Things are constantly changing
I'll be honest. There are days where I feel overwhelmed by the number of different membership plugins that are in constant flux, changing and improving every day.
It's crazy to think that for the longest time there was virtually no movement (years ago I went looking for a WordPress solution and found 3 – all of which had serious engineering and performance issues).
But that's not the case these days.
If you recall, I've consistently told you that MemberPress is right up on the top of my list of membership plugins for WordPress. In some cases, iThemes Exchange did some things that MemberPress didn't (like eCommerce, which MemberPress stays clear of). WooCommerce has great subscriptions but it's member protection is a bit cumbersome (using Groups).
MemberPress is killing it!
I've told people this before. If you have to say that you're killing it, it's likely that you're not killing it.
But that's not the same thing as someone else saying you're killing it – and that's what I'm doing when I'm talking about MemberPress. They are moving and progressing better and faster than anyone out there in this space. It's impressive.
Let's talk about their most recent release
I don't want to bore you with a line by line copy of their release notes. They already wrote stuff down. But let's talk about why these new features are important.
Paywalls and Search Engines
One of the classic challenges with membership sites is that your content protection mechanism also blocks it from search engines. This can be a royal pain if you want Google to function as your lead generation.
See, if Google could index your content, then when someone searches for it, they'd find your awesome article (protected by a membership site/paywall) and be re-directed to create an account to see the content.
Now you can do that without any issues at all. You can treat Google as an authorized member, and let them see everything.
Their paywall feature also lets others see up to XX pages (you decide how many), before the site locks them out and redirects them to become a member.
They're one of the few that support this feature.
Custom Fields per Membership
This other feature is often something that gets asked of me regularly. People always want to know if they can collect further information from newly-signed-up members. My answer is always yes. Most plugins will let you do that.
But then they go further, highlighting that different memberships or membership levels will require different amounts of custom data to be collected. And this is where I smile and say it's possible but will take a bit more work.
Until now.
MemberPress supports this now natively out of the box, and that means that your low level memberships may only collect one or two fields, while your larger or more expensive memberships can collect several different pieces of data.
Messaging
Not only have they added background emailing, with the use of WP-Cron, but they've also added custom reminders.
On one of my earliest membership sites, years ago, my boss asked me if we could automatically send an email to our customers 2 months before their credit card expired.
I remember explaining that it wasn't that simple because Paypal was collecting all that info, and we weren't storing it. Additionally, trying to work with Paypal's API to collect and manage that process was more expensive than just letting them expire and dealing with it after the fact.
Yes. I was lazy. And I didn't love Paypal. But none of those things are news to you.
Now you don't have to tell your boss that it's too hard, too expensive, or that you're too lazy. MemberPress lets you do it automatically.
Here are the different messages that can now be scheduled:
- After member signs up
- After member abandons signup
- Before subscription expires
- After subscription expires
- Before subscription renews
- Before credit card expires
- After credit card expires
When was the last time you checked out MemberPress?
So let me simply ask you this question.
When was the last time you checked out MemberPress?
When did you last put them thru paces to see if it would do everything you want? Because these days they keep rolling out more features. They keep writing great articles. And they are working hard to be the only membership plugin in the WordPress ecosystem you'll ever need.
Let me know what you think of this latest release.