SureMembers: Memberships in WordPress

SureMembers is a component for WordPress that allows you to manage affiliates with a big difference: the emphasis is on content restriction. Membership plugins in general are heavy, full of checkmarks, billing, member dashboards and more… But SureMembers strips away all the clutter by responding to the fundamental premise: “who can see what on my site”.

Who is it for?

It is a practical plugin for those who have (or want to add) their website:

• Online courses.
• eBooks/documents or other digital downloads.
• Exclusive blog posts or tutorials.
• Videos or exclusive audio files.
• A private forum or group of members.

Including content and/or sections for membership users is ideal for generating income with our site. Among the possibilities we find the offer of exclusive manuals or tutorials, the collection of a monthly subscription for a free VIP access, and workshops of all kinds including teaching body disciplines. Then it's a matter of programming that only VIP members can access these paid content.

Same case for digital products, perhaps via a single payment: this would allow users who do so to access special pages related to that product, or download instructions or manuals.

In truth, the possibilities of monetizing through membership content are endless.

Initial setup

Downloaded the product from the official website, we must upload it to our hosting like this:

After uploading the plugin to the site, it remains to activate it as we show in the screenshot below.

Once the license has been entered, we will proceed to create our first “Access Group”. The Access Groups are the way SureMembers names a membership level. The idea is to add members to an Access Group and then assign contingent content to it.

After giving the Access Group a name, we can then define its rules:

Among the options it is possible to select the entire site, all Posts or Pages, or specify Pages, Posts and even certain taxonomies.

Good news is that we can then exclude particular Posts/Pages from the rule we are creating. We can also do this from the Page/Post Edition itself (more on this later).

If we have LearnDash installed, SureMembers it will recognize it and it will be displayed as an option in the protected content dropdown. We take this opportunity to remind the reader that LearnDash and SureMembers are included in our plan Managed WordPress.

Another good news is that we can release the content in time, that is, establish content “by dripping”. As we see in the screenshot below, the plugin lets us enter the days that must pass and until the time that a specific content will be released.

downloads

The final socket allows us to add downloadable files with one click.

UNauthorized access

This side socket is where we can determine what happens if a user outside the Access Group intends to access paid content.

As seen in the screenshot above, SureMembers It gives us the option of redirecting them to another page or showing a message accompanied by a call to action button.

We are allowed to use HTML code in the message (and a more advanced content editor is in the works).

Member Priority

The Priority level comes into play when a user belongs to more than one Access Group. We can create and use user roles for deep integration with content creators. If a content is restricted for one Access Group but not for the other, the higher priority will prevail.

Restrict a Page or Post from Editing

As we anticipated in the note, it is not necessary to manage all the content rules from the creation of the Access Group. The screenshot below shows us how to protect/unprotect a Post or Page directly from its editing window. This way it is also easy to verify if certain content is exclusive to paid users or not.

Restrict a Gutenberg Block

Perhaps the juiciest feature in SureMembers is the ability to restrict particular Gutenberg blocks. That is, in a whole posting of an Entry or Page it is possible to hide certain blocks at will.

A very great use of this option to manage specific blocks is that we could have an advertising banner or a call to action that, once a user becomes a member, they would stop seeing.

Member Administration

We can see all the members that belong to an Access Group on the groups administration page or through the native WordPress Users section.

SureMembers adds some elements to the Users page allowing us to filter them by Access Group. Also, we will see the active Access Groups for each user next to their username and email.

If we click on a User we will be able to manage which groups it belongs to and also see when they were added to that group.

integrations

To get started, SureMembers has direct integration with SureCart, which is obvious since these are the same developers. But it can also be integrated with WooCommerce, BuddyBoss, SureTriggers Y LearnDash.

It is also compatible with constructors Elementor, divide Y Spectra.

plans

At the time of writing this note, SureMembers offers an everlasting membership to boost your launch. The plans start at USD199 for a single site, raising its price according to the number of sites where we need to use it.

If you have your site hosted in one of our plans WordPress Hosting, you can add SureMembers at a lower cost with the Managed WordPress service.

conclusion

SureMembers focusing in one thing, the restriction of content according to users, and it does it well. It is easy to set up, has a modern interface and high integration capacity.

It's a lightweight component, well optimized, and doesn't add any useless code to our site.

Gutenberg compatible.

And it integrates perfectly with SureCart and WooCommerce allowing us to create an optimized checkout experience for our users.

We appreciate reading and we remain attentive to your comments below. We read and respond to all messages. Success and good website.