Wishlist Member WordPress Membership PlugIn

If you’re considering building a paid-access Wordpress membership site, you’re probably wondering which membership software to use. This article is here to help you.

I currently run two membership sites. One using aMember + Joomla + phpBB and one using WordPress and the Wishlist Member plugin.

Both sites are new and right now is a good time for me to share about using them because I’ve been in Membership Software Land for the last six months straight. Everything is fresh in my mind.

In this article I’m going to share specifically about the Wishlist Member plugin. (I’ll follow up with a post about what I’ve learned about using aMember).

My Confession

I bought Wishlist Member and fell in love with it right away.

Of all the WordPress Membership site plugins I came across (about five of them) it stood out in terms of:

Cost / Affordability

• It was only $297.00 for unlimited license (they also offer a single license for $97.00).

Professionalism of Pre-purchase Support

• They actually responded quickly and professionally to several pre-purchase questions I had sent them via email.

Available Information

• Wishlist makes their set of Tutorial videos (30 of them) freely available for you to watch before you buy. This was a perfect way to check out nearly every aspect of the plugin ahead of time.

Feature Set

• None of the above would mean anything if it wasn’t a first-rate premium plugin. It is.

Wordpress Membership Site with Forum

Quickie: use Wishlist Members if you are only using Wordpress for your content. If you want a forum to be included, you can run the free and quite impressive SimplePress Forum plugin in a WP page and it too will be protected.

This is an excellent solution that gives you incredible control over how you protect your WP content and it’s about as easy to set up as you could get.

• You can have incremental content delivery
• You can offer multiple membership levels – easily.
• You get first-rate support from the development and sales team at Wishlist
• It’s Easy to use
• You’ll save a ton because it affordable

If I could run all of my sites (other CMS) with this plug in, I would.

What are the downsides?

The downside of Wishlist Member is that you cannot protect anything outside of Wordpress. Not that you’d expect that from a WordPress plugin. But you may need that for your membership site regardless.

For example, say you are streaming video at your site and somebody decides to look at your HTML code and find the URL of the video files. With Wishlist Members, you cannot protect that content because the video file is not part of WordPress – it’s just being called by Wordpress.

So – that’s a weakness of Wishlist Member.

If you need to protect folders of content on the server as well as your WordPress blog you would use this software.

Bottom line: If you want to get a paid-access, membership site going on Wordpress – buy Wishlist Member and install it and start using it. It’s only $97.00 and if you’re in this as a business, it’s nothing compared to the money you’ll make when people are paying for your content.

In other words – it is a no brainer, no effort, easy decision.

Go for it.

Check out the Wishlist Members Tutorials
Go Straight to the Wishlist Members Shopping Cart

UPDATE

After my quick review was posted, Stu from Wishlist Member pointed out some very cool information that I did not know about! Here it is…

We saw your review and we’re certainly glad to hear that you like WishList Member

One thing to note…

You can actually protect files insider your membership by using a couple other WordPress plugins in combination with WishList.

They can be found here:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/download-monitor/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/drain-hole/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/secure-files/

The one we most recommend is Download Monitor but they are all very similar (it just depends on what version of WordPress you have).

Hopefully that helps.

Take care.

Stu