How To Make A Lightweight Automated Membership Website For Free Using WordPress

if you want to make a membership website or add membership features to your existing website then this is the video for you i'm going to show you how to make a lightweight automated membership website for absolutely free in fact i posted this question yesterday in the wp crafter facebook group if they would like me to make this video in over 700 people said yes they want to see a video like this on how to make a membership website for wordpress for free now it's not as much about having something for free that normally costs hundreds of dollars per year it's more about learning how to do something like this with the tools that you have and leveling up your wordpress skills but at the same time having a lightweight automated membership website but that's not all because this video is going to level up your wordpress skills and be quite an eye-opener to what you could do with wordpress now let me be clear there's nothing wrong with all-in-one solutions like member press which you can see right here is 349 dollars per year or restrict content pro which comes in at 249 dollars per year and here's many people's favorite wish list member at 397 per year those are all great membership solutions that i recommend my favorite being wishlist member and a lot of people here it's their favorite as well but most of what you need you already have in wordpress and you have in the tools that you already use we just need to get it all working together in perfect harmony and that is what this video is about so first i want you to ask yourself what is a membership plugin really doing on your website anyway here's what they're doing on a very basic level first they set up access groups and allow you to configure what those access groups are allowed to access second thing is how to register a new user and sell or give away that access and lastly they automate granting access based upon their purchase now there's various ways of doing everything i listed above and these include using tools that you already own and already love so each step of the way i'll let you know of alternative tools that you could use that you probably already own so right now is the time where i ask you to smash the like button because i'm about to bring it so step one you need web hosting for your website go to wpcrafter.com hosting or you'll see the menu on my website go here i have the best host broken down based upon cost and your skill level and how hard they are to set up if you're new to the channel i've been crushing it on this channel with helpful tutorials based upon hosting to help you get the best performance for the lowest price if you're after something really low cost i recommend name hero it's an excellent value if you're looking for super easy to set up it just cost a few dollars more then siteground is the way to go and if you don't mind it being a little bit more technical to set up but have virtually unlimited power then cloud ways right here is what you want to choose i'll have links about setting these up in the video description down below so with your hosting setup here's a brand new fresh installation of wordpress all we need is a wordpress theme for this site i'm going to use the cadence theme it's completely free you can visit wpcrafter.com cadence i'll have a link in the video description box to get this the reason i'm choosing this theme is because it's full feature there's no feature held back in the free version in fact it's more powerful than most paid themes on the market so now let's install the cadence theme you're going to go to appearance you're going to click on themes you're going to go up here and click on add new we'll click on upload theme we'll choose the file that we just downloaded then we'll click on install now next we'll click on activate and the first time we activate it we get this option for cadence starter templates we'll click on this button to install this free plugin and here are the starter templates that we can choose from now just a side note i have insider information that this starter template is coming it's going to be ideal for membership websites and online course websites it's going to be 100 percent completely free it's just not ready yet but you can look here the design is perfect it's completely free i really like this area down here that lets people know what they're getting and if this was available right now i would use this template but it's not that's okay i'll just choose a different one so for this site i'm going to choose this right here and when you click on it i love this when you import it before you click on import you can choose a color scheme so we can see i've got pinks but if i like this color palette i can choose that or this color palette we can go with the dark style right here you can choose any of these color schemes and it affects the entire site the colors will change across the entire site now don't worry though after it's all set up it's very easy to change these colors so this right here looks fine for me i'll go ahead and click on import now i get this confirmation message and i'll just click on start importing all right that took about 30 seconds or so for me i can click right here it says finished view your website i've got a fully set up website here and you can see it only took me about two minutes or so and i have the inner content pages here i've got a gallery i've got a pricing page i have it all right here so we're going to go ahead and customize this just a tiny bit after we have everything set up so now is where the magic starts to begin we're going to set up our membership levels now this is the only part in this whole process that can be a little bit technical we have to add a little tiny bit of code to our website now if you're a website developer we're going to be adding a custom function don't worry if you're not a website developer because i'm going to make it super easy so there's multiple ways you can add this to your website you just need the little tiny snippet of code now i'll have a link in the video description box down below it'll take you to my website where i have a blog post on this based upon this entire video where you can just copy and paste this little tiny snippet of code across don't worry it's going to be super easy and i'm going to show you how to do it all right now now there's two ways to do this if you're comfortable with wordpress and you have what's called a wordpress child theme you can copy and paste the snippet of code in your functions.php file now that might be technical but don't worry there's a very easy way to do it with a free plugin called code snippets i'm going to use that method here in this video but for those of you that are more experienced and want to put this someplace else on your site without adding code snippets you can easily do that by adding it to your functions file so to install code snippets we're going to go to plugins we'll click on add new over here we're going to search for code snippets we're going to scroll here and click on install now and then i'm going to click on activate we have a brand new menu item over here on the left that says snippets i'll click on it now what the code snippets plugin does is it allows you to add and organize these little tiny snippets of code that you can use to add new features or functionality to your website you can even use it for performance purposes little snippets of code that increase the performance of your website it's a great plugin to have but like i said it's completely optional so what i'm going to do is click on add new and right here i'm going to give this snippet a name so i'm choosing to name this membership levels i'm going to click right here where it says code now this is where you want to go to my website and highlight and put the code in the clipboard of your computer and paste it in so that's what i'm going to do i'm going to paste it in right here so let me explain what this is so what we need to do is add something called user roles to wordpress it's a built-in feature in wordpress and based upon these user roles we're going to give people access to different pieces of content on our website i'm creating three user roles one is called gold member the next is called platinum member and the third one is called vip member now you don't need to have these three different membership levels it's completely up to you if you just want one that says paid member and one that says free member you can structure this however you want these are your membership levels so to customize these it's very simple so here's the first one right here i'm going to show you how to do it so right here it says in all lowercase it says gold member well you can change that to say whatever the heck you want it to say make it all lowercase and then right here you see where it's the proper case where it has the capital g and the capital m for member this is how it's going to display inside of your website so that's where you want to have the proper case like that capitalizing the first letter of each word and so you can see i have gold platinum and vip so now that i have my membership levels set up i'll go here and click on save changes and now i'm going to click back on all snippets so once we save it it's not active yet so you can see we have these switches here now these all right here are just some sample examples you can delete them if you want but here's my membership levels that i just need to toggle on and so now it's on this is exciting stuff so i'm going to go over here to where it says users and i've already created a test user on your website if you want to see these new membership levels it's super easy you can click on add new user and then you could fill this out but what we're trying to do is see how they've been added to where it says role so by default the user role is subscriber but if i expand the options check this out we have three new options vip platinum and gold what do you think so far have i earned a thumbs up yet if so go ahead and click on that thumbs up i don't know what you're waiting for so far you've done the most technical part of this entire tutorial and you've done it with flying colors and you've also learned some great new stuff about wordpress now there's actually other ways other than that snippet of code to add these new user roles but it involves adding another plug-in so i just felt like it was easy or to just use this little snippet of code but you could do what you want to do and what you feel most comfortable with but there's plugins that are free that make it easier without that snippet of code to add these user roles so now that we have user roles we need to figure out how we can make it so certain parts of our website are only accessible to so to users that have those particular user roles so if someone's not logged in they're not going to see it if someone's logged in and doesn't have a specific user role they're not going to be able to see it either let's go over that now so this is the first real step where we have a lot of flexibility on how you want to implement this i'm going to tell you what i think's the best way but you probably already have a tool for this so a first option is say for you elementor lovers i guarantee you one of the elementor add-ons if you use an elementor add-on is gonna have some visibility control options here's an example i'm not saying go and use this plug-in visibility logic and that's because the functionalities in so many of the add-on packages but i just wanted to show you this free one so it's going to work the same on all of them so you can see right here in this screenshot your add-on package would add an option that says visibility control under advanced so you can tie this to a section on your page and then where it says visible for you can enable and choose the user role and you just saw how we added those user roles so for you the user roles will appear now i personally won't be using this method but i wanted to make you aware of it because it's completely optional and up to you next i'm going to show you how to do this in the pro version of your wordpress theme many wordpress themes when you have the pro version have something called elements or custom hooks or custom layouts or something like that the cadence theme has a pro version as well and they have implemented this very elegantly so i'm going to go ahead and try it with this now i'm not saying go and get the cadence theme because if you're using a pro version of a theme it most likely already has this functionality in it but i'm just going to show you in the cadence theme and then i'm going to show you a completely free way and i think it's probably the most elegant way i'm just making you aware of all the options that you have so i've purchased and i own the pro version so it's a plug-in i'm going to go to plug-ins add new i'll click right here it says upload plug-in and i'll click on choose file and upload the pro version now that it's there i'll click on install now i'll go here and click on activate plugin now i want to go to the the themes option panel i'll go to appearance and i'll click on cadence here is where i can enable these features so for me i want to go ahead and enable hooked elements right here i'll toggle that on and for showing you something really cool i want to show you the header add-ons and this might give you a reason to consider using this theme for a membership website now with those two options enabled i'm going to refresh the page and now you can see it says elements so i'll click on elements i'll click on add new and for here i'm going to choose default as the element type so right here i can put any piece of content that i want and if i have a page builder i can also build it in my page builder but right here you can see the default block builder for wordpress this is just optional so i would build out the content here that i just want for a particular membership level i'll go over here and click on this icon right here and then i can choose where i want this content to show and then i can click right here where it says user settings and it says visibility2 and in this drop down it shows right here all users logged in logged out and then right here specific role and you can see there's my gold platinum and vip members so i can make specific content that is only viewable to people that have this user role and then here's one of the features that is quite unique to this theme it's the only one that has it is expires settings so you can actually have content that's only visible to certain membership levels and it will actually expire on a specific time so if you wanted to show them something and have it expire on a certain date that's how you do it this is a unique feature to this theme so this is another way that you can have content that is only viewable to people with certain user roles before i show you the next option for doing it which i think is probably the most elegant way and most of you are going to want to do i wanted to show you one more unique feature in the pro version of this theme so here i am on the homepage and i'm going to click on customize now one of the unique features of the theme is the header builder but there's a something i wanted to show you specifically in the pro version of the header builder so i'm going to click on header and essentially all of these items i can move around in this grid but there's one specific for for websites where people have to log in and it's pretty powerful and that is right here it's the account header item so i can drag and drop this where i want so you can see i dragged it off to the far right and now we have this icon right here next to the button actually it would probably be better to the left of the button so let me show you some of the options with this and you can modify any of the options of any of these by just clicking on the settings actually here i'm going to probably move them the menu into the middle because i kind of like the way that looks better uh there we go so i'm going to go ahead and show you these settings i'm going to click right here and what you do is this can trigger a registration window a logged in window when someone's logged in it'll show a gravatar image of them so uh it's very powerful on what you can do and it's a really elegant solution to making your website look more customized so for me i would choose this i kind of like that better i'll probably make it a little bigger and then i would have it be icon and then the username so that's my username you can see it changed right there uh we have all of these options right here then we can create a drop down menu that we tie to right here so when someone's hovering over it it will appear a custom drop down menu that you can create if i scroll up here and show you i can show you the logged out view so we can fully customize this for how it's going to look when someone's logged out and this is really cool down here let me go ahead and set this okay it's the account action so this is what happens when someone clicks on it so i can click right here and it will actually show a login window when someone clicks on it i think that's really cool and we can also have a registration link so let's see if it will let me see it when i click on it we get this gorgeous beautiful login window and you can actually hook in content above it below it to the left or right and make this really customized it's beautiful if you ask me and the last thing is there's design options right here so if i wanted to make that the avatar image larger it's kind of small right there i have this right here and i can make it how large or small that i want maybe something like that let me show you one more cool thing and this is in the free version of cadence theme we obviously have this cool button let me click on the settings of the button so this is all completely free this account i item here that's in the pro version only but everything else you see is free the menu the logo obviously the logo but the button but check this out we can show have this button show only when someone's not logged into the website so it can be sign up now or register now so there's visibility options on the button so over here i can change the text of the button i can change where the button goes but then when i scroll down here it says button visibility so it's currently set to show for everyone but i can optionally make it for logged out only so that means if you're not logged in you're going to see the button if you are logged in you're not going to see the button once again this is in the free version of this theme remember i said no feature is held back so here is the most elegant way that i've found to control who has access to what content is called content content control it's a free plug-in it's made by an established developer that has plug-ins on hundreds of thousands of websites they make a couple very popular plug-ins it's elegant it's clean there's no pro version there's no upgrade there's no banner advertisements it's just simple lightweight clean and elegant let's go ahead and install this it's completely free let's go to plugins add new we're going to go over here and we're going to search for content control and here it is i'll click on install now and then i'm going to click on activate now the best thing is so far we've built this website out there's only like three or four plugins we could have skipped over code snippets if you have some other place to go ahead and put that tiny snippet of code so the only required plug-ins so far was content control and for this website you can do your website however you want we use the free cadence blocks and we have the cadence starter templates and this is the pro version of the theme it's so optional so so far it's all very lightweight and guess what you don't see any big menu item over here when we activated content control that's because it's a very elegant lightweight solution you go to settings and you go down here to content control and here's where we're going to set up our restrictions we're going to click on add a restriction but first i want to click on general and this right here is where you're going to enter in the message someone will see if they don't have access to the content you're going to have an option to redirect them to say a sales page or right here you could put a message here now you might be thinking oh this is no fun i can't you know make something look nice out of here well if you're using elementor pro you can use the short code for a save template and put it in here the same works for gutenberg if you have gutenberg block builder and you use the reusable content feature you can go ahead and insert it right here this is optional but i think most people might want to have a dedicated sales page and if someone tries to access content that they don't have access to it'll take them over there so let's go back to restrictions now that we're here we're going to click on add a restriction and this is where we start deciding who gets to see what so for restriction title this is just for you i'm going to go ahead and enter in gold members and now all we have to do is start choosing our options so first who can see this content well you got to be logged in and guess what i'm going to check right here where it says gold member so now we know who this rule applies to now if i wanted this to also apply to platinum and vip you can choose more than one user role it's very easy next we'll click on the protection tab right here and this is where we can choose how we're going to protect the content so remember i mentioned redirect we have the option of redirect or showing that custom message so if i choose custom message right here we get some options but i think redirect is better this is basically what's going to happen when someone tries to go to a page that they do not have access to then right here it says where are they going to be redirected to we can to the drop down home page no you'd probably want a custom page and this is where you would enter in the url to your sales page or maybe a page that says oops you don't have access to this you can either log in or you can purchase access this is where you're going to put that sort of page next let's click right here where it says content and this is a simple elegant way for you to choose which content is protected by which membership level so i can go to the drop down and you can see we have a vast array of targeting options here that's why i said this is free and this is probably the way that i would do it and i'd recommend that you do it so there's a lot of ways of doing this and it works for custom post type content so maybe where you want to protect a particular page you would just choose a page or a selected page or page with an id or all the child pages of a page or your home page you can choose any of these there's so many options that you have uh the same goes with blog posts now what's really nice for blog posts is you can say a post with a tag so you can go create a tag for gold members or you can create a tag that says protected content and then all you have to do is add that tag to a blog post when you want to protect that content so i can click right here it says a post with a tag and then right here i can select the tag now i don't have any tags created yet on this website but i hope you see the power you can just choose the content based upon a rule that will be protected and you can have multiple conditions so i can say that and another piece of content and another piece of content and another piece of content you can easily target exactly what you want protected based upon rules and it's super easy to do so i just change it to a selected page and i can click right here to choose the particular page that i want protected i'll just randomly choose this about page right here why not and then i'll click on add and there we go this is where my gold members access configuration is and then i would do the same thing for the platinum and for the vip members and i would give them different access you don't have to have it like that you could just have one level free or paid it's completely entirely up to you i hope you're beginning to see how this is all coming together and it's super easy to set up and it's a very elegant solution and you can put it on your website and it's very lightweight but we have a few more missing pieces the the next thing we need to do is register users how are we going to register users and or sell the content that's what we need to figure out next now there's so many different options here one option is to install woocommerce create a product and that product is the membership when someone buys the membership they're registering on the site and they're paying you money that's one option another option is using a simple contact form so for example a very popular form plug-in on this channel is fluent forms and you can if you have the pro version of fluent forms you can also use it to sell stuff you can create forms for selling anything and that's another option so this is one where you can use some of the tools that you already have now here's a couple conditions we need to be able to use a tool that will cr create the user account in wordpress that's why woocommerce is very easy to do that now there's contact form plugins most of the free contact form plugins don't have as a free feature the ability to create register and create an account but there is a free form builder that's quite popular i don't ever talk about it on this channel because i really don't like the interface that they have however it's the most full featured free forms plug-in i prefer fluent forms but this video is showing you a completely free solution so right now i'm going to skip showing you woocommerce but woocommerce would be the easiest way i'm going to show you using this form builder but you can use the tool in the method that you prefer so i'm going to go to plugins click on add new over here i'm going to search for forminator kind of like terminator oh and there it is right here you can see why i don't like it i think the the way they do things is so goofy um and gimmicky like this silly dude here like smiling and stuff it is what it is i'll go ahead and click on install now and then i'll click on activate this adds a new menu item right here that says forminator so i'll click on forminator right here i will click on create actually before i click on create if you want to use this to sell access you have to configure it with your payment gateways so you would have to go and actually let me address something here it says forminator pro no there isn't a pro version as far as a version with more features they're trying to actually i take that back this must have changed recently there's a extra form fields and e-signature anyways if i was to buy something it sure as heck wouldn't be this i would use fluent forms any day of the week and i have a 25 off code in down below but that's only if you want to sell it and you don't want to use woocommerce which is entirely free like i said this is where you have flexibility so i'm going to go here to the settings is it the settings yes right here in payments so you can connect this to your stripe or connect this to your paypal and then you can create a form where you can charge the user and collect money so that's how this is going to be a completely free solution but like i said there's so many ways that you can use tools that you already own right here so now i'm going to go over to where it says forms and i'm going to click on create and there's a couple samples in here it's not showing me the form for selling because i'm not going to take the time to connect this to my payment options i'll just click right here for a registration form and then i'll click on continue and it says user registration and then i'll click on create there we go i can add additional fields if i want to and then i'm going to go over here and just click on publish and it's publishing this registration form so now once you have the user registered and they have a user account we need to do some automation and the missing piece for that and this is the special sauce that makes everything work together and gives you a lightweight automated membership plug-in is using the uncanny automator plug-in it's free but there's also a pro version that opens up more features and functionality but we can get away with using the free version but i'll show you some of the enhancements that you can get when you're using the pro version to get to the uncanny automator website go to wpcrafter.com automator and i'll have a link in the video description box down below so there's a free version of this that's going to do the automation and this is when someone registers or buys we need to change their user role to what the access level that you want them to have and that's how we're going to have everything automated so if i go over here to integrations this actually can do a ton of awesome things and it integrates with a variety of plugins including form plug-ins and e-commerce plugins so for example when i was saying forminator what we just used right here when a user submits a form do an action that's what an automation plug-in does some event occurs and that's called a trigger and then it triggers a series of multiple actions so an action can be to change the user role to send them an email welcoming them to your new membership you can send their information off to your email marketing crm and you can register for them for a webinar you can literally do all that with the free version of this plugin so when i scroll down here i kept talking about woocommerce well you can do the same thing a trigger can be when someone views a product you wouldn't want that but if someone purchases a product that could be the membership and it triggers actions now one of those actions is right here where it says wordpress core and these are the ones that are included for free the ones that say pro you would be paying for but check this out for a free action right here is change the user's role and that's what we're doing we just need to have a mechanism to automate changing the user's role but then while we're at it why don't we just send that user a nice welcome email as well and why don't we do whatever we want to do as many actions as we want to take now there's one tiny gotcha to the free version of automator what it does is it will only perform triggers and actions when someone is logged in so you just need to register the user and i just showed you how to make a registration form so you need to create the registration form they need to be logged in and then it can start doing these uh triggers and automations now the pro version though you can do what's called anonymous triggers so that means you could use fluent forms or any of these form plug-ins and it will it will take their information create the user account so they don't have to be logged in first and it will add the user role to them and it could do a whole lot more of special stuff let's go take a look at that real quick here i am on their pricing page it's very simple all the plans have everything included the only difference is the amount of sites you can use it on so the pro version is 149 and it can be used on two websites and that's pretty much all you would need only if you wanted the extra convenience now for the next five days from when i upload this video there's a special offer that i reached out to them and negotiated so what i just showed you was a one-year license and i said hey can you give my audience a lifetime license for a few bucks more than a single year license and they said yes and we made this deal happen so that same pro version that was 149 you could pay 199 and get a lifetime license with lifetime updates it will include three years of support there's also other plans including an unlimited plan right here go and make sure you check out the frequently asked questions for it though it's going to answer a ton of questions that you might have including down here it says can i pay in installments and what they're allowing you to do is if you were to purchase the lowest plan say the pro plan or the agency plan before the timer runs out at any point in the next three months you could upgrade your license by just paying the difference and you could do it on your own when you log in this is a fantastic deal it's only for a few more days and it can do so much more than just this tiny little sliver that i'm showing you in this video it can do so much more than that so for the rest of the video i'm just going to show you the free version here so we're going to go to plugins click on add new over here we're going to do a search for uncanny automator and here it is uncanny automator i'll click on install now and then i'll click on activate this adds a new menu item here on the left i'll click on it and let's go ahead and set up our trigger which is filling out the registration form and then let's go ahead and set up our actions which is to change the user role so i'll click on add new and right here i'll give the recipe a name i entered in gold member now obviously it has a ton of integrations but it's a smart plug-in it's only showing me integrations for what i have installed on my website so if i had woocommerce it would show that if i had learn dash or lift or lms it would show that if i had easy digital downloads or fluent forms it would show that but since i don't it's only showing me what i have installed and that's forminator so i want the trigger to be filling out that registration form so i'm gonna click right here and then right here when it says user submits a form i'm going to click right here and then here is my form right there and i'm going to click on save so that's going to be my trigger so now all i need to do is set up my actions so i'm going to click right here it says add action i'm going to click on where it says wordpress and i'm going to go right here where it says change the users role to a new role so i'm going to click on this a new role and then right here i'm going to choose what the role is and we know this is going to be for gold members and there it is i'm going to click on save so far this says when someone fills out the registration form then we're going to go ahead and put gold member on their user account so they're going to get access to whatever we let gold members have access to but we don't need to stop there the real power of this plugin is having multiple actions together so i'm going to click on add another action i'm going to click on wordpress and then i'm going to scroll down just a tiny bit to where it says send an email i'll click on that and right here why don't i fill out a very nice welcome email and include a login link now we can take any info from their user account or from the form submission and we could insert it in here so if i click right here where the asterisk is it's going to show all of these options so where it says common i can insert all of these things their user id their username their first name so i can put it like that and it's going to show their first name maybe i might want to say hi in front of it hi and then user first name and then i can fill this very nice email out and then i can click on save oops i should probably enter a subject and by the way you can do the same thing here for the subject i've entered welcome to the gold membership and i'm going to go ahead and click on save and so now we have a recipe that is triggered when someone fills out the user registration form and it performs these few actions so let's turn them on i'm going to turn this on i'm going to turn this on i'm going to turn that on and then i'm going to turn on the overall recipe right here by turning that and making it all live sorry that this video is as long as it is i hope you learned something from this video but we just tied it all together we completely replicated the function of a all-in-one membership plug-in solution with tools that we already have all we did was add a tiny snippet of code we didn't have to add a plugin if we didn't want to then all we needed is a way for someone to register or if you're using woocommerce just use woocommerce it's very fine and then we needed a way to determine who gets to see what and i showed you three different ways to do that and of course for me i would use the freeway which is using the free content control plug-in which is very elegant very powerful and very minimalistic and then we just needed to a way to integrate everything in perfect harmony and that is the automator plug-in you mix this all together it's not that many moving parts uh i we could have done it in probably ten minutes if i didn't explain everything in detail and you have a fully featured lightweight automated membership website you didn't have to pay anything for it you didn't have to buy something for one hundred to five 500 dollars that duplicates a bunch of functionality you already have on your website no we just used a little bit of ingenuity we use what features wordpress already gives us and we made it all work perfectly together but the real secret sauce is the automator plug-in okay that's it if you found value in this video and if you learned something give this video a thumbs up maybe share it someplace when someone's asking how to build a membership website or a lightweight membership website that helps me out i know there's going to be questions you can ask down below and i'll do my best to answer them thank you for watching this video and i will see you in the next one

Channel: WPCrafter.com WordPress For Non-Techies

Views: 67,543

Rating: 4.9198399 out of 5

Keywords: membership wordpress

Id: nyQ-pJFbpSE

Length: 38min 15sec (2295 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 03 2020