Setting up Pro Memberships is not difficult at all, but it helps to understand the pieces that together make up a membership site. These are:

• Members: A Member is someone who has subscribed to a Plan, usually by purchasing it.
• Plans: A Plan defines the benefits that the Member gains by subscribing. You can offer several plans, each with its own set of subscribed members, but a member may only subscribe to one plan at a time.
• Products: Nothing new here – a Product just means any product in your store – you can associate any number of products with any Plan.
• Content: This refers to your pages and posts, but also includes custom content and bbPress forums. In particular, it’s the content that you wish to market to your members. Content can be associated with one or more Plans.

By subscribing to a plan, a member may gain:

• The option to purchase exclusive products;
• Access to items of content otherwise hidden – like training courses or exclusive news;
• Discounts off a range of products.

A plan may offer members any one of these benefits, or any combination of them.

This guide walks through the process of setting up your membership model in a logical order, with a single worked example running throughout.

Deciding your membership model

Before creating anything, consider these questions.

How many levels do you need? Pro Memberships doesn’t limit you to one plan — create as many as you like. A member holds one active plan at a time, and granting a different plan replaces the old one rather than layering on top of it. If you want tiers, model each tier as its own plan and treat moving between them as a replacement, not an addition.

Do you even need levels? Gold/Silver/Bronze tiers are typical of membership plans, but with Pro Memberships, plans are flexible enough to support a range of membership models at the same time. One plan could offer product discounts, while another plan could drip feed your courses. Yet a third plan could grant access to a range of exclusive items.

Product, or add-on? Every plan is granted by the purchase of a qualifying product. This could be one of two types:

• Dedicated product: Such a product exists purely to sell the plan. A customer places, say, a Gold Membership, in the cart and checks out as normal. They receive a link that enables them to register as a member on the Gold plan. They could gift the membership to someone else, or use it themselves.
• Bundled with something you already sell: In this scenario, you link the plan to an existing product, so buying it comes with membership included. Most useful for loyalty schemes or “buy this, get access” offers.

A case study: “The Members’ Lounge”

To make the rest of this guide concrete, we’ll build one plan from scratch: Gold Membership. Members get 15% off everything, free shipping, the ability to purchase exclusive clothing lines and access to a members-only fashion guide that everyone else only gets a taste of.

Step 1: Create the product first

A plan can only link to a product that already exists, so this always comes first — even when the product’s sole purpose is selling the membership itself. Create and publish it as you would any other WooCommerce product; nothing about it is special.

We’re taking the ‘dedicated product’ route for the Members’ Lounge, so that’s a simple product called Gold Membership Product, priced at £75/year. Make it a virtual product as there’s nothing to ship or to download. (Note: if membership requires a recurring subscription as indicated, you’ll need a way to set up subscriptions – one perfect solution is WooCommerce Subscriptions available from the WooCommerce Marketplace).

Step 2: Create the plan and link it to that product

Go to Pro Memberships → Plans → Add New Plan, name it, and under Qualifying Products link the product from Step 1. Then set the Access Length — Choose from Lifetime, a fixed number of days from grant, or a fixed calendar date.

The Members’ Lounge plan uses Lifetime: use this for all plans sold as a recurring payment, whatever the subscription’s billing interval. Access is then determined entirely by the status of the subscription.

Step 3: The paywall. Decide what to put behind it

Any public content type on your site can be restricted here, not just pages and posts — a product, a category or tag, or (if you have bbPress) a forum topic.

For the Members’ Lounge, that’s a single post: “Members’ Lounge: Your Autumn Styling Guide,” filed under a Style Tips category. Non-members can still find it while browsing or searching. They just see a teaser instead of the full thing. One post may not sound like much of a membership plan, but you can add more content to the plan at any time or, as we’ll see, you can drip content.

By also selecting the Clothing product category, we’ll add the entire clothing category to the plan – this closes the shop door to everyone bar those on the plan.

Step 4: Choose how much non-members see

The Restricted post/page teaser setting controls this: a simple message with nothing revealed, or the article’s own opening paragraphs fading into that message. The Members’ Lounge uses the excerpt style, showing the first two paragraphs — enough to sell the join, not enough to give the game away.

A member visiting the same URL sees the whole thing, without the teaser, and without the prompt to join.

Step 5: Add the discount and shipping perks

Both are simple, effective incentives to include on the same plan if you want to reward your members. The Members’ Lounge sets Member Discount to 15% off all products, and ticks Free Shipping, but you could tailor the discount to a single product, a selection of products or a range determined by category or tag:

Step 6: Test it before going live

Publish the plan, then check it works the way you want it to before pointing customers at it. Either place a real test order for the qualifying product, or add yourself as a member manually via Pro Memberships → Members → Add New. This is a good way to confirm restricted content and discounts behave correctly before any money is involved.

What the member actually sees

If the qualifying product is paid for with a WooCommerce Subscription, membership is granted directly and stays in sync with the subscription automatically. Otherwise, Pro Memberships issues a voucher instead of granting access immediately. This is useful for those buying membership as a gift. The code appears on the order-received page and is emailed out; whoever holds it redeems it from My Account → Redeem a Voucher, and that’s when membership actually starts.

From then on, My Account → Membership shows their plan, status, and what it includes:

Next step

Next, see the Plans reference for every field on the plan editor in detail, and Admin Reference for the Members, Vouchers and general settings screens.