If you signed up for PMPro Max and you’re starting fresh (not migrating an existing site) this guide is for you. Your site is already provisioned and waiting. Paid Memberships Pro is installed and active, you have a starter theme, and we’ve created the membership pages you’ll need. Your job is to make it yours and launch when you’re ready.

There’s no deadline. Take your time. This guide walks through a recommended order, but you can skip around as needed.

Before You Begin

Your site is currently running at a temporary staging URL (something like staging-yourdomain.pmpro.site) and it’s fully functional. You can log in, edit content, install plugins, and configure everything you need. When you’re ready, you’ll update your domain’s DNS to point to your new site, and the staging URL becomes your live site.

Until you change DNS, your real domain still points to wherever it pointed before. Visitors won’t see your new site yet. That’s by design: it gives you space to set things up without anyone watching.

Accessing Your New Site

To get to your new site for the first time:

1. Go to your Membership Account page here on this site and open your hosting dashboard.
2. Find your site and click the “Magic Login” link to access the WordPress admin.

From the WordPress admin, you can do everything you need: write content, install plugins, manage members, configure settings. The login URL will be something like https://staging-yourdomain.pmpro.site/wp-admin/.

What Is Pre-Installed

Your site comes with a few things already in place so you’re not starting from a blank WordPress install.

Theme: Memberlite (and Memberlite Child)

Memberlite is our WordPress theme designed specifically for Paid Memberships Pro sites. It’s opinionated about what membership sites need (clean typography, layouts that work for paid content, good defaults for member dashboards) but flexible enough to look like your own brand once you put your content in.

A child theme is also installed and active. The child theme is where any custom CSS or template tweaks should go: it protects your changes from being overwritten when Memberlite updates.

Here’s a short list of Memberlite theme documentation to explore as you start building your membership site:

• Customize the Theme
• Page Layout Options
• Sidebars and Widgets
• Menus
• Colors
• Theme Tools

You’re not locked into Memberlite. If you have a different theme you want to use, install and activate it like you would on any WordPress site. Just be aware that the starter homepage and About page content won’t look the same on a different theme.

Plugin: Paid Memberships Pro

The core PMPro plugin is installed and activated and your Max license is already active in your site. This means you can install any Add On from the Memberships > Add Ons screen.

Plugin: PMPro Hosting

This plugin gives you the PMPro Hosting menu item in the WordPress admin sidebar. From there you can monitor your server health, toggle performance features like page caching and object caching, run image optimization, and clear caches. Each panel is documented in the Hosting Admin Dashboard guide.

Most settings in the hosting dashboard are already turned on with sensible defaults. You won’t need to touch most of them.

Recommended Setup Path

You can do these in any order, but this is the sequence we recommend if you want to move efficiently and avoid backtracking.

1. Run the PMPro Setup Wizard

Start here. The Setup Wizard walks you through the most important Paid Memberships Pro settings: your business details, the kind of membership site you’re building, your sender email address, and recommended Add Ons for your use case.

To launch it, click on Memberships in the WordPress admin. This menu page should automatically redirect you to the setup wizard.

The wizard takes about 10 minutes and saves you from hunting through the settings screens manually. See the Setup Wizard documentation for details on each step.

2. Confirm Your Hosting Settings

Open PMPro Hosting in the WordPress admin sidebar. The defaults are already in place, but it’s worth a quick look so you know what’s enabled and where to find things later.

You should see Page Caching, Object Caching, and WebP Images all turned on. The “My Hosting” tab shows your server’s resource usage at a glance.

If you want to understand what each panel does, the Hosting Admin Dashboard guide covers them in detail.

3. Build Your Site’s Basic Structure

The structure of your site totally depends on what type of membership you are building. This is a good time to pause and leverage the Max Skills included in your plan.

1. Head over to the PMPro Max: AI Tools page.
2. Complete your Context Profile. Your context profile is the basis for all other AI Skills you run for your membership.
3. With this in place, try using the Copyrighting skill to draft an About page or the basis of your homepage. You can also browse through other available skills that may help you create an outline for your main pages.

If you’d rather start from a different layout, clear the page entirely and build from scratch using Memberlite’s starter patterns (available in the block editor’s pattern library).

4. Set Up Your Real Membership Levels

If you completed the Setup Wizard, you may have set up two basic levels: a free and a paid level. Navigate to Memberships > Settings > Levels in the WordPress admin to add more membership levels or adjust what was already created.

For each level, you can set the price, billing frequency, expiration, and which content the level can access. The Membership Levels documentation walks through each setting.

5. Connect Your Payment Gateway

If you plan to charge for memberships, you need to connect a payment gateway. Navigate to Memberships > Settings > Payments and pick your gateway. Each one has a setup guide linked from the settings screen.

Here’s an overview of the Payment Gateway options available in PMPro.

6. Adjust Your Design

Your site already has the color scheme and fonts you picked at signup. To change either:

• Color scheme: Appearance > Customize > Colors. Switch between the 10 built-in Memberlite color schemes or fine-tune individual colors.
• Fonts: Appearance > Customize > Typography. Change the heading and body font selections.
• Logo: Appearance > Customize > Site Identity. Upload your logo and favicon.

Custom CSS goes in Appearance > Customize > Additional CSS, or you can add it to your child theme’s style.css if you’re comfortable editing files.

7. Test Before You Launch

Before you point your domain at the new site, click through it as a regular visitor would:

• Visit your homepage, About page, and Pricing page logged out
• Try a sandbox checkout for each membership level
• Confirm the checkout confirmation email arrives
• Log in as the new test member and check the account, billing, and orders pages
• Try canceling the test membership

If anything looks broken or unexpected, fix it now while only you can see the site. Contact support if you hit something you can’t work through.

Going Live

When you’re ready, going live means pointing your domain at your new site. Once DNS resolves, your domain stops loading whatever was there before and starts loading your PMPro Hosting site.

The full DNS cutover process is covered in DNS and Domain Management, including:

• The two options for DNS management (we manage it, or you do)
• How to update nameservers or A records at your registrar
• How long propagation typically takes
• What happens to your SSL certificate after cutover

Reply to your support ticket when you’re ready to start the cutover. We’ll give you the exact nameservers or IP address to use.

After You Launch

A few things to know once your site is live:

• The staging URL is removed. Your site is now reachable at your real domain. There’s no separate staging environment by default. If you want one for testing future changes, see Staging Sites.
• Transactional email starts flowing. Membership confirmations, password resets, and admin notifications deliver to real members from your {yourdomain}@pmpromailer.com address. See Transactional Email for sending limits and what’s allowed.
• Backups are running. Daily off-site backups happen automatically. We retain 7 daily, 4 weekly, 6 monthly, and 1 yearly snapshot. See Backups for more on how backups work.
• Security is layered in by default. You don’t need to install any security plugins. See Security for what’s in place at every layer.
• Performance is tuned in by default. Page caching, object caching, WebP images, and Cloudflare CDN are all already working. See Performance Tuning for what each layer does.