What’s the best membership plugin?
Most people overbuild membership sites...
Most people overbuild membership sites. This Reddit thread is a perfect example.
What website builder should I use to create a paid membership website?
It’s for an investing service. Just need a place for people to see a sales page, checkout (preferably with stripe), create an account, and see a couple pages behind the paywall.
Thinking SquareSpace (maybe with Memberspace?) or WordPress (with idk what plug-ins).
Thoughts?
The short answer from me would be:
WordPress + UsersWP, and its new membership plugin.
Why? Because it’s simple, lightweight, scalable without adding much overhead, and does exactly what this user is asking for. Nothing less and nothing more.
That, from my experience, is what the vast majority of Membership Websites need. A simple Paywall to protect their premium content.
But what did the Redditors reply instead?
They replied the following – Total distinct suggestion mentions: 9
| Solution | Mentions | % |
|---|---|---|
| WordPress (generic) | 3 | 33.3% |
| MemberPress | 2 | 22.2% |
| Restrict Content Pro | 2 | 22.2% |
| Paid Memberships Pro | 1 | 11.1% |
| Gravity Forms (+ addons) | 1 | 11.1% |
| XenForo | 1 | 11.1% |
| UltimateWB | 1 | 11.1% |
Since the question was asked on the WordPress subreddit, it’s no surprise that most replies favored WordPress.
However, while the suggested plugins are indeed Solid, they are completely overkill here for a simple Paywall.
Most of these suggestions follow the same pattern: powerful tools for the wrong use case.
Let’s look at a few of them.
MemberPress
You don’t pick MemberPress for something this simple.
You’re paying at least $200/year, plus a percentage of your revenue.
To keep 100% of your revenue, you’re closer to $350/year.
And what are you really using?
A tiny slice of a much larger system built for complex memberships, courses, automations, and everything in between.
If all you need is a basic paywall, most of that goes unused.
Restrict Content Pro
Same story, different packaging.
There’s a free version that technically does the job. But it takes 2% of your revenue.
2% doesn’t sound like much, until it is. If your project works, that fee becomes painful very quickly.
To remove it, you need to pay at least $99 per site per year.
Again, you end up paying for a full suite of features when all you needed was a basic paywall.
Paid Memberships Pro
Same model again.
2% of your revenue unless you upgrade.
Then you’re looking at $174 for the first year and $347/year after that.
For a couple of protected pages.
All the extra features are there, but… again, you don’t need them!
Gravity Forms (+ addons)
This one is just a bad idea.
Yes, you can stitch together a membership system with add-ons. But now you’re building your own platform on top of a form builder.
It works, until it doesn’t. And when it breaks, you’re the one fixing it.
None of these tools is bad.
They’re just built for bigger, more complex setups. (other than Gravity Forms, which is built for forms.)
If all you need is:
- a sales page
- a checkout
- a user registration and an account page
- a couple of protected pages
You don’t need a full membership platform.
You need a simple paywall.
So how can we build a membership site with a simple paywall?
✅ UsersWP Membership Plugin
If you are asking yourself, “What is a Membership Plugin?” Read here: https://userswp.io/what-is-a-membership-plugin/
To build the site described by the Reddit user, a sales page, a checkout (preferably with Stripe), an account creation page, and a couple of pages behind the paywall, UsersWP, together with its Membership add-on, is an ideal fit.
Most of what you need is already there, out of the box.
As soon as you activate UsersWP, it creates the core pages for you: Login, Register, Account, and more, like the Profile page and the Users Directory.
From there, the setup is straightforward.
You create your roles and/or membership levels (you can work with one or the other, or both together), then create the two pages that contain the content you want to protect.
Once that’s done, you restrict access to those pages using the UsersWP Membership > Content Restriction settings.
Next, you build the landing page that sells access to that content. The page may include a call to action or a pricing table with several CTA buttons. These buttons can be set up to open a pop-up with the registration form and price selection.
Once the user fills out the form, they are redirected to the checkout page. After payment, everything else happens automatically.
The account is created, the correct role is assigned, and the membership level is applied. At that point, the user can access the pages protected by the paywall, no manual steps needed.
That’s the whole point.
Most people start with tools and features. They end up with something bloated, expensive, and harder to maintain.
Start from the use case instead.
If all you need is a paywall, keep it simple.
In the next tutorial, I will show you how easy it is to build a website like that.
I will build this demo on my local development tool of choice, Local by Flywheel (now WP Engine).
To create the sales page, I will use Cursor and its Claude Code extension. The landing page will sell the premium content: an “Online Course”.
The CTA will be followed by the registration flow and by a checkout page, where payment is required to complete registration and unlock access to protected pages.
Finally, I will show you a few different ways to restrict content, depending on how you want to structure your paywall.
