Once you have a website, the hardest part is over. Now you have to ensure that it has all the necessary features and elements. I say it’s the easy part because all you need for extra features is to find the necessary plugins and install them. If you want to have membership for your website, you need some functions. Best free WordPress membership plugins included in this post.
When you have membership options on your site, you can provide them with exclusive content. Alternatively, you can have people pay for it and provide them with different membership privileges. When you’ve added an excellent membership plugin to your website, you can accept various payment gateways. We say excellent because there are some substandard free plugins out there. This is why we’ve prepared this piece so we can help you find the best free WordPress membership plugin.
Best Free WordPress Membership plugins are listed below:
- Members – Membership & User Role Editor Plugin
- Ultimate Member – User Profile, User Registration, Login & Membership Plugin
- Paid Memberships Pro
- Simple Membership
- WP-Members Membership Plugin
Members
Members is another one of the best WordPress membership plugins. It is based on roles and capabilities that you can allocate to users on your website. With this plugin, you can set permissions and restrict your site’s content by providing a straightforward user interface for WordPress’s membership roles and capabilities system. Traditionally, these were only available to developers who could code from scratch. Members has a massive array of features that qualify it for this list.
This WordPress membership plugin has a great role editor that allows you to create, edit and delete roles and capabilities for your members. You can base all these on the users who pay for them, giving them capabilities and withdrawing them when they don’t. You can give more than one role to any user. Members also allows you to deny particular capabilities to specific user roles. Rather than create a new role from scratch each time, this free WordPress membership plugin lets you clone existing ones.
Members is shortcode and widget ready. You can use shortcodes to control who gains access to particular content. You also get a login form widget and a users widget that appear in your sidebars. If you want to make your website and its feed private so that only paying members can access it, this plugin supports this fully. Having different addons integrated with it comes with different custom roles and capabilities.
Ultimate Member
Ultimate Member is one of the top WordPress membership plugins. It makes it very easy for your users to sign up and become members of your website. With this plugin, you can add elegant user profiles to your website easily. You’ll rarely find a better plugin for creating advanced membership websites and online communities. Ultimate Member is lightweight, which ensures that it won’t be heavy on your site and slow it down. This plugin is highly extendable and will accommodate addons that give you more membership functions.
With Ultimate Member, you can control your site’s user profiles from the front end. Your site can also support frontend user login and registration. This free WordPress membership plugin gives you custom form fields with conditional logic for easy filling. Ultimate Member offers a form builder that lets you edit the fields with a drag & drop interface. You can allocate custom user roles for your members and even provide privileges for certain roles.
Ultimate Member has a wide range of extensions that add to the plugin’s capabilities. The User Notes allow your users to create private and public notes right from their profiles. Profile Tabs facilitate the easy addition of custom tabs to the user profiles. If you want to showcase the users on a map on the members’ directory page, Ultimate Member lets you use the User Locations extension just to do that.
Paid Memberships Pro
Paid Memberships Pro offers multiple tools that you can use to kickstart, manage, and develop your membership website. It is one of the best WordPress membership plugins and supports various premium content delivery niches. It has an easy setup process, starting from restricted access that you can provide for your members only. Paid Memberships Pro lets you create unlimited membership levels with flexible pricing. They can include trials, free memberships, subscriptions, recurring payments, and one-time payments.
You can integrate your website with PayPal, Authorize.net, PayPal, and other popular payment gateways so you can receive payments from your users. With this WordPress membership plugin, you can manage your full membership data easily. You can view sales reports, revenue, expirations, signups, cancellations, and import or export members. Paid Memberships Pro boasts robust REST API endpoints, which include a native Zapier integration to link your apps and automate workflow without the need for code.
This superb membership plugin has various member experience features. Your users can enjoy frontend login, user registration, password recovery, and profile editing. They can also view and operate the membership account dashboard and receive custom member emails. Paid Memberships Pro boasts quite a few content protection features too. It lets you restrict default content, including pages, blocks, posts, and categories that unpaid and paid members can access.
Simple Membership
As you may deduct from the name, Simple Membership is a very simple plugin. It is also an excellent free WordPress membership plugin that works with virtually any WordPress theme. It provides protection for your pages and posts so that only your members can view your particular content. Simple Membership allows you to set up unlimited membership access levels. For instance, you can have silver, bronze, gold, and free membership levels, all of which have different access levels.
This WordPress membership plugin lets you choose a post or page that you want to protect as you edit within the WordPress Editor. Simple Membership will then demand that users log in or become members so that they can view the protected page or post. With this plugin, all payments from your members will be well documented, so you can view them any time from the admin dashboard.
Since you can have free and paid memberships on your site, this plugin is equipped to handle various membership gateways, including Stripe, Braintree, and PayPal. A PayPal smart button is available for membership payments. You can also enable email confirmation or email activation for free memberships. Simple Membership comes with many action and filter hooks for developers to use for customizing the plugin. An API is also available for creating, querying, and updating member accounts.
Youzify
Youzify, previously known as Youzer, is a high-quality BuddyPress plugin. It converts your website into an effective, robust, and compelling social hotspot with an amazing ROI. The membership system and features that come with this WordPress membership plugin have over 700 custom options. Youzify has an activity stream that gives users live updates of activities on the site. The member and groups directories are ideal for users who want to view the available member and group statistics.
Friends can make connections, such as the ones on social platforms. Youzify allows your users to send private messages to each other. They can also follow and unfollow each other. If your website is highly interactive, you can facilitate ratings and reviews on your site with the help of Youzify. You can allocate points and badges to the users based on whichever criteria you want. It could be by payment and access or activity.
As one of the best WordPress membership plugins, Youzify has mechanisms in place to ensure that your site is as fast as it could be. It supports lazy loading so that the images your users upload don’t slow down your pages. Youzify supports the display of various other media formats, including audios and videos. You can set the maximum sizes and numbers of files and attachments with this plugin.
WP User Frontend
WP User Frontend is another one of the best WordPress membership plugins available. It has the most elegant and functional frontend dashboard, editor, and publisher. The plugin also offers the most user friendly frontend uploader for post submissions, WordPress user profiles, and memberships. WP User Frontend lets you create any post type easily. It gives easy access to functions that would otherwise have required users to go to the backend of the website.
With WP User Frontend, you can enable users to edit their profiles using the default fields right from the frontend without giving them access to the backend. Users can upload images from the frontend and make any one of them the Featured Image. The image upload feature is on the post content area. WP User Frontend comes with a user-friendly that supports filling of fields via drag & drop. With its real-time previews, you can see how the form will look after publishing.
WP User Frontend allows you to add your published forms in the Gutenberg block editor. You can also utilize the unique shortcodes for each form by pasting them on any page or post you want to have the form on. This free WordPress membership plugin enables you to redirect users to another page upon logging in, submitting a form, or editing a form. When you install the required WPUF pages, you can delete a registration, post, and subscription forms in one click. You can also import and export them as JSON.
Restrict User Access
If you want to start providing content with restricted access, you can go for the Restrict User Access plugin. This free WordPress membership plugin is light and simple so that you can synchronize everything in minutes. You can set up a membership site quickly with different levels, such as platinum, gold, bronze, silver, and free. You can reward users with levels when they pay for them or purchase products in WooCommerce. Restrict User Access also lets you control how long memberships last.
With this WordPress membership plugin, you can restrict access to posts, pages, and categories. You can then combine conditions if you want, for instance, setting premium tags when a particular author publishes a post. Restrict User Access comes with page templates so that you can set up your membership terms easily. It comes with blog pages and post-type archives that you can customize using Gutenberg – the default WordPress block editor.
Restrict User Access comes with BuddyPress profile sections and allows your users to engage in different forums and topics. This superb plugin will automatically detect custom post types and taxonomies created by any theme or plugin. It also boasts support for the most popular WordPress addons so that you can, for example, restrict multilingual content. You can create navigation menus and widget areas with the Content Aware Sidebars addon, so that user without certain access won’t access them or their content.
Paid Member Subscriptions
Paid Member Subscriptions is a robust free WordPress membership plugin that’s easy to set up and use. It comes with a comprehensive membership solution. You get to create subscription plans, restrict access to premium content, manage members, and accept payments. Paid Member Subscriptions is 100% compatible with WooCommerce, so that you can restrict certain products to members only. You can give discounted product prices based on subscription plans.
This WordPress membership plugin allows you to set up your membership website easily with the Elementor Page Builder. All you need to do is create a new page and allocate a name to it to get started. Once you add the shortcode [pms-register], all you have to do is publish the page. Paid Member Subscriptions gives you access to shortcodes for member login, registration, membership plan management, and content registration. You can even display partial content using a shortcode to stimulate subscriptions.
With this plugin, you can accept PayPal payments from your subscribers. You can even keep track of payments, payment statuses, and purchased plans while viewing detailed logs of all payment activity. Paid Member Subscriptions allows you to customize default member emails and even set up member messages. This WordPress membership plugin lets you grant free trial periods and sign-up fees easily. This plugin supports the easy maintenance of records of member databases, reports, and records. You can import and export records to CVS at any time.
ARMember
ARMember is ridiculously easy to operate and offers a wide range of features. This free WordPress membership plugin lets you can create unlimited membership plans with automatically recurring payment facilities. It also comes with an inbuilt form builder that enables you to create stylish free forms for signup, login, registration, profile editing, change password, forgot password, etc. ARMember forms are spam-free since the plugin has reCAPTCHA functionality. You get to use a drag & drop function in creating your registration and login forms.
As you would expect of one of the best WordPress membership plugins, its user interface is user-friendly and can restrict any content on your site in a single click. You can use just one shortcode to restrict partial content on any post or page. ARMember has the simplest facilities for upgrading, renewing, downgrading, and canceling memberships. With this WordPress membership plugin, your members get to register, log in, retrieve passwords, change passwords, and edit their profiles on the site’s front end.
You can create user profiles and member directories very easily. ARMember lets you import and export users and settings that you’ve already configured rather than create them anew. Since it has Brute Force login protection, your content will be much safer in terms of who can access it. ARMember supports Gutenberg and will work with any of the best WordPress themes.
WP-Members
The WP-Members plugin stands out as one of the best WordPress membership plugins. It turns your site into a membership website, complete with premium content restrictions and much more. Apart from restricting posts, custom post types, and pages, you can hide them. WP-Members plugin allows you to limit the menu items you display to logged-in users. This plugin integrates user login, registration, and profile into your theme so that you don’t have to customize them all over again to match your theme.
You can create custom registration and profile fields so you can collect as much profile information as you wish. With WP-Members, you can activate notifications so that the admin will get notified each time a new user registers. This free WordPress membership plugin has the option of putting new registrations on hold, pending the admin’s approval. You can create post excerpt teaser content easily that urges your users to subscribe to your plans.
With this WordPress membership plugin, you can use shortcodes to create login forms, registration forms and restrict content. WP-Members gives you access to robust customizations with over 120 action and filter hooks. Among the premium extensions that this plugin offers is the MailChimp addon. You can add the subscription to your MailChimp list as part of your registration form field requirements. Other integrations include Download Protect, PayPal subscriptions, Security, and Invite Codes.
ProfileGrid
You can create the most incredible communities and membership websites with ProfileGrid. This is one of the best WordPress membership plugins with its ease of use and abundance of features. It allows your site to have multiple types of user profiles. You can then have different groups for different profile types. Each group can have its own moderator or group manager, and ProfileGrid lets each group have its own registration workflow that you can track easily.
With this free WordPress membership plugin, you can offer your visitors the option to sign up or request membership from a group of their choice. ProfileGrid also lets you set limits on the maximum number of members per group. You can also allocate particular WordPress roles to particular groups. The plugin facilitates the filtering of user profiles by groups on the directory page. When you set a group as closed or private, a user will require approval from the admin or group manager to join as a member.
ProfileGrid allows users to join multiple groups at a time. The group manager can create, manage, edit, and set rules for membership right from the dashboard. They can also manage the profile sections and fields. The dashboard of ProfileGrid also has an area on which you can search, filter, and view profiles and members. You can create and edit email templates for user notifications right from the dashboard.
ProfilePress
ProfilePress is a lightweight WordPress membership plugin that facilitates the creation of high-quality member directories. You can protect sensitive content and control user access. This plugin offers a drag & drop form builder that is easy to use for creating various custom frontend forms. You can create user registration, login, and password reset forms. ProfilePress has automatic login and redirections on the frontend. It also allows you to add registration, login, logout, and profile links to your site’s navigation menu. It changes as users log in and out.
ProfilePress allows your visitors to create elegant user profiles complete with profile pictures and user information. You can create searchable and filterable member directories on which they can search and find each other. This free WordPress membership plugin is shortcode-ready. It offers shortcodes with which you can showcase user avatars and allow users to upload profile images from the front end.
ProfilePress comes with ready customizable templates for creating user profiles, member directories, and forms to save you and your users time. It allows you to disable the admin bar and restrict access to the WordPress dashboard based on user roles. You can redirect the default WordPress login page to your custom registration, login, and password reset pages. ProfilePress has many premium addons that you can go for additional functionality.
WP User Manager
WP User Manager is one of the most user friendly and lightweight WordPress membership plugins. The WP User Manager lets you create highly customizable user profiles with full login, registration, password recovery, and forms on your site. Your users get these functions on the frontend of your website. WP User Manager allows you to customize the emails that will be sent to users when they register and reset their passwords.
Your users can edit their site avatars by uploading images through their account pages. The elegant user profiles have public profile pages for displaying user data. WP User Manager comes with a shortcode editor with which you can add elements to pages and posts easily. You can also create, edit, and duplicate the roles and capabilities of various user levels. WP User Manager has beautiful user directories that you can display anywhere on your website.
This free WordPress membership plugin generates SEO-friendly URLs so that your content ranks well on Google. WP User Manager has very powerful tools for content restriction and member management. If you’re after premium features, the paid version of this plugin offers quite a few. You can allow your users to create and join groups on your site. WP User Manager allows the sending of verification links though email when new users register. Alternatively, you can approve new users manually before they can log in to your site.
Bottom Line
Having a website is crucial when you have a passion you want to share or a business you want to run online. This list gives you many choices for a WordPress membership plugin. And even though these are free, there are a few extra features and functions that you can get with paid plugins. Therefore, if you’re ready to spend some money on getting a membership plugin, you can explore the best options available. If you don’t want to spend money on a membership plugin, this list has all you need. Good luck as you manage your website’s membership.
If you want to make directory website, Here is the list of the best WordPress directory plugin.
