WooCommerce Memberships 1.8.8

1. Buy this extension
2. Download and install Memberships in your WooCommerce store
3. Create your Membership Plans and Members
4. Check out our extensive documentation for any advanced setup help
5. That’s it! Sit back and enjoy your fully integrated membership site!

Customer Access

Can customers have more than one membership?

Yes! Memberships are not tied to a user role, so customers (or any user on your site) can have multiple memberships. They can manage them from the “My Account” section.

When is membership access granted?

Access is granted for any paid order (status is ‘processing’ or ‘complete’).

Can guests purchase memberships?

No, this is not possible because Memberships require user accounts for customers. However, Memberships will prompt customers to create an account during checkout to make this simple.

If a customer tries to purchase a product tied to a membership as guest, the checkout page will force the customer to create an account before they can complete the purchase (as Subscriptions does). Typically, this only adds one field to checkout (for the account password) and looks like the “Create Account?” option is forced.

Can customers upgrade or downgrade memberships?

Customers can upgrade or downgrade memberships if you’re using WooCommerce Subscriptions to sell recurring memberships. Set length memberships cannot be upgraded or downgraded, as Memberships isn’t involved with billing, proration, etc.

If Subscriptions is used, Memberships ties into all Subscriptions actions, so an upgrade or downgrade of a subscription will trigger a change in membership plan. If you don’t want customers to pay a recurring payment, you can configure Subscriptions to only process one charge for the membership, which will still allow you to take advantage of switching (upgrade / downgrade).

Can customers share their login details?

Does Memberships prevent members from sharing their log in credentials?

No, but there’s a great free plugin that already does this: WP Bouncer. This prevents users from logging in from more than one location or device at a time.

Customer Experience

Can I redirect members to their content after purchase?

As a customer can purchase more than one membership at a time, Memberships can’t reliably redirect a customers to members content — a purchase note is a much better solution for this. Ask customers to go to the “My Account” page and click “View” for the membership to see the membership content and perks.

How do I disable discount notices?

Discount notices can be disabled by clearing the discount text. If you leave the discount notices blank under WooCommerce > Settings > Memberships > Products, they will not be shown to non-members.

Can the My Memberships table be removed?

I use subscriptions to manage memberships, so I don’t want to show the “My Memberships” table to customers. Can it be removed?

It can be via a code snippet, but we do not recommend this

First, the “My Memberships” area is needed for members to access the Member Area. Second, Memberships will not show member actions (like “Cancel”) if the membership is tied to a subscription — instead, it will force any cancellation / pausing / etc actions to use the subscription instead in order to keep billing and access in sync.

Admin Management

Can I apply memberships to existing customers?

Yes, Memberships has a couple of tools that will help you grant membership access to customers.

First, you can manually grant membership access to a user under the “Memberships > Members” screen to any membership plan. Second, you can retroactively apply memberships when editing a plan by clicking “Grant Access” for existing purchases – if customers have purchased a product that grants access to the membership in the past, a new membership will be added.

Can I give away free memberships?

Absolutely. You can do so by tying the membership to a free WooCommerce product. We recommend marking this product as “virtual” as well since the Membership does not require shipping. This will let the customer add the free product to the cart and “purchase” it without payment.

If you want to simplify the process even further, you can also create a membership plan that grants access upon “user account registration”. This will create a membership for every registration on your site, such as via the account page, checkout, WP registration, or other processes.

Can I test how members will see my content so I know what it looks like?

Absolutely. As an administrator (or shop manager) user on your site, no content will be restricted to you so that you can easily manage your site. If you want to see what your shop looks like as a non-member, you can log out, use an incognito window, or a different browser to view your site.

To view your site as a member, you can use our User Switching integration to easily impersonate a member. For example, this can let you view your site as a temporary gold member so you can ensure your restriction rules are set up correctly.

Content Protection

Does Memberships protect direct download links?

Memberships does not restrict downloadable file URLs specifically, as (1) it assumes that an URL for a download you’ll share is one that should be “share-able” and not restricted, and (2) directly restricted downloads happens at the server level (outside of PHP, which is the language WordPress / plugins use), so trying to restrict this purely via PHP code isn’t truly possible and would depend on your server configuration.

To protect downloadable files, we typically recommend taking one of these strategies:

1. Add the file to a free WooCommerce downloadable product, then restrict this product to your membership. This lets members “purchase” the free product to get access to the downloadable files, and they’re protected by WooCommerce’s user authentication for members only.
2. Use something like the Subscription Downloads plugin to achieve this instead (if your membership will be using Subscriptions). This plugin lets you “assign” downloadable products to a subscription (these products don’t even have to be purchasable). When a user purchases the subscription for your membership, they’ll have a list of the associated downloads available in the account page.

Are comments or RSS feeds restricted?

Any content that is restricted will be removed from your site’s RSS feeds so that it’s protected from non-members.

If the content is restricted, comments on that content will not be shown. If the restriction mode is “Hide content only”, the comments section will be protected with a “comments closed” message until a membership is purchased.

If I restrict a page / post / etc, will the entire page be restricted?

In short, yes. Adding content to restriction rules will hide the entire content, unless your settings show excerpts, in which case the excerpt will be shown.

If you only want to restrict a portion of the content, you can use the plugin’s shortcodes to restrict content sections, or show content sections only to non-members (i.e., log in, content restricted, or upgrade notices).

Integrations

Does Memberships integrate with BuddyPress?

At present, the only thing Memberships can do is restrict your BuddyPress pages (such as the registration page, your Groups index, or your members list) when the restriction mode is “Redirect to page”. However, the content is still directly accessible, such as using the direct link for a member profile or for a group’s page, so this isn’t truly a solution for using Memberships with BuddyPress.

BuddyPress does not use WordPress custom post types (instead using several custom tables in your database) to store its information, so Memberships will not automatically detect its content for restriction.

Does Memberships work with WPML?

Can I translate Memberships into my language?

Sure thing! Memberships is translation-ready, and the text domain is: woocommerce-memberships Most plugin strings can be translated, though if you use anything other than the default “restriction messages”, you may not be able to translate these dynamically via WPML.

However, all strings included in the plugin are always translatable by any translation plugin (PoEdit, LocoTranslate, etc).

Please note that the plugin is not 100% WPML compatible. We have improved compatibility with a lot of issues, such as using the Members Area with WPML, but not everything (such as duplicated registration-based user memberships with WPML) can be solved on the Memberships side, so WPML would need to add compatibility for other areas on their end.

Does this integrate with WooCommerce Bookings?

Can I restrict bookable products with WooCommerce Bookings?

Yes, a booking type product can be restricted or discounted based on membership plan rules. Note that the booking calendar and price estimate will not be included if purchasing is restricted, but the rest of product details are visible, such as the short description and product tabs.