CS7 – Building a Membership Site

Timestamps

00:33 Installing Paid Membership Pro Plugin
02:04 Creating Membership Level
06:14 Creating Membership Pages
07:33 Configuring Payment Settings
10:11 Creating Discount Codes
11:34 Configure Advanced and other Membership Settings
16:14 Creating Registration and Membership Dashboard Pages
27:06 Restricting Content
33:39 Testing the Membership Site

 

Lesson Notes

In this Lesson: we are going to discuss about

  • Installing Paid Memberships Pro plugin
  • Creating Membership Level
  • Creating Membership pages
  • Configuring Payment settings
  • Creating Discount Codes
  • Configure Advanced and other membership settings
  • Creating Registration and Membership Dashboard pages
  • Restricting content
  • Testing the Membership site

 

Building a Membership Site

A membership site is an exclusive portal for members who have registered or subscribed to the site. They will be able to access the exclusive content that you have created for them when they have logged in to the site. A membership site may be created for building online courses, online communities, webinars, podcasts, and many more. There are a variety of plugins used to building a membership site in WordPress:

  • Paid Memberships Pro – with Free and Paid version
  • Ultimate Member – Free in WordPress
  • s2Member – with Free and Paid version
  • Restrict Content – with Free and Paid version
  • MemberPress – Paid version only
  • WooCommerce Memberships – Paid version only

In this course, we are going to use Paid Memberships Pro to build a membership site. Paid Memberships Pro is designed for premium content sites, clubs/associations, subscription products, newsletters, and more! The plugin adds a new revenue source to your site and is flexible enough to fit the needs of almost all online and offline businesses.

 

Installing the Paid Memberships Pro plugin

Right after installing and activating, you will be brought to the Paid Memberships Pro Dashboard. Then follow the Initial Setup.

 

 Creating Membership Level

  • Under Settings → Level: create a name for the membership level, you may optionally add a description and confirmation message
  • Set Initial Payment
  • Enable if the level has a recurring subscription payment
  • Set the Billing amount per assigned no. of Days/Weeks/Months/Years
  • Set if there will be a Billing Cycle Limit
  • You may add a trial period
  • Set an amount and no. of subscriptions for the trial billing amount 
  • Save level and you will be brought back to the Membership Levels

 

Creating Membership pages

The next step is to Create Pages.

  • Under the Paid Memberships Pro settings, go to Pages.
  • Click on Generate Pages for me. Page settings will be displayed.

Note that upon installation of the Paid Memberships Pro, our login page has been set to Paid Memberships Pro login page. We can change it back by selecting the Use WordPress Default in the Login page.

 

Configuring Payment Settings

Next to setup is the payment gateway

  • Click on Payment Gateway & SSL.
  • Choose among the Payment Gateway and provide the needed information like API key, but since we are only creating a test membership site, you may select the Testing only.
  • Select Live/Production on the Gateway Environment
  • Set the currency
  • Set the accepted credit card types
  • Set a sales tax (optional)
  • SSL settings – No action needed for this because our website is already secured.
  • Click on Save settings

 

Creating Discount Codes

Just like the coupon code in WooCommerce, we can create Discount codes here in Paid Memberships Pro so that we can encourage more people to register on our membership site. Here, we can set up discount codes that completely override the membership level initial price, subscription, expiration, trial and more. See as discussed in the Video lesson.

 

Configuring Advanced and other membership settings

We are now going to proceed with the configuration of the Advanced and other settings to complete the setup of our membership site. See as discussed in the Video lesson.

 

Creating Registration and Membership Dashboard pages

By default, our membership site has a registration page that looks like this. You may access it by going to the Paid Memberships Pro page settings (From the WordPress backend: Memberships → Settings → Pages. Right-click on the Membership Levels view page and open in incognito mode. Let’s create a registration page that will redirect to this page to make it user-friendly.

  • You may either get the URL of this page or you may copy the URL of the Select button.
  • Take note of the URL.
  • Let’s create a registration page in Elementor. We may create a page using a template.
  • We will link the previous link from the Select button on the Membership Levels page to this button on the Elementor template.
  • View the page and click on the button. It should bring you to the URL you have set on the link.
  • Make sure to add the Membership registration and Logout pages in the Menu

 

Next, we need to create a membership dashboard page, where we will redirect our users after they register or log in.

We also need to add a button or link to the ff. Pages so we can lead them to our membership dashboard page:

  • Membership Confirmation
  • Membership Account
  • Login page

 

Additional tip: We may change the default Levels page into our Membership Registration page so that we can redirect them into a more user-friendly type of Registration page, and also the default Membership Account to our Membership Dashboard page so they will be redirected here after they register or login.

 

Restrict Content

We will add a restriction to our Membership Dashboard page so that it will only be accessible by the members. We may restrict our content through the following options:

  • Pages
    • On the upper right, you will see a Require Membership option, select the member level to be given access.
  • Using shortcode (create a separate page for this and add a link to the membership dashboard)
    • Using the shortcode
    • Viewable by non-members only
    • Viewable by Non-members and Level 1-2 members
  • Using Elementor
    • We can set the visibility of elements according to the membership
    • We need to set the visibility of our button in the Membership Confirmation, Account, and Login page to be visible only to the members

 

Testing the Membership site

When you try to view the page as an admin, you won’t be able to access it so we have to access it later using a membership account. We will test the membership by creating a dummy account. We need to access the registration page in Incognito mode.

Input dummy details, you may input any card information and test also the Discount code. It will not be validated since the payment mode is only set to Testing. You will get a membership confirmation and you will also receive a confirmation email. Once you are registered, you are automatically logged in so you should be able to view the Paid Membership Dashboard page by clicking on the button we have added.

Additionally, we may also install the Theme My Login plugin to be able to redirect users back to the Login page after they log out.

 

Portfolio

Build a membership site using Paid Memberships Pro. Send the URL of your membership registration to webdesign@surgedigital.agency

Email Subject: WD – Portfolio 7

 

PORTFOLIO SUBMISSION GUIDES:

1. Video-On-Demand (VOD) Access
Submit your portfolios to courses@surgedigital.agency.
You can submit individually per coaching session or submit all required portfolios as one, in one email (attach your Google Drive).

2. VOD with Class Coaching
Send your portfolios to courses@surgedigital.agency.
Please submit individually per coaching session.

3. VOD with Mentoring
Send your portfolios to courses@surgedigital.agency.
Please submit individually per coaching session.

4. Premium Members
Submit your portfolios to courses@surgedigital.agency.
Please submit all required portfolios as one, in one email (attach your Google Drive).

 

CONTACT US!

For Technical Issues: members@surgedigital.agency

For Submission and Certificate: courses@surgedigital.agency

For any Concerns or Questions: info@thesurgemarketplace.com