MemberPress Plugin Review – An out of the box membership site creator

 

When you require a comprehensive membership site, you start looking forward to hiring a developer to actualize a membership site. A membership site is a website that enables you to sell your online training courses, tutorials, downloads or any other kind of digital content. No doubt that a membership site is a big project and you will not want things messed up due to some flaw in your membership software. So to keep all possible glitches at bay and to be on the safer side you would prefer to get a good developer to serve your purpose. Hiring a developer for a membership site means paying on per hour basis that may shoot up the project cost over thousands dollars. For some this cost might not be a big deal but as a matter of fact for many it really matters.

Thanks to WordPress, a miraculous CSM platform blessed with thousands of amazing plugins that expand its functionality manyfold in innumerable directions, we can build a membership site using WordPress. Lots of membership plugins, either free or paid, are available. MemberPress is such a plugin and one of the most powerful and easy-to-use membership plugin that allows us to get around all the developmental cost. MemberPress lets us sell our site content, sell downloads, charge recurring payments, drip content and much more.

Here in this review, we’ll be dissecting this wonderful plugin in full to throw all pros and cons in sharp relief. One important thing before we get started is that like all other reviews by me this one is also an honest review and doesn’t aim at earning affiliate commissions by boasting about the plugin in a biased way. I never hesitate to tell about the let-downs of the stuff that I review. It is my responsibility toward the readers of my website. I just want you to make most of it.

Well. I will cut to the chase and set the ball rolling.

Full review

WordPress users who have only moderate knowledge of WordPress are one of the target users of MemberPress plugin.It especially has been designed taking such users into account.

In fact a beginner can’t be bothered with shortcodes when setting up membership pages and various sections. MemberPress realizing what a beginner wants, provides the easiest initial setup for a membership site.

Plugin’s developer has left no stone unturned in smoothing things out for a beginner or a novice. Once you’ve installed and activated the plugin, just go to plugin option page and the plugin gives you an option to auto-create required pages for a membership system. Additionally, you can edit your membership pages directly from the option page using the attached edit button. All the other settings can be done easily through option page and there is no need to edit code elsewhere.

Creating a membership package is very easy and assigning content to membership packages is also easy. You can assign some site content such as a page, post or custom url to multiple membership packages at once. All you need to do is to add a rule and assign content to one or multiple packages using the rule.

MemberPress comes with extensive options to create custom membership packages. With the help of “add membership page”, you can assign a title, detail, its price and duration etc to a membership package. ‘Add membership page’ contains a special option metabox with the help of which you can configure various options regarding the package;

Creating and customizing a Membership package

• Registration related options
• Registration button text
• Membership welcome email
• Payment method for the package
• Option to choose specific user profile’s fields on registration page (all or selected)
• Membership shortcodes are also available such as Membership link, membership signup form
• Membership related permissions
• Allow or disallow users to purchase the membership more than once
• Specify who can purchase the membership

Pricing table and feature boxes

Using this section you can add membership benefits/features and it will automatically create a pricing table with benefits on your site’s pricing page. No need to do extra work to set up plans and pricing tables.

Custom redirect on login

You can specify a custom URL for members who have purchased the package and also you can specify a custom redirect URL on login.

Set onetime payment or recurring payment – Also give access for a limited trial period

Charging recurring payment is very easy with MemberPress. All you need to do is to select billing type “Recurring”. Recurring billing is very much flexible and you can specify recurring billing on a monthly, yearly, weakly, 3 months, 6 months and even a custom period such as 1 or 2 months basis.

One of the features that makes the MemberPress outstanding is the “Content Assigner” or “Adding a rule”. If you add a rule, you can assign any page, post, category, custom post type or even a custom URL of your website to one or multiple Membership packages. You don’t need to go to a page, post or any content type to add it to any membership package. Just select it from the dropdown menu on “Add Rule” page

If you want to partially show/hide some content, you can do it without any problem. Go to Rules . Add or edit a rule > Click on “Partial Content Codes” > Pick the shortcode and wrap it around any content that you want to hide.

Email reminder before certain days of membership expiration is a must-have feature for any membership website. MemberPress includes a reminder creator section with the help of which you can set custom reminders before or after the expiration of a memebership, after signup, before credit card expiration or after credit card expiration. Reminder module of MemberPress is so much flexible that you can set a reminder on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis. For instance, if you are running a digital download website, you can schedule an email to be sent before a few hours to few days of membership expiration. You can create as many reminders as you want to be triggered at different times.

With MemberPress you can create coupons and apply them to all or certain membership types. You can create fixed amount discount coupons or percentage based discount coupons. You can limit number of times that the coupon can be used. You can also set an expiration date for a coupon.

This is one of unique features of MemberPress that sets it apart from other membership softwares. MemberPress doesn’t integrate its membership packages with WordPress role editor but it uses its own different system. If you want to manually assign a membership to a WordPress users, you need to go to “transactions > add new transaction”.

The big issues with most of the other membership plugins is that one user can buy only one kind of membership package. If someone purchases membership A, then he can’t avail membership B. That’s not true for MemberPress. You can let users buy different packages at the same time at your website.

Many times you need to sell membership plans which have fundamentally same features. i.e. one plan is the upgrade for another plan just augmented with more features. To create an upgraded membership plan, you need not to go through the hassle of creating the upgrade plan from scratch. Instead, you can create a product group which has similar features and assign upgrade path to multiple plans in the group.

Are you selling online training courses? In that case, you will not want to enable users to access all the training content at once. You will prefer to give access to your content step by step on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. it is lucky that MemberPress supports content dripping feature or delayed content delivery.

In addition to PayPal Standard, PayPal Pro and Express, MemberPress has built-in support for Stripe, the most lovable payment gateway for developers. Stripe is expanding its wings and currently available in 23 countries including U.S, Canada, Australia and many Europian countries. With the help of Stripe, you can get payment from any country and it supports payments from debit cards, too.

Keeping site visitors away from the protected content, you can allow search engines like Google to read login protected content and this way you can get ranked in search engines for the content that is in-fact not visible for non-subscribers or logged-out visitors. Allowing search-engines to read your content helps tell search engines about your ownership for that content, too.

If you want to allow visitors to have access to member only content limited by page views, you can enable MemberPress’ PayWall.

If you want to add a download to a membership, go to “Rules > Add rule > Select Custom URL from dropdown > Choose Membership package. And there you go.

You will have a hard time finding a membership plugin that could even handle proration. If a member upgrades in the middle of the month, MemberPress charges the user for the rest of the month and not from the start of the month. It is really a must-have feature that saves a lot of time of site admin which is otherwise consumed in manually adjustment of the payment.

Offering an affiliate program not only boosts your sales but also it drives more traffic to your website.

Blair Willimas has developed a powerful affiliate plugin, too, the Affiliate Royale. Affiliate Royale works seamlessly with MemberPress and turns your WordPress into a powerful affiliate website. You get this affiliate plugin free with MemberPress

Are you in the business of website development? Are you having a company that provides web design related services? If yes, MemberPress’ developers-package lets you install the plugin on as many sites as you want. Following the way, you can earn unlimited money creating membership sites for your customers.

Can you overlook the importance of email marketing when you are in online business? Specially if you are running membership website? You can convert your customers into subscribers with the help of integrating popular email marketing services like GetResponse, MailChimp etc. MemberPress provides free integration with following services;

• GetRespnse
• MailChimp
• ActiveCampaign
• Made Mini
• Mail Poet
• Sendy

Undeniably, many more integrations will come in future releases of the plugin

MemberPress leverages advanced reporting system with the help of which you can keep a close eye on how your membership site is going. With reporting module, you can generate rvenue reports based on days, month or years. You can calculate following detail for a selected period of time;

Pending transactions
Failed transactions
Refunded transactions
Completed transactions
Amount collected
Amount refunded
Taxes collected
Total net income

Other features of MemberPress

• Integrate Amazon Cloud
• Import/Export addon
• Math Captcha addon
• Api for developers
• Works with any theme
• Custom profile fields for members
• Added advanced filtering of members
• Added a dedicated member management dashboard to see advanced data regarding members

 

Important questions regarding MemberPress

Does the plugins lets you sell downloadable products?

Answer – Yes. You can assign a file URL to a membership package. Also, you can integrate Amazon AWS and protect Amazon hosted download links. But you can’t limit downloads per day or per month.

Does the plugin support content dripping?

Answer – Yes

Does the plugin support recurring billing?

Answer – Yes

On how many sites you can use the plugin?

For a Business license, you can use the plugin on one site, but for a Dveloper license, you can use it on unmimlited number of websites including your clients’ websites.

Does MemberPress has an affiliate system?

Answer – Yes. Just install Affiliate Royale plugin (free with MemberPress) and it provides a full featured affiliate software for your membership website.

Is there any money back guarantee?

Answer – Conditional money back guarantee is available for 30 days. If you are unable to get the plugin working correctly and their support fails to resolve your issue, you can ask for a refund within 30 days from the date of purchase.

Coming to the cons

Still there are some downsides of the plugins and some of them are limited shortcodes, no opportunity to customize login page and account page. Adding custom fields in user profile is a feature but it is limited to just text field and dropdown field, checkbox fields are not available to add.

Checkout more on MemberPress