How To Make A Lightweight Automated Membership Website For Free

If you want to make a membership website or add membership features to your existing website, then this is the post for you.

I am going to show you how to make a lightweight automated membership website for free

In fact, I posed the question yesterday in the WPCrafter Facebook group and nearly 700 people said they wanted to learn this.

But thats not all, this video is going to level up your WordPress skills and be quite an eye opener

Now let me be clear up front that there is nothing wrong with all in one solutions like memberpress, restrict content pro, or wishlist member.

Those are great solutions Wishlist being my favorite.

But most of what you need you already have in WordPress or the current tools you have installed on your website, we just need to get them working together in perfect harmony to automate everything and that is what this video is all about

Ask yourself: what is a membership plugin actually doing anyway?

Here is the what it is doing at a basic level:

• Setup access groups and select which content they can acces
• Registering a new user to give away or selling access
• Automate granting access based on the purchase

Now there are various ways to do each of the above. These include using the tools you already use and love.

So each step of the way I will let you know of alternative tools you can use that you are likely to already own or have on your website.

Step 1: You need hosting. Siteground or Cloudways

Step 2: You need a WordPress theme, i'll be using the free Kadence Theme

Automator Pro is on special right now and can do a whole lot more.

Step 3: Lets setup a full website

Step 4: Lets add our membership levels, for this we add this custom function.

// Add a custom user role

$result = add_role( 'gold_member', __(
'Gold Member' ),
array( ) );

$result = add_role( 'platium_member', __(
'Platium Member' ),
array( ) );

$result = add_role( 'vip_member', __(
'VIP Member' ),
array( ) );

Step 5: Setup who can see what. You can use Elementor display conditions, Kadence Pro elements, or the easiest is Content Control

Step 6: Setup a way to register or sell access. You can use WooCommerce, or a form plugin

Step 7: Automate it using Automator