Looking for an honest MemberPress review to help you decide if it’s right for you?
We’ve got you covered! MemberPress is marketed as an “All in One” membership plugin for WordPress, but we’ll test that claim to see if it lives up to the hype.
In this article, we’ll cover all the features, pros, and cons of MemberPress, as well as full details on pricing, integrations, and add-ons.
- What is MemberPress?
- What to Look for in a Membership Plugin
- MemberPress Plugin Features
- MemberPress Integrations & Add-ons
- MemberPress Pricing
- MemberPress Review: Pros
- MemberPress Review: Cons
- Final Thoughts: Is MemberPress Really the Best Membership Plugin?
Let’s get started!
What is MemberPress?
MemberPress is a premium WordPress plugin you can use to create a membership site. This can help drive traffic, engagement, and conversions on your WordPress website.
But wait, what’s a membership site anyway?
A membership website is a place where members can register and login to access premium content and perks. These goodies can include exclusive blog posts, videos, podcasts, online courses, community forums, exclusive app features, and much more.
What to Look for in a Membership Plugin
When choosing a WordPress membership plugin, there are several important factors to consider.
First, look at the functionality of the membership software you’re considering and compare that to the user experience you want to deliver. Do you want to host online courses? Host webinars? Facilitate conversations in a member forum? Make sure that your membership page builder has the features that you need or integrates with other tools to get the job done.
Next, think about the specific membership models you want to offer. You may want to offer additional membership levels above your basic plan, or use a free trial period to generate leads. Not every membership plugin can do different payment structures, so pay attention to the details of the software you’re considering.
Ease of use is very important, both for you and your members. How easy is it for you to add new content for your members? Can members manage their own subscriptions and membership levels? Do the membership features adopt the styling of your existing WordPress theme or will you need custom coding to make them fit in? It can take a lot of work to build a membership website, so try to choose a tool that’s user-friendly.
Good customer support is important for getting you out of a jam. Look for plugins that are updated regularly and come with plenty of documentation, tutorials, and personalized help when you need it.
We’ll be reviewing MemberPress in this article, but we’ve also made a list of other membership website builders you can consider.
Now let’s take a look at how MemberPress can turn your WordPress site into a thriving membership.
MemberPress Plugin Features
Content Paywall & Access Rules
MemberPress offers fully customizable content protection. That means you can limit who has access to specific pages and blog posts, post categories and tags, individual lessons within courses, videos, and more.
What’s more, MemberPress lets you drip content to your members bit by bit. This helps keep interest high because there’s always newly available content for them to access. It can also give you more control over the member experience. Perhaps you need participants to watch a specific video before they start a course. You can set the course to unlock after the video has been viewed.
Content can be dripped based on a fixed date, after registration, or after purchasing a specific product or membership. You decide!
Finally, MemberPress also lets you set expiration dates for your content access. This also helps drive engagement as members are motivated to check out their content or complete a course before it expires.
Online Courses
Besides protecting your content, MemberPress acts as a powerful LMS plugin (learning management system). This means you don’t need a separate course plugin like LearnDash to be able to offer online courses as part of your membership.
Your online courses are built right into the MemberPress platform, so you can manage your courses and students all from within your WordPress dashboard. The drag and drop curriculum builder makes it easy to add, edit, and rearrange your lessons.
To make your online course more effective, MemberPress can add quizzes and progress tracking. Unlike many course platforms that only have multiple choice quizzes, MemberPress allows you to add multiple choice, multiple answer, true/false, short answer, and essay questions. You can set questions as required or optional, and choose to require a previous lesson to be complete before a quiz is accessible. Additionally, quiz questions can have point values and you can require a passing score before moving on to the next lesson.
Online courses can be controlled with the same MemberPress access rules as anything else on your website. And if a user wanders onto a page that isn’t part of their membership level, MemberPress will even generate a sales page automatically to persuade that user to purchase a membership.
Customizable Membership Options
One way to generate more revenue and engagement in your membership is to offer different types of membership. This makes your membership more accessible to more people without losing you money by giving away too much of your premium content.
MemberPress lets you create both free and paid memberships. Paid memberships can be subscription-based or a one-time fee for either lifetime or term-limited access. You can also offer trial periods and limit the length of the trial and the number of trials each user can have.
Practically every piece of the membership process can be tailored to fit your business model. You can set specific payment methods for each membership, customize the user information fields, define permissions for who can and can’t purchase a membership, and send custom welcome emails for each membership level.
There are also add-ons that allow for gifting memberships, corporate memberships, and more.
Community Forums
MemberPress has built-in integration with forum plugins like bbPress, BuddyBoss, and more. This allows you to add message boards and discussion forums to your community to help build engagement and connections between members, not just with your brand. This type of peer to peer connection is vital for growing a sustainable community.
As with everything else on your site, MemberPress can restrict access to your forums based on membership level. That lets you open some forums to the public while keeping some forums VIP-only.
Coupon Codes
To promote your membership site, you can create coupon codes in MemberPress. You can either have MemberPress generate the codes automatically, or use your own code words. There are plenty of options to configure for your coupons, including:
- Percentage or flat discount
- One-time or recurring
- Number of uses allowed
- Start and end dates
- Memberships the coupon can be used on
- Affiliate association if using the Easy Affiliate add-on
Easy Pricing Pages
If you have multiple membership options, a pricing table can lay out the different choices and nudge users toward the one you want them to pick. MemberPress can automatically build high-converting pricing pages for you, with no CSS or HTML knowledge needed. Just pick the membership options you want to include, add them to a Group, and your pricing page will appear!
MemberPress Integrations & Add-ons
In addition to the core features listed above, MemberPress has a wide variety of addons and integrations you can use to expand your membership site’s functionality with features such as:
- Payment Gateways: Stripe and PayPal integration are included with every license, and you can also add Authorize.net and WooCommerce integrations.
- Email Marketing: Instantly add new members to your email list on ConvertKit, Aweber, Mailchimp, and other ESPs and tag them to receive segmented emails .
- Podcast Memberships: Create a paid podcast to monetize your content.
- Affiliate Programs: Add an affiliate plugin like AffiliateWP or Easy Affiliate and let your members recruit for you.
MemberPress Pricing
MemberPress has 3 license levels that are priced by year:
- Basic: Starts at $179.50/year
- Plus: Starts at $299.50/year
- Pro: Starts at $399.50/year
There’s no free version of MemberPress but you do get a 14-day money back guarantee if you want to try it out before you commit.
MemberPress Review: Pros
We like MemberPress for a lot of reasons.
Most importantly, it’s easy to set up but still highly customizable. You can create as many membership levels as you want, set the content dripping and expiration exactly how you need, and set up custom coupons with just a few clicks.
We also appreciate how the online course platform is included in the MemberPress license. It’s very nice being able to manage courses from the same place you manage your membership.
MemberPress plays well with a bunch of different email service providers, marketing tools, and popular WordPress plugins and themes. You’ve spent a lot of time building your WordPress site, and MemberPress lets you hang onto everything that’s working and just add membership functionality on top of that.
Best of all, the MemberPress support team responds within a few hours on weekdays. That means you won’t get stuck trying to fix something on your own when your members need a solution quickly.
MemberPress Review: Cons
The most obvious drawback of MemberPress is that you must have a WordPress site to use it. If you don’t have a WordPress site, you’ll have to either move your site to the WordPress platform or build your membership website separately and link it to your existing site, which can be confusing for visitors.
The add-ons and integrations system is useful but can be a little confusing. While MemberPress integrates easily with other plugins like bbPress and AffiliateWP, it would have been nice to see those, along with some of the other add-ons, as built-in features. The add-ons are available based on license level, but some users might want the option to add just one premium add-on without upgrading their entire license. That currently isn’t possible.
The plugin is relatively affordable, but without a lifetime purchase option, the cost can certainly start to add up over time, especially on the more premium plans. The developers have generally done a good job grouping the add-ons by need, though, so you can probably find a license level that works for you.
Final Thoughts: Is MemberPress Really the Best Membership Plugin?
MemberPress takes the functionality of multiple plugins and combines them into one. It can handle walled content, online courses, subscriptions, registration, free trials, and much more. As far as membership plugins go, MemberPress is hard to beat.
Did you know that OptinMonster integrates with MemberPress? That means you can show high-converting campaigns on membership pages, checkout, online courses and more based on membership, registration, or login status. This helps you target your marketing even more for better results.
Try it out for yourself! Get OptinMonster for MemberPress today!
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