Are you looking for a way to create a website with membership and user login?
Membership sites are very popular these days because they allow you to build your own community. Instead of relying on social media for your audience, you can create your own group of members on your own platform (and maybe even charge for membership, if you want to make some money).
The best The bottom line is that creating a membership site isn’t that hard…as long as you have the right tools. In fact, you can configure everything with no technical knowledge required.
In this post, we’ll tell you what those tools are. Then we’ll show you step-by-step how to create a website with membership and user login.
Let’s dig in!
What you need to create a website with membership and user login
Before we get to the tutorial, let’s talk about the tools you need to create a user-friendly site with membership and login features.
First, you need WordPress for the foundation of your site. If you’re not familiar with it, WordPress is by far the most popular way to build a website – it works with over 42.5% of all websites on the Internet.
But while WordPress does include support for users register in the core software, it’s quite limited and not very user friendly so you’ll want to extend it with one or more plugins.
Add membership functionality with paid member subscriptions
To expand the membership functionality of your site, you can use the Paid Member Subscriptions plugin.
Paid Member Subscriptions is a complete WordPress membership solution. It helps you to:
- Create unlimited membership levels.
- Offer custom registration and login forms for your members to use.
- Restrict content on your site based on their membership levels.
- Charge one-time or recurring payments for membership (you can also offer free membership levels).
- Manage all your members from your dashboard of WordPress.
Basically, paid member subscriptions are all you need to build a website with membership and user login in WordPress.
Expand registration and user profiles with Profile Builder
If you want even more control over registration/login behavior and user profile management, you can also link paid member subscriptions with the Profile Builder plugin.
Profile Builder is a complete WordPress user and registration solution. profiles. At a basic level, Profile Builder allows you to create and customize three key forms:
- Registration – You can create a custom registration form that displays anywhere on your site . You will also be able to control the fields that appear on the form, including the collection of personalized information from new registrants.
- Login : You can create your own user login form which replaces the default WordPress login system.
- Edit Profile – Once users sign up, you can allow them to edit some or all of their profile details from the interface of your site.
Overall, it also gives you more control over registration and login behavior, such as setting up automatic redirects after login/registration or requiring approval administrator manual for some types of users.
How to create a website with membership and user login
Now, let’s see the step by step guide on how to create a site website with membership and user login.
For this In this tutorial, the only thing we’re going to assume is that you’ve already set up your basic WordPress site. Once you have a WordPress site up and running, we’ll walk you through everything you need to do to set up the membership and user login functionality.
For the main functionality, you only need the WordPress Subscriptions plugin. paid members. However, we’ll also show you how to extend your registration and edit your profile features using the Profile Builder, if you’d like.
To get started, be sure to install and activate the Paid Member Subscriptions plugin. You can use the free version on WordPress.org for much of what we cover, but we’ll also mention some areas where you might want the paid version.
1. Follow the Paid Members Subscriptions Setup Wizard
As soon as you activate the Paid Members Subscriptions plugin, it should automatically launch its setup wizard to help you set up some important basics.
If not, you can manually launch the setup wizard by going to the Paid Member Subscriptions area in your WordPress admin and clicking the Open Setup Wizard button. strong>.
In the first step of the setup wizard, click the button to have the plugin create key membership pages for you, such as registration, login, and account management. Then you can also configure some basic login/registration behaviors:
In the next step, you can set up the payment methods you want to accept if you plan to charge some or all of your members for access to your site (more on this below.) If you’re not sure about this, you can always configure it later, so don’t stress too much:
And that’s it for the wizard!
2.Set up your membership levels (subscription plans)
Next, you’ll want to create your membership levels, which the plugin calls “subscription plans”. how much access different types of members have to your site.
For example, some members may have access to all of your content, while other members may have limited access.
With the subscriptions of paid members, you can create both free and paid membership levels. A common approach is to have a limited free tier and then one or more paid tier. For paid tiers, you can charge people one-time fees or recurring payments.
Create a Membership Tier
To create your first membership tier, go to Membership Subscriptions paid members → Subscription Plans → Add New.
First, you can give it a name. This is the name that will appear when people choose the plan. If you’re not sure how to name it, you can refer to our guide to naming your membership levels.
Set Pricing and Access
Below that, you can enter the length and price of the plan .
With the free version of Paid Member Subscriptions, you can offer free membership plans or charge a single price. Just set the price to zero if you want the subscription plan to be free:
With Paid Member Subscriptions Pro, you can also charge for automatic recurring subscriptions, along with things like one-time or free trials. enrollment fees.
When you’re done, click Save Subscription to save your plan.
Set up more plans if needed
Now, you can set up more membership plans if needed.
If your plans are not connected to each other, you can go to Subscription Plans → Add New again to create a new plan.
However, you can also have a set of tiered plans where the plans are organized hierarchically and members can upgrade to a higher level plan or downgrade to a lower level plan.
In this case, you’ll want to add your plans as upgrades or downgrades.
For example, let’s go to and you want to create an upgrade to the plan you just created. Go to the Subscription Plans area and hover over the existing plan. Then click on the Add Update option:
You will then get the same screen where you can set the name, price, access duration, etc.
When you return to the Subscription Plans area, you can see the hierarchy of your plans and rearrange them using the arrows if necessary:
3. Customize your key pages (registration, account, etc.)
During the setup wizard, Paid Memberships automatically created four key pages for your membership site. Those pages are:
- Account
- Login
- Reset Password
- Sign Up
These pages are ready to publish immediately. However, you may want to add some of your own unique content to them to customize them for your site. For example, you might want to add text to the registration page.
To make these edits, go to the Pages area in your WordPress dashboard and edit one of the pages. You can add as much content as you like, just don’t remove the shortcode that’s there.
For example, on the registration page, the registration form will appear wherever the shortcode [pms-register] is. .
Later on, we’ll show you how you can use the Profile Builder plugin to gain even more control over your registration page.
4. Restrict Content to Members Only
At this point, you’ve created your membership levels and made it so people can sign up for free or paid plans through your signup page.
For the final touch, you need to restrict the content you want to only be available to members.
There are two ways to restrict content: piece by piece or with bulk restriction.Let’s go over both…
Restricting Individual Pieces of Content
To restrict a single piece of content, open the editor for that content. Then scroll down to the new Content Restriction box.
Here, you can restrict content for all registered users (regardless of subscription plan) or for subscription plans specific:
How to restrict content in bulk
With Paid Member Subscriptions Pro, you also have the option to restrict content in bulk. For example, you can restrict all posts in a certain category or of a certain post type.
To get started, make sure you buy at least the Hobbyist license and then install the Global Content Restriction add-on.
You can then bulk restrict content by going to Paid Member Subscriptions → Subscription Plans and editing the plan you want to restrict content on massively. for.
You will get a new Global Content Restriction box where you can configure rules. For example, if you mass-restrict the “Gold Member Content” category, you can automatically restrict access to all posts within this category:
How to filter content over time
Instead of making all content available to members right away, many member communities like to “trickle” content over time. For example, you can give members access to a new piece of content every week during their membership. This encourages them to stick around and continue subscribing.
With Paid Member Subscriptions Pro, you can add support for content dripping via the Content Dripping plugin.
With the plugin active, you can Go to Paid Member Subscriptions → Content Drip Sets to set up content drip sequences for different subscription plans:
5. Explore other paid member subscription setups
At this point our tutorial on building a website with membership and user login is almost done. That is, your member community is fully up and running.
However, you may want to explore the Paid Member Subscription settings to see if there are any smaller options you’d like to tweak for your site.
You can access these settings by going to Paid member subscriptions → Settings. You’ll get five different tabs:
- General – A variety of general settings for login behavior, home pages, account sharing, and more.
- Payments : Set up everything related to payments on your site.
- Content Restriction : Set up the content restriction behavior, including the default message that is displayed when a visitor does not have access to the content.
- Emails : Configure the emails that your site sends to users.
- Misc – A few miscellaneous settings for things like GDPR compliance and antispam protection.
You can also explore all available plugins by going to Paid Member Subscriptions → Add-ons.
How to extend registration and profile functionality (optional)
This section is t Totally optional. But if you want more control over your membership site’s registration and user profile features, you can link Paid Member Subscriptions with the Profiler plugin.
Like Member Subscriptions If you pay, the Profiler comes in a free version and a paid version:
- The free version is fine if you only need the default WordPress user profile fields, e.g. name, email, bio, etc.
- The Pro version allows you to add your own custom fields. You’ll want this if you want to collect custom information from people when they sign up on your member site.
We’ll use the paid version for this example so we can display the custom fields, but the basic interface will be the same for the free version.
Customize your registration form
To get started, be sure to install and activate the plugin. Then, go to Profile Builder → Form Fields to control the fields on your registration form. In this interface, you can…
- Use the dropdown menu at the top to add new form fields.
- Drag and drop form fields to change their order by clicking the number in the leftmost column.
- Edit the details of any form field by clicking the Edit button.
- Remove any of the default form fields if necessary.
Feel free to customize the registration form as much as needed. If you have the Pro version, you can also add unlimited custom fields to collect as much information as you need from your members.
Besides the basic profile fields like email and password, the only field you need to add is the Subscription Plans field. This field allows you to connect your signup form to the subscription plans you created with Paid Member Subscriptions.
When you customize the field, you’ll be able to choose which plans new users can choose from:
If needed, you can also create multiple unique signup forms, each linked to a different subscription level. For example, you can create one registration form for free members and one for paid members (to do this, make sure to activate the Multiple Registration Forms premium plugin by going to Profile Builder → Plugins) .
Displaying your registration form
When you’re done customizing the fields on your registration form, you can display it using the shortcode.
In most situations, you’ll want to replace the Paid Member Subscriptions registration shortcode with the new Profile Builder shortcode:
[wppb-register]Create a custom publisher profile form
In addition to customizing your site’s registration form, Profile Builder can also help you customize the publisher profile form that appears in the member account area from Paid member subscriptions.
For your editing form For profile ion, you can give members access to the exact same fields on the signup form, or you can create a custom set of fields with the Multiple Edit Profile Forms premium plugin.
Once you’ve created your custom edit profile form, go to Paid Member Subscriptions → Settings and find the Edit Profile Form dropdown under the tab General settings.
Change the dropdown to Default Profile Builder (or the name of your custom edit profile form if you created one):
Create Your Membership Website Today
With the right tools, it doesn’t have to be difficult to create a membership and startup website user session.
Paid member subscriptions give you all the features you need to turn WordPress into a membership site. Then, if you want even more control over your registration and user login behavior, you can link Paid Member Subscriptions with the Profiler plugin.
To get started with your site, you can try the Free version of Paid Member Subscriptions at WordPress.org. Once you discover how easy it is to build a website with membership and user login, you can upgrade to Paid Member Subscriptions Pro to access great new features like automatic recurring payments, content dripping, and much more:
Still have questions about creating a website with membership and user login? Tell us in the comments and we’ll try to help!
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