areas such as digital products or members’ file uploads still get indexed and appear on search engines. You need to protect them to create completely private member areas.
PDA Gold protects unlimited files of all types and creates private download links for users to access them. You can check out our guide on protecting downloadable files on membership sites here!
Key Features of PDA Gold
- Secure unlimited files and all file types in membership sites
- Integrate with most WordPress membership plugins
- Block search engines from indexing private files
- Restrict protected file access to logged-in users or paid members
- Create private download links for each protected file
- Expire download links based on time or clicks
Price: Free. The gold version starts at $190.8 annually
Which is the WordPress Membership Plugin of Your Choice?
This article has presented the 9 best WordPress membership plugins, free and premium. Most of them help you lock your premium content and grant access to your members only.
Similarly, you can secure your WooCommerce store behind a membership site as well. In case you sell digital products, you need to completely guard them off so that members can’t share them with outers without your consent.
While some membership plugins include content protection as a built-in feature, some still lack this crucial function.
So opt for WordPress membership plugins but don’t forget to install PDA Gold to protect your content assets!
