A WooCommerce Membership Site in Under 10 Minutes

Building a WooCommerce membership site doesn't have to be tough

I know that a lot of folks out there will tell you that building a WooCommerce membership site is not only tough work, but complex work. I disagree.

Often, I think the issue is not the developer side of things. It's us. The end users.

We want to create everything that Amazon and Netflix has - all in a week or two, for a few hundred bucks.

But you can actually build a WooCommerce membership site without a ton of complexity if you keep things simple.

And that's what I intend to show you here. In 7 steps. And under 10 minutes.

But I'm not going to write 10 minutes worth of reading, because that would be a very, very long blog post. Instead I'm going to show you the seven steps in seven brief videos.

And no, I didn't speed them up. I literally shot the video while I did things, and as I spoke to you. And it is less than 10 minutes of video.

(A side note, many of you read these posts in your inbox, but the videos don't always come across. You may want to read this one online.)

Step One - Get the plugins / extensions that you need

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZzfqL14yNE

You'll need the following:

• WooCommerce
• WooCommerce Memberships Extension
• WooCommerce Subscriptions Extension
• WooCommerce Stripe Gateway
• WooCommerce Custom Thank You Pages

Of course, you know I recommend Nexcess Managed WooCommerce hosting.

Step Two - Configuring membership settings

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P-eCG1WIL0

I'm giving you the settings I would choose when I build a WooCommerce membership site, but these extensions all have documentation in case you want to select a different option than I do.

Step Three - Configuring subscription settings

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tyC6_r1uGw

More settings but I promise you this is the last step and then we'll get into the details of actually building the membership site with WooCommerce.

Step Four - Building the membership plan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTiRLWUT6Xw

We finally get into the heart of building a WooCommerce membership site - by creating the membership plan itself. This is where we define the rules of what content is protected. In my example I'm using a category rule, which is a really fast way of protecting a lot of content.

Step Five - Create the membership product

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHNvLnrgOLo

Now we connect the dots between the membership plan, the product someone will buy, and the subscription plan that we'll create. You can see that it's a lot easier than you might have imagined.

(Also, do you enjoy how many different faces YouTube catches me with?)

Step Six - Circling back to the membership plan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90_xv7prO0A

Here's where I show you all the tweaks you could make to your WooCommerce membership site. You can easily change the duration of the membership or the content protection rules.

And then we end with our onboarding - the thank you page.

Step Seven - The custom thank you page

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MkMSRsyOnU

We made it. Seven steps. Under ten minutes. The final step is the thank you page that I often show after a purchase is complete. This is the longest video, mostly because I try to explain why I think it's so important to have a thank you page.

Once you have a WooCommerce membership site...

There are so many things you can do from here. But you may recall that I recently wrote a different post about how you could make a booking calendar available only to members. I think you'll dig that one, if it applies to your membership site.

Of course, if you have membership or WooCommerce questions, there's a ton of content on this site waiting for you.