Membership plugins can be a super-efficient way to convert your WordPress website into a membership-based operation.
Memberships allow for the creation of exclusive content, services, or products that can be restricted to premium users only, thus incentivizing users to subscribe or purchase memberships.
This not only helps in building a loyal community but also opens up avenues for recurring revenue through subscription fees or membership sales.
In this article, we will cover what WordPress membership plugins are, how they can help you, and our top choices for the best WordPress membership plugins currently available.
What is a WordPress Membership Plugin?
A WordPress membership plugin is a tool that allows you to turn your website into a membership-based site without having to write code.
Membership-based websites operate by offering various tiers or levels with different privileges or benefits, such as exclusive content, member forums, discounts, or special events.
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Users typically sign up for a membership by creating an account, paying a fee, and then gaining access to the restricted areas of the website based on their chosen membership level.
Instead of building a membership site from scratch, WordPress membership plugins allow you to transform your site into a fully-functioning membership site with just a few clicks of your mouse.
Best WordPress Membership Plugins
Now that you understand what membership plugins are and how they may benefit you and your website, lets look at some of the best options on the WordPress plugin repository.
In order to limit our list to the top four plugins, we made sure each of the plugins we would recommend met a few standards.
All WordPress membership plugins below had to meet the following criteria:
- Have at least 20,000 active installations
- Been tested with WordPress 6.5.2 (the most current version of WordPress at the time of publication)
- Have at least a 4.5-star rating
- Be Free of charge
With those guidelines in mind, here are our top choices for the best WordPress membership plugins:
Simple Membership
As its name suggests, the Simple Membership WordPress plugins goes straight to the point and provides users with a user friendly interface with all he options users need. It has over 50,000 installations with a 4.5 star rating, and is up to date with the latest version of WordPress.
Simple Membership simplifies the process of configuring payment methods, membership levels, and user management tasks. Furthermore, it has a wide range of compatibility with other plugins, website builders, and widgets.
For users who need a little more, there are also plenty of available free and premium add-ons to cater to your website’s requirements.
Its top features include:
- Unlimited Membership Access Levels
- Membership Payments Log
- Developer API
- Member Login Widget
- Content Teasers
- Protect posts, pages, galleries and more
- Multilingual compatibility
- Manual member approval
Ultimate Member
Ultimate Member kicks off our list of best WordPress membership plugins for good reason. It has more than 200,000 active installations and has maintained a 4.5-star rating.
The plugin has garnered so much attention because of how easy it makes it for users to sign up and become members of your website. It is lightweight and highly extendable and can be used to make just about any membership site.
Ultimate Member allows you to add user profiles to your website and is a great tool for creating membership sites and online communities.
Its top features include:
- Front-end user profiles, registration, and login
- Custom form fields with built in conditional logic
- Drag and drop form builder
- User account page, user emails, and custom user roles
- Membership directories
- Content restriction and conditional navigation menus
- Show author posts & comments on user profiles
Ultimate Member is also developer-friendly with dozens of actions and filters, and it offers a wide range of free and paid extensions that can be used to extend the power of the plugin.
It even comes with its own official theme that was purpose-built for websites that have logged in and out users.
Members
With over 300,000 active installations, Members is definitely one of the top options when it comes to best WordPress membership plugins.
The plugin gives your users the ultimate member experience by giving you powerful tools to add roles and capabilities and assign them to your users.
Members enables you to restrict content on your site by setting permissions via a simple user interface for WordPress’ powerful roles and capabilities system (traditionally would need to be done via coding).
The plugin’s Role Editor feature allows you to create, edit, and delete roles as well as capabilities for these roles, and multiple user roles can be assigned to any user.
Its other features include:
- Explicitly Deny Capabilities
- Clone Roles
- Content Permissions / Restricted Content
- Shortcodes
- Widgets (login and user widgets)
- Private Site
Paid Memberships Pro
With over 90,000 active installs, Paid Memberships Pro markets itself as the most complete member management and subscriptions plugin for WordPress.
The plugin was designed for all types of membership-based sites and comes with all the tools you need to start, manage, and grow your own membership site.
With Paid Memberships Pro, users are able to select a membership level, complete checkout, and immediately become members of your site.
You can create an unlimited amount of membership levels and integrate payment options with Stripe, PayPal, and other popular payment platforms.
Like the other plugins mentioned above, Paid Memberships Pro also allows you to restrict access to content to members only.
Top features include:
- Front-end user profiles, registration, login, and profile editing
- Membership Account Dashboard
- Membership Invoices and Billing Information Pages
- Custom User Profile and Registration Form Fields
- Custom Member Emails
- Restrict WP Dashboard Access
- Hide the WP Toolbar
WP-Members Membership Plugin
WP-Members Membership Plugin has a lot of the same features as the plugins we’ve already covered, but it prides itself on making membership sites simple and easy.
It is simple to use and easy to set up, yet flexible in all the ways you need it to be.
With the WP-Members Membership Plugin, you can do all the same functions you’d expect from the other plugins (user profile and login integration, content restriction settings, etc.), but it also has several other unique features such as:
- Limit menu items to logged in users
- Create custom registration and profile fields
- Notify admin of new user registrations
- Hold new registrations for admin approval
- Create post excerpt teaser content automatically
Final Thoughts
Now that you know what a WordPress membership plugin is, how they benefit you, and what the top options are for free WordPress membership plugins, you can use them to set up your own membership site in no time.
Remember, all of the plugins we mentioned above are completely free to download and use, so there is no harm in trying different plugins out to see which one works best for your individual needs.
If you need help installing any of the above plugins please see How to Install WordPress Plugins.
