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How many online memberships and subscriptions – paid and unpaid – do you think you might have? A dozen? Thirty? More than 100?
Members-only areas are becoming increasingly popular on the web, and can prove invaluable for businesses and bloggers looking to generate more income online, gather more information about their readers, or provide a more valuable experience for their existing customers.
NB: Want to create a client area rather than members area? Check out our post, Client Area Plugins for Your WordPress Website.
Why Create a Members-Only Area?
There are a number of reasons for wanting to create a members-only area on your website or blog. If you’re creating a business website, you might want to offer a value-add to your existing customers and clients by keeping premium content on your website – such as video tutorials – for their eyes only in an extranet which only they can access.
If your website caters to members of a club, sporting group, alumni class or similar organisation, keeping content restricted to members maintains exclusivity. Incidentally Themerex has a great selection of extranet (and intranet) themes to choose from.
On the other hand, if you have an existing website or blog you’re looking to monetise, creating a paid membership option and offering premium content and private member forums to paying subscribers is a popular means of making some serious cash from your online project.
The premium content you offer may be in the form of videos, downloads, presentations, podcasts, documents or eBooks – which you may release teaser content and snippets of as a means of encouraging unpaid members to sign up.
Of course, encouraging your readers to become members might have nothing to do with money at all. If you want to boost your subscriber list and gather more information about your users for product research or development, or for future sales leads, offering free membership is also an excellent option.
Following are the best premium and free WordPress membership plugins to add a membership component to your WordPress website…
Premium Membership Plugins
1. WishList Member
WishList Member is used by more than 50,000 online communities and membership sites around the world, and has the power to transform any existing WordPress website or blog into a powerful membership site.
Key features include:
- Simple installation and member management
- Unlimited membership levels and flexible membership options
- Sequential content delivery, enabling you to automatically upgrade members from a free trial to the next membership option
- Content control, including the ability to create modular memberships and give content access to segmented membership levels
- Shopping cart integration with ecommerce systems including ClickBank, PayPal, InfusionSoft and more.
Addition features include subscription length control, partial and sneak peek content display and teasers, custom error messages, secure RSS feeds, login redirection and more.
The WishList Member WordPress membership plugin is available for a one-off payment, at a cost of $97 for a single site license, or $297 for a multi-site license.
2. MemberMouse
Member Mouse WordPress membership plugin enables you to sell products, subscriptions and memberships, set up password protected members areas, manage customers and track metrics, automate customer service, and more.
Key features include:
- Payment integration with powerful ecommerce platforms including Stripe, Braintree, PayPal, Authorize.net and more
- International currency integration and overdue payment handling
- Email integration with MailChimp, AWeber, iContact and GetResponse
- Group functionality, allowing one member to pay and secure a certain number of spots, such as for consultants and agencies
- Customer account self-service, so members can update their information
Additional features include 1-click upsells to maximise revenue, trial offers and coupons, gifting functionality, time release and drip-feed content management, extensive shortcode library for dynamic site functionality without complex coding.
MemberMouse is available monthly subscription cost basis, starting from $19.95 per month for their Starter package (for up to 1000 members). There are a number of subscription plans available, right through to their Professional package for unlimited members at a cost of $599 per month.
3. Magic Members
With a focus on simplicity and intuitiveness, Magic Members WordPress membership plugin enables you to use your existing content to build a membership site.
Key features include:
- Payment gateway integrations with PayPal, eWay, Stripe, and more
- Pay per post access, which offers the flexibility to allow free subscriptions to purchase content on a per-post basis
- AutoResponder integration with MailChimp, iContact, AWeber and more
- Download manager, which protects downloads from being accessed by unauthorized users, and provides the ability to assign different permission levels to different subscribers
- Sequential course delivery system, which is particularly useful if your members are being served course content on a drip-feed basis (weekly or monthly).
- Category protection, allowing you to assign membership access to particular categories
Additional features include easy set up and installation, simple member management, custom post type support, coupon creation and management, subscription length control, forum integrations, custom widgets, flexible membership options, partial content display for teasers, and S3 Amazon support.
Magic Members plugin is available for a one-off payment, starting from $97 for a single user. Other options include a 3-user plan for $197, and unlimited users for $207.
4. Restrict Content Pro
Restrict Content Pro is a complete membership and premium content manager plugin for WordPress, allowing you to create an unlimited number of memberships levels, including free, trial and premium.
Key features include:
- Member and subscription management
- Payment tracking
- The ability to offer discounts with a complete discount code system
- Members-only content options
- Unlimited subscription packages
Restrict Content Pro includes support for Stripe, PayPal, and Braintree, for simple integrated payment options, as well as earnings and sign up analytics.
Restrict Content Pro is available with single-site, multi-site and unlimited site access, starting from $42. Specific Restrict Content Plugins are subject to a yearly license for support and updates.
Free WordPress Membership Plugins
There are many tools available via the WordPress plugin directory to help you create restricted member access, and registration and login pages. These are five of the top free member-access / WordPress membership plugins currently available.
1. s2Member
s2Member is a WordPress membership plugin integrating with PayPal, to offer access to designated member-only content, posts and pages to paid members.
s2Member supports up to four primary membership levels, as well as custom capabilities to create membership packages. This plugin has an average user rating of 4.4/5 stars and has been downloaded more than 469,000 times.
2. Maven Member
Maven Member allows you to protect and restrict access to pages, posts and categories on your WordPress website, as well as create your own custom registration form, and customise templates for login and registration.
This plugin has an average user rating of 4/5 stars and has been downloaded more than 12,000 times.
3. WP-Members
WP-Members is a powerful membership management plugin, working to restrict content access to registered users. You can also create some special pages with simple shortcodes, including a user profile page, registration page, and login page.
This plugin has an average user rating of 4.2/5 stars, and has been downloaded more than 322,000 times.
4. WordPress Access Control
WordPress Access Control allows you to restrict pages, posts, custom post types and more to members, as well as customise search pages to hide restricted posts or pages from search results to non-logged in members.
This plugin has an average user rating of 4.5/5 stars and has been downloaded more than 49,000 times.
5. Member Access
Member Access allows you to make individual posts and pages on your WordPress website accessible only to logged-in members. This WP members-only plugin has an average user rating of 4.3/5 stars, and has been downloaded more than 100,000 times.
Final Thoughts
Do you currently offer members-only pages and content on your WordPress website or blog? What WordPress membership plugin or tool do you use?
235 thoughts on “9 Best WordPress Membership Plugins (Free & Paid)”
Hi, thanks for the review. I was wondering if I could have a members area on my site where I could limit the amounts of downloads (say of videos), that members make a day?
Please let me know if there is a free way to do this, if not, what is the paid option?
Thanks – Daniel
Hi Daniel, it sounds like what you want to do is release your videos (content) on a schedule to members, so more like a course in which they get access to modules over time. Wishlist Member, Member Mouse and Magic Members all offer this functionality.
I am looking to upgrade my WordPress site to offer E-Books and even short Essays at a price, I do not want to force people into membership can you advise me of a good approach?
Hi Derek, suggest you look at something like Easy Digital Downloads as a way to sell eBooks etc from your site.
Hello Charles and everyone,
I have already your article and comment.This article and every comment is very helpful for everyone .However, I want to add something, and recently I just released the membership plugin in the wordpress repository who is called “rs-members”. Before developing I just studied existence all membership wordpress plugin.I got many problems from the those.As a result; I just tried to include many useful features.Without programming skill any guys can easily maintain this plugin. I hoped this plugin will be helpful fill up your all demand. .Guys you can visit my “rs-members” from wordpress repository.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/rs-members
Thank you gentleman for patiently reading.
Thanks for the response! No, emails come from a myriad of domains, the commonality is they are financial members of the organization, so we wanted to use the list as a validation mechanism. If we update the list to remove a person, they then are not allowed to access the site. I am a novice at this so any suggestions as to who to reach out to?
Hi Cynthia, In the post we link to the best membership plugins on the market. These options would be the best to manage and control access to members only content on a WordPress powered site. The issue is whether you can sync the website access permissions with your existing contact list. I suspect that this would require some custom development so I suggest reaching out the the plugin vendors first. The other thought might be that if your membership is too big and doesn’t change too much then you might considered manually managing the user list in WordPress in addition to the contact list (or instead of?)…this way you have no custom development.
I am working with a group that has a mailing list maintained by google works. Financial members are maintained in this contact group. I am looking for a way to leverage this contact group to enable access to the web site members only section. In other words if name is in contact list, allow member access. Can you help with this?
Hi Cynthia, do all members share a common email domain? If so you could try this domain whitelist plugin in conjunction with one of membership plugins. If not then I think it would require come custom coding to sync the site with the contact list. I’m not familiar enough with the APIs available for Google Apps to know if this is easy or not. I suggest reaching out to the premium plugin developers to see if they have some suggestions/insight.
Hie, im working on a jobboard website and i need a plugin that can restrict the resume page from jobseeker members and restrict the job offers page from companies
Hi Joseph, I think that any of these memebership management plugins would achieve this as you can create different membership types with access to different sections of your site. The question is whether they play nice with whatever plugin or custom coding you use for your job board. Perhaps try integrating one of the free options and see if you can make it work.
Hi,
I am building my first website and am looking for a way to set up a private page for each individual client of mine on my website. I was hoping to be able to assign an easy to remember URL (www.websitename.com/membername) which would open to a login page where a password is required. Most of my clients will be set up for autobilling and will be primarily accessing their private page for their personalized content updates and to post comments for me to reply to.
Is this something all of these plugins are capable of? At first I assumed so, but they all seem to focus on multi-level memberships and content feeds where as I am intending to set up a more interactive page for the client and I to keep up with everything they need in one easy place. Not sure if that is part of what these plugins do. Any comments would be a great help.
Hi Erick,
I think you could achieve what you are after with these plugins, though they are more intended for membership sites where you restrict content to different levels of membership in a one to many type model. What you want is a one to one model where you have a dedicated area for each individual client. For this reason I’d suggest you take a look at one of the following plugins which are more intended for this purpose:
It’s a great question, and I hope this helps. I think I’ll write up a blog post on this 🙂
Hi Erick, quick followup…we published that post:
https://wpdevshed.com/client-area-plugins-for-your-wordpress-website/
Thanks again for the idea!
Hi Charles,
Not normally one to comment on articles, but gotta give you kudos for still answering questions and comments months after posting the article!
Great article and great to see people interacting with their audience!
Tom
Hi, thanks for this post! I have a questions I was wondering if you knew the answer to.
I am wondering if there is a plug in out there that will only allow registration to either fully listed email addresses, or listed domain names. We would like to sell access to our online magazine to Universities. So we would like to specify on our site that anyone from @example.ac.uk can register and access their account. We also have individual subscribers, so we’d still like to be able to allow any other paid individuals access too.
Thanks so much!
Hi Roz, had to think about this one for a bit and let me say upfront I’ve not had to do this before…that said, how about this domain whitelist plugin in conjunction with one of the membership plugins we mention above? You might also reach out the premium plugin developers and ask if this is possible. I don’t think it would be a particularly hard thing to code so they might be able to help with a little custom coding/config.
HI!
We launched a website and are looking to add more functionality to our website.
The current website currently provides:
*Information for potential members to know about our group
*New Membership Registration
*Current Membership Renewal – All members renew at one time, regardless of the month they joined
*Current Partner and the discount offered for each partner
*Information to become a partner
What we are looking for:
*A new plug in that would add another tab at the top of the website
oWhere current members could “log in” and it would show a GREEN screen with “Member current through 3/31/2016” (the green is just an idea)
oWhere nonrenewed members could “log in” and it would show a RED screen with “Membership expired on 3/31/2015” (the red is just an idea)
oThe nonrenewed screen would have a link to our renewal page to RENEW NOW!
oThis information would be updated year to year
This plug in would allow us to eliminate our members from having to carry a current membership card.
This plug in would allow us to eliminate printing and mailing new membership cards every year.
Do you have a recommendation for a plug in for our word press website?
Hi Shannon, it sounds like you are simply needing a plugin which can manage memberships and prompt members to renew when their current membership is up. To this end I think any of the premium membership plugins we list above would be a good choice. They all allow you to create recurring membership subscriptions so any associated billing can be handled automatically.
What I’m not sure about is the membership cards. I’m not sure what the cards are used for so I don’t know if these plugins can replace the need for that. The plugins are simply used for controlling membership access to the site and it’s content, but if you need the cards for other offline reasons (in-store discounts etc) then you may still need to produce these(?).
A lot of good plugins on this list, great job compiling it!
I would suggest one more to add, it’s a plugin I use called “WP-Client”
https://wp-client.com
It lets you register users (or let them self-register), assign files to them, send private messages, and a bunch of other stuff.
They make free and paid versions (paid version just does more stuff)
Hope this is useful for someone!
Have a site that I would like to convert to a background check, wondering any of the plugin that can search and display names etc
Hi Gee, not sure what you mean. Can you be more specific?
I was looking for a log in area for one of my wordpress sites that allow certain people (I add myself) to log in to a certain page to create a full page ad of their own creation but nothing else, no other pages nothing. but I still want the ad to be public once updated or created… how would I go about doing that?
Hi Troy, hmm, that is easier said that done. The hard part isn’t the log in part, it is the handling of the page creation and publishing. Do I understand correctly that this is for accommodation providers on your site to create their own listings? If so then I suggest using one of the really good directory style themes which have all those features built in, eg. http://www.inkthemes.com/wp-themes/geocraft-directory-listing-wordpress-theme/ or http://www.geotheme.com/ – and there are others if you google around.
Charles, I need help here. i’m working on an online Banking website using wordpress and i need a plugin to fix up the client page.
JP, I’m not sure what you mean by “fix up the client page”. Can you elaborate? I’m also curious what you mean by “an online Banking website”? WordPress is a great CMS, but I wouldn’t recommend using it to build a website that needs to handle sensitive financial information and where security is of the upmost importance.
Thanks for your suggestion!
Thank you for this helpful list. Would any of these plugins help me? (I’ve already tried a few of them, with no luck.)
Currently, I need a way to password protect certain files. In order to gain access to the files, the user must enter their customer id number and the password (which is a universal password that changes every few months).
I’ve found many plugins that will password protect files, and many plugins that allow users to be registered, however, my issue is that it is a universal password, so not specific to the individual. However, I still need the user’s customer id, to keep track of who is downloading the files. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Hi Becky, your best bet is one of the premium plugins listed above. Each of these provides complete user management so that all users have their own unique login, and you can easily create different user groups with access to different content.
Hi, thanks for the this helpful list.
I’m so new in WordPress and I have this project which the idea is once you log in – depending on which segment (or type of user/member) you fall into it will have specific content – like male images, if you’re a male, different background colour…etc.
Is there any plugin from the list that could help me achieve this? or could you give any suggestions or advice.
Appreciate your help. : )
Hi Chie, I think any of the premium membership plugins would work, with the ability to manage access to certain content by membership type/level. Magic Members for example allows you to limit certain content categories to different membership options. That said, please make sure you have a good look through all the documentation to make sure that it will serve your needs. I would also reach out to the developers of these plugins if you have any specific questions about their products. They will be able to advise you more authoritatively than I can. Best of luck with your project!
Hi,
We’ve got a freemium plugin which has a different approach, centered more on publishing private content rather than managing membership.
For some use cases this could be more indicated. Not to mention that it plays nicely with subscription plugins such as WP eMember.
You can check it out on http://wp-customerarea.com
Do not hesitate to contact us if you want to know more or even get your hands on the add-ons for testing purposes.
Regards,
Hi Vincent, thanks for stopping by. Your plugin looks interesting. I’ll take a look.
Do any of these plugins handle an IP address whitelist?
I have a site that should be accessible to logged in users AND to certain fixed IPs – and there don’t seem to be many solutions for that set-up..
Hi Malc, good question. I’ve not seen this feature in any of these plugins. I’d reach out to some of the premium plugin developers and see if there is a solution they can help you with.
Why not buddypress + paid membership pro = works a treat !!
Hi Charles,
Thank you for this helpful overview..
Could you give me advise on the following:
I would like to put my Buddypress site behind a login, so that the whole of the site is only visible after logging in.
And even more perfect, to have a redirect to a specific page after logging in.
Which solution fits my need best do you think?
Thanx again!
Ben
Hi Ben, so I gather you don’t want any part of your site publicly viewable and you don’t want Google to be able to index it, correct? Like a company intranet of some kind?
If that is the case then I don’t think you need any of these plugins which are really for managing users and access permissions. Rather you can set a password at the server level. If you have a hosting account with cpanel you can easily set permissions per directory from the root on down, eg. if you set up a new site at intranet.benworx.nl you could easily password protect that entire site. Here’s a tutorial on this: http://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/website/protecting-files/how-do-i-password-protect-a-directory-in-my-control-panel-cpanel
Hope that helps.
Hi, thank you for the list! I am just new and confused:
Do I need one or two plugins to handle login/membership AND to manage nice looking download file pages?
Can any of these membership-plugins also help me to do a download page and manage all files, categories etc? And in a nice style so the download page looks good? Or do I need a secondary plugin to handle the file management and the download part of the process?
Or is it better the other way around: Is there a file management plugin that also include the simple login/member and hide/show options I need?!
What plugin(s) should I go for?
(Background:
I need a plugin to show/hide different download files in my download section. My already excisting client list will be allowed to login and see more files than the public. And possibly also see more information about each file, like price or version etc. I also would like to hide some of my posts or post categories from the public and just show to logged in clients. But no need for an actual shop or any other money transaction. Just free downloads. And no public/free registration of new members, I have a closed list.)
Hope you can help!
Hi Leo, I think the answer is that any of these plugins will do the job and probably one of the free ones will work as you don’t need any payment gateway etc. You might even get away with out any plugins. WordPress does have a native feature to password protect any given post, so if you have a closed list you could just set a password for those particular posts and send it out to those people you want to give access too. Now this solution is not 100% secure as if you are providing downloads someone could still find and share the direct file download link once they had logged in, but if you have a small group of known and trusted users who have no incentive to share the private content that might be just fine, it will atleast prevent any random public visitor from seeing the downloadable content.
Design wise either approach would just rely on the design of the theme you are using. You create pages and embed links and content as you usually would, only the access permissions are managed with more or less sophistication depending on what solution you go with.
Hope that helps.
Very helpful – thanks!
Great information post. Thank you. I was wondering if you could direct me to a WordPress plugin that would make my entire blog private and have a universal password to unlock. I am not interested in having users and registration, just a single password. Thank you kindly.
Hi Tracey, if you have a web host with CPanel or Plesk (?) then the simplest way to do that would be to set a password for the directory that your blog is in. This can also be done for the root directory if you blog lives at yourdomain.com/.
Keep in mind however that password protecting your entire site (however you do it) will render it invisible to Google which means you’ll get no search traffic.
Puristat Digestive Wellness is a resource providing tons of content (articles ) on all issues related to overall health and the role proper digestive wellness plays. The site gets a ton of organic traffic because of all this valuable content.
We are now considering placing some of this content in a membership section of the site.
My Question Is: When content is placed “behind” a membership section of a site, how will this influence natural search results and organic traffic? Will the search engines still be able to “see” this content and return it in the SERPs just like is currently happening? What would happen when someone then clicks on a search engine result that is “behind” the membership section?
Thanks a million!
Jim
Hi Jim, in general if your content is behind a login then Google can’t access it and won’t index it so it will not be in the search engines. If you introduce the login requirement after it has been indexed then the next time Google goes to reindex the content they won’t be able to reach it and it will be dropped from the index. So it will absolutely impact organic search traffic. Google does have a “First click free” program for partner publishers. Might be worth investigating: http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.co.nz/2009/12/update-to-first-click-free.html
Hiya, great post but I have a question and I wonder if you could lead me in the right direction?
I need to add a really basic members area to a WP site where admin can upload docs and members can download the pdf’s.
They only have 1 master login that everyone uses for some strange reason, but is there something that could achieve this?
Thanks JJ
Hi JJ, with WordPress you can password protect posts. Could you simply use that feature to protect those posts and provide the password to those that need it?
More here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Password_Protection
If not that then perhaps something like: https://premium.wpmudev.org/project/password-protect-selected-content/
Hope that helps.
Check this plugin. I think it will do the work you are looking for and it is free.
https://wp-customerarea.com
I have been considering a members only area on my site. Being able to post minutes from the meetings, event planning and notes, etc would be a huge help. I am going to be looking at each, but is there one that you would say is the best option? Contact me through the site if you need more information. BTW, just found this site through Google and it is pretty neat.
Hi Stacey, it really depends on what you want to achieve. By the sounds of it you are more interested in community features rather than product and sales features? If that is the case then you might just need BuddyPress. If you are looking for more then I like S2, but would also consider Exchange from iThemes. We didn’t look at Exchange when we wrote this post a year ago, but I’ve since played with it and really like they way it works.
I’m trying to achieve the same type of thing as Stacey, I think, and I’m using the Simple WordPress Membership plugin, which allows for one free and several paid membership types. I’m obviously just using the one free type.
Since http://www.carolinashowski.org has a good amount of public-facing content as well, would I need to install a second instance of WP to also have member.carolinashowski.org where members can navigate/bookmark directly, or is there another way of architecting with a subdomain like this?
Hi Rebecca, if you wanted to put your membership area on another sub-domain, like member.carolinashowski.org, and keep it all separate from the main public website then that is indeed a separate install of WordPress. This would then operate as two distinct websites and the content on each would be managed separately. You can of course link them together for navigation purposes, but you can’t easily managed content across both the main site and the subdomain from a single installation of WordPress. There is a way to do this (using a multisite install of WordPress) but I really don’t think that’s a good idea in this case and I’m not sure the membership plugins would work well with WP multisite.
I would do it as a one site install you could do a subdomain redirect as your members landing page, once logged in they’re going to be redirected back to the normal site.
All your subdomain would be doing here is acting as a shortcut but it would give you a simple neat URL to handout to get customers logged in
Hi Charles. I’m using iThemes Exchange now and I’m trying to get customer data to be exposed through the a REST API. Any ideas how that could be done?
Hi David, I think this will require some custom development. If you need developer support you could try posting your requirements as a project on Codeable and getting a quote for such work.
why cant I get into my account ,as it say web site not aviliable
Hi Wayne, if you website isn’t available I think you need to put this question to your web host.
We are a group of 175 to 200 family members sharing family genealogy on an Ancestry My Family site which is being retired. We are looking for a site as similar as possible. Please give us an idea if one of your private sites would fill our need.
Hi Connie, thanks for your comment. We don’t actually provide any sites like this ourselves, we only wrote here about some of the membership plugins available for WordPress powered sites. Without knowing what kind of features and functions your Ancestry My Family site had I can’t really comment on the suitability of this kind of solution.
I can say that I’ve often thought that a wiki style site would be ideal to enable a collaborative genealogy effort, allowing member to add and edit pages as well as providing a good revision tracking system so you can see who made what changes over time etc. A hosted wiki style site such as provided by http://www.wikidot.com could be a good option.
Hi Nikki,
Was wondering if you would consider adding http://DigitalAccessPass.com (DAP) to your list here.
Thanks for the consideration.
– Ravi Jayagopal
Great post, very helpful!
Thanks!