Guest post by Ada Invanoff
If you plan to launch a membership site, probably your first idea is to search for special software.
Yes, there are many dedicated membership applications but in fact you don’t need them because there is a much better alternative – to build your membership site on WordPress.
WordPress is the ideal platform and here are 3 reasons why.
1. It Is Easy to Transform WordPress Into a Membership Site
WordPress is a very flexible CMS (Content Management System) and even though it is popular mainly as a blogging platform, this isn’t the only way you can use it.
What is more, you don’t have to turn your whole site into a membership area. You can have one section of your site with restricted access, while other sections could be a blog, a shopping cart, a forum, etc. that is accessible for everybody.
Thanks to its extendability through plugins, WP can be turned into many types of sites, in addition to blogs. And this transition doesn’t involve starting from scratch. Very often the effort you need to make in order to turn it into a membership site is limited to the upload, activation, and simple configuration of the membership plugin of your choice.
2. Great Free and Paid WordPress Membership Site Plugins
It is the availability of great free and paid membership site plugins that make it so easy to transform your site. If you are used to having dozens of plugins to choose from for a particular task, you might be surprised to learn that there are not dozens of membership plugins but the good news is that the existing few really rock.
Each of the available WP membership plugins has its strengths and weaknesses but no matter which one you pick, you will be making a sound choice because all of them are great in terms of functionality. If you are looking for a feature rich plugin, try Digital Access Pass.
It comes with tons of features but it is the easiest to learn. If you are happy with the basic features only and you are on a tight budget, Your Members might be the plugin for you. The plugins are too numerous to list and describe here but if you want to learn more about the available options, check the plugin comparison page in the byline to get an idea what can be found on the market.
3. Low to No Learning Curve
Although mastering the advanced features of each of the available membership plugins might not be the easiest task, as a whole the learning curve involved in the process is a low one or is completely missing. Since you will be using WordPress itself as the basis of your membership site, if you already know how to use this platform, you won’t have to learn a lot but still the dreaded reading of the docs for the plugin is a highly recommendable step in the process.
Most of the functionality these plugins offer is intuitive to configure but if you want to make sure you are doing things the way they are supposed to be, you can’t skip the docs.
WordPress is a great choice for a membership site. This is why you don’t have to look further but get the plugins we recommend and in no time at all you will have a really cute membership site up and running.
Ada is the Blogger Relations Manager at WinkPress, which is a web resource about leveraging WordPress, its themes, and plugins to create versatile and unusual websites. Visit the site to learn more about WordPress membership plugins.
About Guest Author
I never realized how easy it is to turn a WordPress site in to a membership site. Very eye opening. Thank you.
Word press is good if you know what your doing but if you just want to keep it simple and don’t have a ton of time i would say go with weebly.
For a static site, Weebly is really a great choice – I have used it in the past and I really like it. But does Weebly have so many extras as WordPress does? I haven’t checked Weebly in ages and I don’t know where they stand now.
Ada recently posted..The Best WordPress Mailing List Subscription Form Plugin
Another reason why WordPress is the best membership site platform is because of it’s support. Like Ada mentioned, there are a lot of free and paid plugins that can easily be access by users. Unlike Joomla, the plugins or extensions are hard to understand since i think this CMS is intended for developers.
Exactly – I am not saying Joomla is inferior to WordPress but it seems I simply don’t have the Joomla way of thinking or what but I certainly find it less intuitive. This is a factor even for experienced users because when a simple task takes ages to complete, this is wasting me time I could spend in a much better way.
Ada recently posted..Setting Up Amazon CloudFront CDN in WordPress is Really Easy!
I love wordpress.. I wanted to thank you for this excellent post. I surely enjoyed each little bit of it and I have bookmarked you to check out more new stuff you post in the future.
WordPress is a user-friendly platform. And it is very simple for beginners, especially to build the blog. I have used several plugin but haven’t heard about this Membership Site Plugins. Thanks for the share.
I just use wordpress engine and hope to soon find out the functions of several plugins that are available
abdurrazaq recently posted..Canon Pixma Ip 1980 Driver
Of course WordPress is the best platform for any kind of website!
It is the most flexible platform and its functions can be extended easily enough for any particular function you might have in mind. For niche bloggers with high quality content, having some parts of your premium content available only to registered members of your blog is an excellent idea, and is a very nice way to monetize your blog while also providing valuable information and premium content to your blog readers.
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Hi Ada,
You know, I just think WP is the perfect tool for any kind of website and not just membership site. I mean, it is so easy to build a site with wp that even I with no html and coding background was able to get my first blog up and running in less than an hour.
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I personally love WordPress very much. It is easy to use and it offers many plugins which are very useful as per seo point of view also. It will save your time too. I totally agree with the reasons you have mentioned here.
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The choices available in wordpress is immense. Its great as Blogging platform.
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Yes, truly it is awesome, but there are many bad things too. The more plugins the more problems. I would really advice to use as less as possible of them. Also WP is kind of slow and with higher visitor count and bigger db it is a shared hosting killer :). Especially when the bots attack. I would recommend to always backup the db and files before updating to new versions too. Since it can cause many problems.
But surely if you are new it will be much much easier to learn than other CMS systems. I remember that in matter of hours I learned so many basic things about it. I had never used it before but the same day I started I felt like I know so mush things to do on it. Of course they were the tip of the iceberg I know now, but it was much different than my encounter with Joomla :D. Not trying to start the Joomla vs WP war, but just saying :).
Regards.
Nikolay Nikolov recently posted..How To Deal With Spam In Skype?
Thanks for the tip – a recent backup is always a must (though I don’t know how many of us actually do it) but with such a resource monster as a lot of visitors on a shared hosting are, you just can’t go without. Though if the site becomes a success, then you might have to wave shared hosting goodbye anyway. :) As for Joomla vs WP, I wouldn’t like to go in more details but I consider myself a seasoned web master and this summer Joomla managed to drive me nuts. 5 or 6 years ago, when me and Joomla first met, it wasn’t much different. I suppose, I just don’t have their way of thinking and this is why their choices seem so unintuitive to me. Well, I don’t mean in WP everything is perfect but it is much more user- (and especially beginner-) friendly.
Ada recently posted..Setting Up Amazon CloudFront CDN in WordPress is Really Easy!
Even with few thousand visitors it is pretty hard to make money from a blog. At least in my country. In my language even adsense is giving very little money, since there is very little competition. In english blogs it is much much better. Not to mention that shared hosts in my country are getting overloaded with even 1000 – 2000 viists in a wordpress blog. But anyways. Let me stop complaining now :). There is a solution for every problem and there is always a way. We just need to find it ;).
WordPress is great for any kind of site; at some SEO conferences speakers said WordPress is the best choice because its pages get indexed by Google algorithms faster.
Robert recently posted..Black & Decker CHV1510 Dustbuster Review
I guess you are right – some of my personal sites that run on WordPress got indexed the next day after they went live and I just said, “Wow! Unbelievable!” So this must be true, not a subjective opinion of a SEO guru. I don’t know why this is so but I have also noticed it.
Ada recently posted..Setting Up Amazon CloudFront CDN in WordPress is Really Easy!
I’ve got to agree Ada that WordPress is a great platform to base a membership site off. I remember the first membership site I set up for a friend almost ten years ago, before WordPress. I had to upload a load of php. files and the template files and try to get it to work with the existing site, it’s fair to say it never worked correctly. That’s why I like WordPress, easy and simple compared to how I use to do things.
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I don’t have much experience with other membership sites stuff but I doubt that now, 10 years later, they are as easy as a WordPress plugin. If not for something else, you do need to set a separate site, upload files, create accounts, etc. Too much pain, in my humble opinion.
Ada recently posted..Setting Up Amazon CloudFront CDN in WordPress is Really Easy!
I totally agree with. WP is low to no learning curve because its a user friendly platform. A person need not to be an expert just to make their own blog with wordpress. Unlike with other platforms, setting-up sites or even the simple posting of contents could really eat up much time for a user to learn the process.
Christina recently posted..Little Tikes Picnic On The Patio Playhouse Review – Great For Group Play
i love the points but the most fabulous one is the first one as flexibility matters a lot.
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i agree with you. wordprees is the best cms
Humaira recently posted..Bola Baron From Bengali Film Aparajita Tumi (2011)
Availability of plugins, the popularity of WordPress, and the ease of use are the major reasons why WP is so popular for any purpose, membership sites included. :)
Ada recently posted..Setting Up Amazon CloudFront CDN in WordPress is Really Easy!
Twitter: erydave
says:
Hi Ada….
It’s very interesting articles. I’ve just know if there is WP plugins like that. I hope I can try it fro my ideas.
Thanks for sharing…..
Ery
ery recently posted..Things You Should Know about Modern Kitchen Design
Twitter: bloggersethics
says:
and the best part you have almost everything available for wordpress on the internet. you wish and it will be there
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I really liked this article. It goes to my favorites. Thanks
@Anna: The low (or even next to no) learning curve is a huge advantage for sure. :)
@James: There are free plugins, too or free versions of the paid ones. But if you are serious about a membership site, the money it could earn a day will be more than the price of the plugin. Well, till this moment comes, there might be a lot of time but basically for a popular membership site, the investment pays off quickly.
Ada recently posted..Setting Up Amazon CloudFront CDN in WordPress is Really Easy!
I love WP, been using it for a while now with both of my blogs. great review. thank you.
Larissa recently posted..How to get rid of scars- fast and easy!
the only question arises in my mind .. is it worth spending so much in plugins of WP ?
James recently posted..Spare Time Success With Survey Jobs From Home
WP is easy to use and to run and besides it is the familiar CMS which everybody knows. Thanks for the review.