Paid Memberships Pro is a solid WordPress membership plugin.
Whether you’re a beginner or a pro, this plugin enables you to create a fully-fledged WordPress membership website from scratch with little to no experience required.
Paid Memberships Pro was created back in 2010 by a team of husband and wife: Jason and Kim Coleman. The plugin was created from the ground up to help users create and manage profitable WordPress membership websites.
Many other membership plugins aren’t customizable. Luckily, that’s not the case with Paid Memberships Pro – this plugin is fully customizable to meet your membership site’s unique needs.
The extensive options for content restriction and the 60+ premium add-ons give Paid Memberships Pro an edge over competitors. There are tons of powerful and advanced features offered by this plugin that can help you craft a masterpiece membership website.
In this Paid Memberships Pro reviews, we’ll take an in-depth look at its features, benefits, integrations options, pricing plans, pros and cons, and more. What’s more, we have also included a thorough walkthrough to help you create a brand new WordPress membership website.
With all that being said, let’s begin.
Paid Memberships Pro Review in a Nutshell
Paid Memberships Pro is a powerful WordPress membership plugin that enables you to create membership websites with ease. With Paid Memberships Pro, you can create unlimited membership levels, recurring payments, registrations, profiles, protected member content, and more.
The plugin comes with simple settings and features a one-click page setup that enables you to create a fully-fledged WordPress membership website in minutes. The dashboard of Paid Memberships Pro is intuitive and easy to use, letting you create and manage all aspects of your WordPress membership website.
The best part is that you can create multiple membership levels, along with tiered memberships. Also, you can create membership levels to protect content in posts, pages, custom post types, post categories, and more.
Paid Memberships Pro offers both free and paid versions. While the free version allows you to create membership websites with basic features, the paid plans make it extremely easy to create and manage your WordPress membership website. They even enable you to automate many aspects of your site, no hassle involved.
Is the Pro Version Worth a Try?
The perks of using the Paid Memberships Pro (Premium Version):
- Unlimited membership levels with flexible membership pricing
- Features 60+ premium add-ons to extend and customize
- Provides fully-customizable reports and member dashboard
- Email notification for new members, invoicing, and more
- Extensive options for content restriction
- 100% GPL – unlimited site use and integration with third-party plugins
- Integrates with more than six payment gateways – PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.net, etc.
Choosing the paid plans can unlock the premium features that will help you create and manage a fully-fledged WordPress membership website with ease.
To learn more, keep reading through our Paid Memberships Pro reviews to discover whether or not it’s the right fit for you.
Features & Benefits of Paid Memberships Pro
Paid Memberships Pro comes with tons of powerful, easy-to-use features that make it stand apart from the competitors.
On top of that, it’s a fully-customizable membership plugin for WordPress that comes with flexible content control, themed registrations, and more. It also seamlessly integrates with third-party services, including payment gateways, autoresponders, email marketing, plugins, etc.
Let’s take a look at some of its best features:
Multiple Membership Levels
With this plugin, you can structure your membership websites the way you want, as it enables you to create unlimited membership levels as per your needs. Multiple tiers of membership allow you to control the access of your membership content.
This plugin features unlimited membership levels that help you create any type of membership:
- Free
- Paid
- Subscriptions
- Custom trial periods
You can set up any number of membership levels and types according to your requirements. Whether you want to create a hierarchy-based membership (gold, silver, bronze) or even create a topic-oriented membership level, it all depends on you.
Content Dripping
Many WordPress membership plugins don’t offer a content dripping feature. In contrast, Paid Memberships Pro comes with a powerful content dripping feature that enables you to release a steady flow of content on a schedule.
Once you set up content dripping, all members will not have access to all content; instead, they will get membership content in regular intervals that are determined by you.
You can deploy this feature using shortcodes to easily set up the release date, time, and duration of the content.
Flexible Payment Gateways
Paid Memberships Pro seamlessly integrates with all major payment gateways such as PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.net, and more. The payment setup is simple and straightforward: just select and paste the appropriate API information and insert it into the membership payment settings page.
Many plugins restrict the creation of subscription buttons for each membership level and only offer off-site payment checkouts. Luckily, Paid Memberships Pro comes with a single settings page where you can configure the payment gateways for all of your memberships levels and subscriptions.
Flexible Membership Content Control
With Paid Memberships Pro, you can lock down your membership content with ease. This login comes with an admin box to your WordPress Edit Pages. It allows you to control the access to your membership content for each membership level that you offer. You may also control your post content via categories and other options.
In-Depth Reports & Analytics
Paid Memberships Pro provides reports of your WordPress membership website. It shows a snapshot of various reports, and the dashboard summarizes three detailed reports for all of your members. This includes details about visits, views, logins, sales, revenue, membership stats, etc.
- Visits, Views, & Logins: This report displays details about visits, views, and logins based on different time intervals: daily, weekly, monthly, and all time. Also, you can click to view reports that will show all of the specific data points by members/users.
- Sales & Revenue: With this report option, you will get detailed reports on your overall sales and volume. You can sort your sales and revenue based on custom time periods and membership levels.
- Membership Stats: This report includes detailed information on various membership statistics, including signups and cancellations. It provides an in-depth overview of monthly recurring revenue, lifetime value, cancellation rates, and more. The reports are available in both graph and chart form; you can click on any graph or chart in order to expand it and have a more clear view.
Multiple Subscription Options
Each membership level you create has a unique pricing option. Here, you can easily define an initial payment, along with the recurring billing cycle, price, membership terms, custom free trial options, and more. Let’s take a look at these subscription options:
- Initial Payment: If you set the initial payment option, this amount will be charged at checkout.
- Billing Cycle: Each membership level has a custom billing cycle. You can choose from daily, weekly, or yearly pricing options.
- Price & Membership Term: You can define the price you want to charge your members, along with the billing cycle.
- Custom Trial Option: You can create custom free trial options where you can define the length and price of the trial you are offering with your membership plans. It will automatically bill the member once their free trial ends until and unless they cancel the custom trial.
Fully SEO Optimized
The Paid Memberships Pro plugin is fully SEO optimized, which means that you can get better rankings and visibility on search engines. You can set Show Excerpts to non-members so that they can only access the content if they register or sign up.
Also, the hidden content under the Read More tag can be indexed on search engines so that you can easily attract new members and get traffic and revenue rolling in for your WordPress membership website.
Email Notifications
The Paid Memberships Pro plugin enables you to customize and send email notifications to your members and users. Various emails can be easily customized, including your own styled HTML template within the header and footer files. You can customize various emails, including welcome emails, membership fee invoices, membership level changes, membership cancellations, and more.
Custom Content Pages for Members
Providing a custom content page for each member gives an edge to paid members. This plugin allows you to create unique pages for each of your members.
Also, you can allow any number of users depending on the niche of your membership website. Let’s say you have an educational membership website – you can create unique pages for instructors that are unavailable to students.
Paid Membership Pro Pricing Plans
Paid Memberships Pro comes with free and paid pricing options that are flexible and affordable. The free plan comes with basic features and enables you to create a functional membership website, whereas the premium plan is loaded with a variety of superb features.
Let’s have a look at the pricing options offered Paid Memberships Pro:
- Free Plan: This is a free forever plan that comes with plugin installation, documentation, payment gateway integrations, 14 free add-ons, and the Memberlite theme.
- Plus Plan: The Plus Plan costs $297/yearly and can be installed on 5 websites. The plan comes with many features, including 65+ add-ons, one-click add-on installations/updates, unlimited support tickets, future planned updates, developer chats, and more. This plan is perfect if you want to create one or more than one WordPress membership website.
- Unlimited Plans: The Unlimited Plan costs $597 and can be installed on an unlimited number of websites. This plan includes all of the features in the Plus Plan. The edge of this plan is that it allows you to install and deploy this plugin on multiple websites.
The best part is that Paid Memberships Pro provides a 100% money-back guarantee. If you’re somehow unsatisfied with this plugin, you can claim your money back within the first 30 days of payment. Once you raise the money refund request, they will cancel your membership and refund your payment at once.
Customer Support
The customer support offered by Paid Memberships Pro is fast and responsive. Unlike other membership plugins’ support systems, Paid Memberships Pro doesn’t require you to wait long for help. The support is quick and responsive – you can generate a ticket and contact them right away.
In addition to customer support, they also offer in-depth documentation that can help you install and configure this plugin with ease.
They also have a frequently-updated blog where they discuss each new feature that they release. You can refer to these posts to master all of the features offered by this plugin.
Needless to say, Paid Memberships Pro has reliable customer support. They even provide a lifetime of free customer support with their paid plans. If you somehow encounter an issue during installation or any other issue, they would love to help you out.
Paid Memberships Pro Integrations
The Paid Memberships Pro plugin seamlessly integrates with third-party services and plugins, including payment gateways, email and autoresponders, e-commerce, checkout pages, enhancements, and more.
It integrates with all popular and major email marketing platforms, including Mailchimp, Aweber, ConvertKit, Infusionsoft, GetResponse, MailPoet, Constant Contact, and more.
Additionally, this plugin seamlessly integrates with various payment gateways, such as PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.net, etc. The plugin integrates with all major payment gateway plugins on the market to help you receive payments on the go. With this plugin, you can also take credit card payments from MasterCard, Visa, American Express, Discover, JCB, EnRoute, and more.
What’s more, Paid Memberships Pro also easily integrates with some third-party platforms that help you manage your membership website, including bbPress, BuddyPress, Holler Box, Slack, Zaiper, WooCommerce, and Kissmetrcis. All of these integration options are available as add-ons that you can activate on your website right away.
How to Create a Membership Website With This Plugin
Paid Memberships Pro is extremely easy to use and allows you to create a fully-fledged WordPress membership website in minutes. If you want to create a WordPress membership website from scratch, follow the step-by-step walkthrough provided below.
Step #1: Install & Activate the Plugin
The very first step is to purchase the plugin from the Paid Memberships Pro official website. Once you make your payment, you can download the premium plugin in a .zip file.
To install it on your WordPress website, navigate to Plugins >> Add New and then click on Upload Plugin. From there, select the plugin from your computer and select Install Now.
Activate the plugin right away in order to start creating the membership website.
Step #2: Adding Membership Levels
To add membership levels, navigate to Memberships >> Membership Levels on your WordPress dashboard. Then, simply enter a level name, description, confirmation message after signup, and the cost of the membership level, along with other simple details that you can fill at your convenience.
Step #3: Set Up Payment Gateways
The next step is to set up the payment gateways for your memberships so that the user can sign up. This plugin seamlessly works with various payment gateways such as PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and more. To set up the payment gateway, you need to have an active account with the gateway provider that you want to add.
To set up the payment gateway, navigate to Memberships >> Payment Settings and then select your payment provider from the menu. Then, enter your verification key and details into the next window. It could be anything from an email address to a key code or API key – it all depends on your payment gateway.
Now, set your payment gateway to live and then set the preferred currency, which can include the sales tax. Once you are done making these changes, save your settings to deploy it globally on your WordPress membership website.
Step #4: Set Up Membership Pages
In the second step, we created membership levels; in this step, we need to add some pages for the members to access. To set it up, navigate to Memberships >> Page Setting on your WordPress dashboard.
Now, simply select the ‘click here to generate’ text link at the top of the page. This will easily generate each of the required pages without any hassle. Otherwise, if you want to create pages on your own, create the pages and insert the corresponding shortcodes.
For example, If you want to create a billing page, just create a page and paste the billing shortcode ‘[pmpro_billing]’ into that page. As you can see, setting up membership pages with this plugin is easy – you can allow the plugin to create the membership pages for you, or you can create the membership pages on your own.
After making changes, don’t forget to save your settings to save the changes that you have made.
Step #5: Configuring the Email Setup
Configuring the email setup will help your membership site to communicate effectively with your members and subscribers. It will also send automated emails when any new user purchases the membership or performs any other tasks on your WordPress membership site.
To configure the email settings, navigate to your WordPress dashboard and select Memberships >> Email Settings. Now, enter all the relevant information correctly, such as the website’s email address, domain name, etc.
Don’t forget to check the boxes for the type of alerts you want your users to receive. Once you are done making these changes, make sure that you save your settings.
Step #6 Tweaking Advanced Settings
Now that we have done the basic setup, it’s time to tweak the advanced settings. You can configure the advanced settings by navigating to Memberships >> Advanced Settings from the WordPress dashboard.
You can make various change as per your needs and requirements:
Set the message you want to showcase to unauthorized members
Set a message for your RSS feed (if you are using one)Select to use ReCaptcha, choose to display the terms of services, and many other settings at once
Keep in mind that these are the additional settings that you can configure only if you need them. If you are not sure about any features for the settings, it’s best to leave them alone, as incorrect settings could lead to some serious issues for your WordPress membership website.
Step #7: Controlling Member Content
This is the most important section of creating your WordPress membership website. Paid Memberships Pro allows you to restrict content on the basis of membership levels and subscriptions.
You can restrict the content on the basis of pages or posts; alternatively, you can use a shortcode to restrict the content on any specific pages or posts. Simply open the page that you want to restrict within WordPress.
Next, check the right menu to choose Require Membership from your WordPress visual page editor – it should be above or below the categories or the Set Featured Image section.
In a similar way, you can restrict any content on your WordPress pages or posts. You can also create a member category within your WordPress membership site to restrict the content of a particular category.
Note: You can also use shortcodes to restrict content and or add a Subscribe to Read More tag in your content. Users cannot access that content until and unless they sign up or register with your WordPress membership website.
Congratulations – you have successfully created a fully-fledged WordPress membership website from scratch. If you have followed the steps carefully, you should have been able to create your membership website without any hassle.
Pros & Cons of Paid Memberships Pro
Pros:
- Easy to install & configure
- Unlimited membership levels
- Intuitive dashboard
- Lifetime customer support at no extra cost
- Integrates with third-party plugins and services
- Supports all major payment gateways
- Easy and flexible membership management
- Provides extensive options for content restriction
- Comes with 60+ premium add-ons to enhance flexibility
- Email notification for new members, invoicing, and more
- Customizable in-depth membership reports and analytics
Cons:
- Offers tons of features at once that can be overwhelming
- Price is a bit high, but the features and add-ons offered by Paid Memberships Pro are worth the price tag
Paid Memberships Pro Review Conclusion
Paid Memberships Pro is undoubtedly an easy-to-use, powerful WordPress membership plugin. When we gave Paid Memberships Pro a shot, we were amazed the way it helped us in creating membership areas with multiple membership levels and flexible subscription options. The setup was quick and easy.
If you’re looking to create a fully-fledged WordPress membership website from scratch, Paid Memberships Pro is the best shot to take. The plugin is flexible, SEO optimized, and lightweight, meaning that it won’t slow down your site.
In addition to that, the plugin comes with free plugin updates and lifetime customer support at no extra cost.
Each paid plan is backed by a 30-day money-back guarantee – if you somehow don’t like the service, you can claim your money back. Overall, it’s a win-win situation where you get to try the Paid Memberships Pro plugin for free.
What’s your experience with Paid Memberships Pro? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.
We hope that our Paid Memberships Pro reviews helps you get better insights into this robust WordPress membership plugin.
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