Restrict Membership Signup by Email Domain

In this recipe, we demonstrate how to restrict signups by email, requiring members to use an approved email domain for their member registration. This is useful for Education, Corporate, or Association Memberships, rather than using an approvals-based process, where all of the members may be from the same company or group.

With this code in place, all members must use a valid email that matches your domain (a school, university, or corporate email account) in order to complete membership registration.

How The Code Works

Here’s a breakdown of how this code works to help developers and non-developers better understand all the ways you can customize Paid Memberships Pro.

• Email Validation: During registration, the code extracts the email address ($_REQUEST['bemail']), checks if it belongs to an allowed domain using my_check_for_valid_domain(), and displays an error message if not valid.
• Checking the Domain: The code includes a custom function my_get_domain_from_email(). This function isolates the domain part of the email address, only.
• Domain Check: Using the custom my_check_for_valid_domain() function, the code compares the extracted domain with a predefined list of valid domains (set on line 62), supporting wildcard matches (e.g., *.gmail.com).

If the email domain is allowed, registration continues; otherwise, the code restricts signup.

The Code Recipe: Restrict Signup by Email

Adding the Recipe to Your Website

You can add this recipe to your site by creating a custom plugin or using the Code Snippets plugin available for free in the WordPress repository. Read this companion article for step-by-step directions on either method.

Update the $valid_domains array to include your approved list of domains. This is the list of email domains that will be allowed to register.