WordPress Membership Plugins that Help You Make Money Every Month

When it comes to creating WordPress sites to make money online, one of the most lucrative options is a membership site. Simply put, a WordPress membership is a blog with a focus on having subscribers that pay every month to access content, downloads, videos or other information.

For many aspiring bloggers, one of the more difficult parts isn’t coming up with the membership content, but rather managing the subscriptions and making sure that content is “drip fed” over time. The benefits to this type of WordPress membership system is that it prevents users from joining for a month, downloading everything and then leaving.

Fortunately, there are several WordPress membership plugins that can simplify the process while still protecting your content and keeping your visitors engaged and subscribed. Here are our favorite WordPress plugins for membership:

MemberPress

MemberPress bills itself as an “all in one solution” to manage membership sites in WordPress, and although it’s not a free membership plugin, it does contain a wealth of robust features that make it our top choice. Not only can you securely accept payments online for your subscribed members, but MemberPress also contains several options to create different tiers of membership, and only those users with access can get their respective content.

What sets MemberPress apart from the competition is that it allows the user to handle many of the aspects of managing their membership themselves. They can adjust their own subscription, change their password, update their profile and much more from within a self-service dashboard. This frees up your time as the owner of the WordPress membership site, to concentrate on creating more content rather than dealing with support inquiries that eat away at your time.

Paid Memberships Pro

This plugin doesn’t  cost anything to begin with, so it’s great if you’re looking for WordPress membership plugins that are free to use until you get your membership site established and bringing in money. The core of Paid Memberships Pro allows you to manage much of your WordPress membership site right out of the box, but what’s interesting about this particular WordPress membership plugin is that it can be extended with free add-ons.

These add-ons allow you to do all kinds of things that other WordPress plugins for membership simply don’t do, like integrate with forums (like bbPress or BuddyPress), or integrate with your favorite email marketing or conversion optimization program, like Aweber or ConvertKit. This allows you to customize the WordPress memberships to suit your needs rather than trying to tweak an existing plugin to fit your needs (which can be costly and time-consuming).

WooCommerce Memberships

WooCommerce changed the face of WordPress and e-commerce, and WooCommerce Memberships is changing how WordPress membership sites are managed. If you like having complete, fine-grain control over your membership sites, WooCommerce Memberships is the plugin for you. You can tailor virtually everything through this WordPress plugin for memberships, including the content that members can access through a free trial option.

The versatility of this WordPress membership plugin also makes it a top choice for those who want to integrate e-commerce into their site beyond selling subscriptions or access to content. It works beautifully with many other WooCommerce plugins, so if you’re considering adding a membership component onto your existing website and you’re already using WooCommerce, this one is a no-brainer. You can even add on an affiliate program for even greater residual income streams.

MagicMembers

Now in its tenth year of operation, MagicMembers may not have all the bells and whistles of the other WordPress membership plugins featured here, but it’s ease of use is second to none. It’s the ideal WordPress plugin for membership sites to deliver an online course or training modules and you can restrict access by post type, tag and many other flexible features that other plugins don’t offer.

It also integrates nicely with a variety of email marketing and affiliate marketing services, so if you want to get a WordPress membership site up and running quickly without a lot of hassle and tedious configuration, this is the plugin for you.

ZippyCourses

The last membership plugin for WordPress in our list is tailored specifically to those who want to sell online courses. Oftentimes, if you want to create and sell an online course, you have to focus on either platforms that allow you to teach, or platforms that allow you to sell. But ZippyCourses bridges the gap and lets you do both. Create and upload lessons, rearrange and organize them efficiently, and sell them directly with easy integration as a WordPress membership site.

ZippyCourses also integrates with the most popular payment processors as well as a variety of email marketing tools like Aweber, Mailchimp, Constant Contact and Ontraport. Rather than being a WordPress membership plugin, it’s more of an online course platform, but for people who want to sell their knowledge and expertise, this is a great alternative to other systems on the market.

Choosing the Best WordPress Membership Plugin

As you can see, there are a variety of highly-rated, popular and easy-to-use WordPress plugins for membership that anyone can use to be up and running quickly and start earning recurring revenue from their WordPress website.

But membership plugins are just one piece of the puzzle. You also need to maintain your membership or online course with an intuitive administrative suite and tools that make it easy to stay organized as well as handle common maintenance tasks.

For these, there’s WPDandy. WPDandy makes it easy for you to concentrate on the things you do best while getting access to WordPress professionals and developers who understand how to work efficiently with WordPress membership plugins and much more.

Whether you need cosmetic changes made to your site, or you just need some extra help keeping things up and running smoothly, working with WPDandy is a smart choice to allow you to focus on growing your membership and building your business along with recurring revenue that you can count on month after month. Learn more about our dedicated WordPress maintenance and management services today!