MemberPress: How to Create Memberships [Article]

🛎️ This tutorial has recently been updated; however, it has now been archived as I’ve since moved away from using MemberPress and now use SureMembers. Whilst SureMembers isn’t as comprehensive as MemberPress, it is a lot easier to use; you may still find value from the content below.

Welcome back. In this post, you’ll learn how to create simple membership plans in WordPress using the MemberPress plugin.

Note: This tutorial assumes that you already have the MemberPress membership site set up. If you are not using MemberPress, visit their website here. I’m not an affiliate of MemberPress, though I have used this plugin in the past and therefore happy to recommend them.

What is MemberPress?

Without going too deep into detail, MemberPress is an all-in-one membership plugin for WordPress and one of the most popular premium options available. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, there isn’t a free version you can test.

As an alternative, I’d recommend SureMembers, which is the plugin I currently use for Van Marciano Pro.

Alright, let’s get back to the tutorial.

MemberPress includes everything you need to create and manage memberships on your website. It also works very well with Bricks Builder, even though there’s no official statement confirming full compatibility.

If you’re considering building a membership site with WordPress—regardless of the theme you’re using—it’s definitely worth learning more about MemberPress.

In this quick tutorial, I’m going to show you how to create a membership plan for your website. For this example, I’ll be using a dummy WordPress installation running locally on my computer. If this is your first time using MemberPress, you should find this walkthrough helpful.

I’ll also assume that you already have the plugin installed and activated. Let’s get started.

Creating membership in MemberPress

Step 1 – In the WordPress admin area, navigate to MemberPress → Memberships → and click on Add New. Give your first membership plan a name, for example, Starter.

Step 2 – Scroll down to the meta box and inside of the membership options, you’ll see four tabs. Let’s look at each one –

1. Registration – Here you can change the registration button text call-to-action, enable a custom thank you page, set a membership welcome email, customize payment methods and user info, and access shortcodes. The shortcodes will be useful if you are planning to design a custom membership page using a website builder tool such as Oxygen or Bricks Builder.
2. Permission – Here you can set who can see this membership option and add a custom ‘no permission’ message.
3. Price box – If you want to display a price box, you can add some content here such as a title, a list of benefits, and a CTA button.
4. Advanced – Here you can add a URL to access the membership after someone has paid, set membership pricing terms, login redirects, and user roles for this membership plan.

If you’re using Oxygen or Bricks Builder to design a dedicated pricing table, you don’t need to fill most of these in.

By the way, I have a separate membership signup page design video tutorial you can check out here.

Step 3 – Next, you can set your membership terms and price. You can also set the billing type and interval.

Now you can Publish your membership plan and view it on the front end. So now you know how to create memberships, you can go back and create more.