Two years ago I wrote a post about how hard it was to setup a membership website with WooCommerce. It took twenty two steps and it required two plugins.

Not ideal.

At the time we thought it best to integrate with an existing solution that already had some users. Sounds smart but it forces users to go through the extra steps to make the integration work. And as someone who has to setup his own site & his own accounts I hate when someone drags me through extra steps.

End users don't care what powers their technology. They just want to solve their problem. Which is why we set out to build an entirely new system.

Creating a Membership Solution

I figured by making a solution specifically for memberships that we could cut out 1/3 of the steps.

With WooCommerce Memberships which we released last summer we didn't quite hit 1/3 but we got close. We cut 22 steps down to just 10.

1. In the WordPress Admin click on Products and then click on Add Product
2. Enter a title, description, and price as you would any other product. This is the product that will unlock the membership.
3. Install WooCommerce Memberships
4. Click Setup Membership Plan
5. Click Add Membership Plan
6. Type in the name
7. Under Grant access upon select a product that unlocks the membership
8. Under Restrict Content click Add New Rule
9. Select a category, tag, or specific post that you want to protect
10. Click Publish

Not bad huh? It's less steps and they're much more intuitive. That's a huge win.

I attended Digital Commerce Summit a few weeks ago I met a ton of store owners who picked WooCommerce Memberships over any other platform. Win.

Additional Features

Basic membership features let you restrict content and does that very well. But in the year since the plugin has been out the developers, SkyVerge, have been busy adding tons of new features.

You can restrict purchasing so your store operates similar to Costco or Sam's Club.

Restricting some products to members only.

Or you can provide members-only discounts.

The discount options in WooCommerce are simple & intuitive.

You can also drip content so way users get access to content over a period of time instead of all at once which can be overwhelming. If you want to know more about content dripping I recommend you read this post by Chris Lema.

And of course this plugin works seamlessly with WooCommerce Subscriptions so you can bill your users on a recurring basis (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, etc).

Memberships FTW

A few years ago WooCommerce was really lacking in the membership department. SkyVerge spent a ton of time planning & developing a superior solution. Now I'm confident to recommend WooCommerce Memberships to anyone asks.