How to Restrict Access to Anything in WordPress

WordPress is a flexible tool that can be used to create and display content of all kinds. This post explains various ways to restrict access to your WordPress website. Keep reading to learn how to lock down ANY piece of content, feature, or download you might have on your WordPress site.

All of the instructions below assume that you are running the latest versions of WordPress, Paid Memberships Pro, and any other plugins mentioned.

If we missed something or you still have questions about protecting any specific kind of content on your site, let us know.

How a Membership-Based Website Guides Special Education Professionals 

SENCOs (Special Educational Needs Coordinators) are legally required in every school in the U.K. where they play a critical role in supporting pupils with special educational needs. Their challenges, from managing pupils, parents, and teachers, to dealing with school and local officials, make their jobs anything but easy.

Assisting in this endeavor is SENsible SENCO. Powered by WordPress and Paid Memberships Pro, the site is a centralized membership-based hub of resources, webinars, events, and bespoke consulting services for special education professionals. Abigail Hawkins, a twenty-five-year SENCO specialist, is the professional brain behind the website which was born from the challenges and frustrations she faced. Her husband Gavin Hawkins provides the technical expertise and strategic planning for the SENsible SENCO website; together they fill this critical gap.  

Let Members Submit Content Using WS Form and PMPro

​​User-generated content (UGC) is a powerful way to build community, increase engagement, and add value to your membership site. WS Form and Paid Memberships Pro let members submit content through frontend forms. This workflow reduces your team’s content-creation burden while providing a more diverse content library for your community.

In this tutorial, we take you through each setup step:

  • How to create the submission form in WS Form
  • Several methods to configure form access permissions and limit submissions
  • Plus, various ways to display your members’ contributions.

By the end, you will have a streamlined workflow for capturing, moderating, and showcasing valuable UGC on your site.

Accessibility for Membership Websites: Ensuring Inclusive Experiences for All Members

For today’s web-based businesses, accessibility is not just a nice-to-have feature; it is an essential element that ensures everyone, regardless of ability, can access and enjoy your content. For membership sites, accessibility is especially important. Whether a member has vision problems, uses a screen reader, or has mobility impairments requiring keyboard navigation, accessible websites ensure everyone can have a positive experience on your website.

In this guide, we’ll explore the basics of accessibility for membership websites, make a case for why accessibility matters, and share steps to start improving your site’s accessibility today.

A Step-by-Step Giving Tuesday Plan for Your Membership Site

Creating an engaging and impactful Giving Tuesday strategy can be a game-changer for your membership site. If you’re a nonprofit association, one of our most common use cases here at Paid Memberships Pro, you are in a unique position to leverage this day of generosity to boost funds.

In this guide, we share the exact steps you can take to set up a goal-based fundraising campaign using Paid Memberships Pro and our nonprofit-focused Add Ons. This is not one more guide on the importance or meaning behind Giving Tuesday. If you’re looking for a guide like this, refer to this informative post on Giving Tuesday from our friends at GiveWP.

Keep reading to learn how to set up a Giving Tuesday strategy, plus a few bonus tips with our tried-and-true best practices for NPOs and associations.

Boost Your Revenue With Membership Upsells, Order Bumps, and Expansion Revenue

Order bumps, upgrades, and expansion revenue are different types of upselling strategies that increase your revenue and maximize the value from each customer.

In the context of membership sites, these techniques help you increase the value of the first checkout and encourage active members to purchase additional products or services over time.

Keep reading this guide to learn the basics of what upselling is, along with 9 different ways you can use these strategies to get paid with your Paid Memberships Pro-powered membership site.

Single Membership Level Block

The Single Level Block allows you to customize and display information about a membership level in a pricing-table like format on your Membership Levels page or other places in your WordPress posts or pages.

This block is designed to provide flexible options for showcasing membership details that stay up to date with the linked level’s price, description, expiration, and more.

PMPro v3.0 Release: Multiple Memberships, Rethinking Member Management, New Blocks, and More

We are thrilled to announce the launch of Paid Memberships Pro v3.0, a monumental update that is over three years in development. Designed to transform how you manage and engage with your members, this release zeroes in on what truly matters to you as a membership site owner: a seamless, member-focused experience.

This post details the major new features and what to expect before you update, since 3.0 has database upgrade scripts that forever change the way your site’s membership data is stored.

Read on to learn about these enhancements and how to safely prepare for the update.

Paid Memberships Pro vs. Wild Apricot

If you manage an association or nonprofit organization, you want to stay close to your members. A membership platform can help you communicate regularly with your volunteers and other members, growing your organization and keeping them invested in your mission. Looking for a membership platform to fit your needs? Here’s a comparison of Paid Memberships Pro vs. Wild Apricot.

Redirect Empty Category or Tag Archive When All Posts Are Members-Only

This guide outlines the process to redirect users from empty category or tag archives to the levels page.

Why would the category archive or tag archive be blank? In Paid Memberships Pro, we offer a setting to filter members-only content from the search results or archives pages. If all posts in a specific category are protected, there would be no results.

Use this code recipe to redirect users to your pricing page (or another page of your choice) when they can’t access that content.

Paid Memberships Pro vs. Patreon

You have a lot of platform options if you want to offer a membership program and build a community online. 

With so many choices, starting out can be overwhelming. You want to build your membership on the best platform for your needs from the beginning.

Paid Memberships Pro is a popular membership platform that allows you to restrict content and manage member subscriptions with recurring payments. Patreon is a hosted platform for creators to offer digital shops and paid memberships for their fans.

We’re here to help you learn more about both. We’ll compare Paid Memberships Pro and Patreon so you can make the best decision for your needs.

WooCommerce as Membership Site Payment Gateway

In addition to its feature to offer members-only product discounts as a global percentage off or per-product, our WooCommerce Integration Add On also allows you to use WooCommerce to sell memberships with PMPro.

This documentation explains how to use our WooCommerce integration to sell memberships through a gateway they support.

It’s important to note that Paid Memberships Pro supports loads of native payments gateways, as well as 47 other gateways offered through Stripe.

Note: WooCommerce is not required, and in many cases, not the ideal way to sell your PMPro memberships.

3 Ways to Automatically Apply Discount Codes at Membership Checkout

As an online shopper, it can be so frustrating when you don’t know how to find a discount code or even how to use it. On the flip side, as a business owner, you’re focused on reducing checkout issues, growing revenue through sales promos, and reducing cart abandonment. To solve both these needs, we developed three easy ways to apply an automatic discount code at membership checkout.

The goal of this guide is to save you, and your customers excess frustration. Keep reading to learn about PMPro’s built-in discount links, a helper plugin for running sales, and a code recipe—all designed to apply discount codes automatically.

Membership Checkout Button

The Membership Checkout Button Block allows you to create a button-style link that takes a user to checkout for a specific membership level.

This block can be used with the WordPress Block Editor (Gutenberg) to build a custom membership levels page for your unique style.

Ecommerce Analytics: Send Events to Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

Tracking your membership site’s performance and analytics are crucial when it comes to understanding your audience and making informed business decisions. Better ecommerce analytics can support efforts like conversion rate optimization (CRO), planning your content, price experiments, improved UX, and everything in between.

In this guide, we show you how to send ecommerce analytics data to Google Tag Manager at three key points in the checkout experience: view membership, add membership to cart, and purchase (complete checkout).

After completing this tutorial, you’ll be fully set up to track and view ecommerce analytics for your membership site in Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

How to Create a Mobile Friendly Website for Your Membership Business

As the smartphone has risen to the #1 device for making online purchases, mCommerce (or, mobile commerce) has made its way into the public vernacular.

Mobile devices account for nearly 60% of all web traffic and well over 70% of all eCommerce sales. It’s no wonder that Google now gives preference to sites that are optimized for mobile use. 

With all of this in mind, it’s more important than ever for online businesses to have a mobile friendly website.

In 2018, Google first announced the rollout of mobile-first indexing, but a lot has happened since then. Mobile shopping has continued to dominate the eCommerce landscape, and the trend is upward.

“Mobile-first indexing is now the standard. That means algorithms use the mobile-rendered version of a page instead of the desktop version.” –Search Engine Journal

What does this mean for membership sites in particular? Well, as eCommerce entities, the same rules apply to membership sites.

However, there’s an additional element to consider: Members not only want to be able to purchase their memberships on their mobile devices; They also want to regularly use their memberships in their day-to-day lives. 

Quite simply, this means that memberships offering an enjoyable mobile experience will end up taking the cake.

In this post, we’ll cover more about what mobile friendly means, why it’s important, and how to create a mobile friendly website for your membership business.

How to Create a Conditional Main Menu for Your Members in WordPress

Do you run a membership site with WordPress? Do you want to show a different main menu to signed-in members, logged-out members, and non-members, or on different pages of your website?

While most WordPress themes include some menu customization, by default, WordPress will always show the same main menu. This is where creating a conditional main menu comes in.

Build a Video Membership Site With Free Video Hosting On YouTube 

There are loads of ways to protect video content on a membership site, from super-premium services like Vimeo, to free video hosting on YouTube. In this guide, we show you how to leverage the world’s second most popular search engine, YouTube, to do just that!

Keep reading to learn how to leverage YouTube as an easy (and free) way to add members-only video in your WordPress membership site.

5 Key Steps to Help Membership Sites Prepare for Traffic Spikes Like Cyber Monday

You just secured a major marketing opportunity that will undoubtedly send a traffic spike to your website. This event could drive huge revenue and list growth, whether it’s from a flash sale like Cyber Monday, a public speaking engagement, a guest spot on a huge YouTube channel, or a mention in a widely read online publication.

Do you know if your website is ready? Is your hosting environment prepared for a burst of website traffic—all at once? Did you prepare your team for an influx of support requests? Have you optimized your site with a clear CTA…so you can actually convert sales and subscribers?

There are some key elements to make sure you have in place before your marketing event go-live or your flash sale event arrives—especially when it comes to dealing with large spikes in traffic.

In this post, we talk about 5 key steps to make sure your membership site is prepared for a high traffic event. These concepts apply to any situation where you might see a spike, such as:

  • Black Friday and Cyber Monday
  • A big product launch
  • A regular sale, summer sale, or other holiday sale
  • A television appearance or other source of publicity
  • Anything else that might send waves of traffic to your site

How to Protect URLs in WordPress

Paid Memberships Pro can protect almost everything in your WordPress site without any custom code. But sometimes, you may need to protect URLs in WordPress for pages or archives that aren’t editable through the admin—such as your Blog page, custom post type archives, taxonomy archives, or other plugin-generated pages.

This tutorial provides a simple, customizable code recipe to block access to these URLs and redirect visitors to your pricing page or membership levels page.

The Dos and Don’ts of Raising Prices for Membership Sites

Pricing changes are a normal part of doing business, and membership sites are no different. However, raising prices for membership sites the right way is an art of its own.

Making these changes without being mindful of things like trust, confidence, and communication has the potential to turn both new and existing customers away—and can lead to skepticism around your brand and business practices.

There are a variety of reasons why you might decide to raise your membership prices over time. Here are just a few examples:

  • The state of your niche market or your competition
  • Global pandemics and other world events
  • Inflation and the changing cost of materials
  • Increased operating costs as your membership site grows

Plus, the more content you release, the more the value of your membership increases. Perhaps your business has grown from a small membership MVP into a full-featured membership site. In this case, you’d need to start charging accordingly.

Or, maybe your costs have increased—and even though you don’t want to raise prices on your members, you simply have to.

Whatever the case, there are some important tips and strategies to keep in mind if you want to make your pricing increase easier for your members to digest, and less intimidating for you as well.

In this post, we talk about the “dos and don’ts” of raising prices for membership sites.

Which Paid Memberships Pro Plan is Right for You?

With over thousands of active installs and over 14 years in development, Paid Memberships Pro is the world’s most complete membership platform. We give you all the tools you need to start, manage, and grow your membership site.

PMPro allows you to restrict your content and manage member subscriptions with recurring payments—including a seamless member experience, flexible membership level pricing, and many other robust features, Add Ons, and integrations.

If you’re not sure which PMPro plan is right for you, we’re going to break it down to help you make the best decision for your membership site needs.

We currently offer three plans: Free, Standard, and Plus. We’ve designed each plan to suit different use cases, from membership site beginners and individual business owners to web developers and agencies.

On this page, we highlight the most important features you’ll get from each PMPro plan. You can see the full details on our pricing page to learn more.