Getting Started with Creating Memberships

A membership is made up of any number of Courses, pages, and posts.

A membership, however, is not required in order to sell a course, but memberships can be an extremely useful tool.

Memberships can be can used to sell multiple courses together at a discounted rate, create multiple payment options for a course or group of courses, and offer courses to a specific group of students separate from everyone who visits your site.

In your WordPress Admin locate Memberships->Add Membership.

From this page the first settings you will see is the ability to title your membership and add content relevant to your membership like what kind of access it includes.

The second setting is Memberships Settings which includes the options: Sales Page, Restrictions, Auto Enrollment, and then any integrations you may be using with LifterLMS.

The third setting is Access Plans where you can set payment options for your membership.

The fourth setting is Student Management. Note that this setting will not become available until you publish the membership. Once you have the membership published you will see a list of enrolled students and the option to enroll students manually, as well as unenroll students, or locate the enrollment trigger to find the place to unenroll that student.

The final setting is Memberships that gives you the option of content restriction, disable restriction, custom plans for accessibility.

These are going to be the building blocks that bring your membership together!

Under Membership Settings you have the ability to customize the sales page content displayed to unenrolled users and visitors, set a restricted access redirect, display message, and restricted content notice, and set the courses that students will be auto enrolled upon purchasing the membership.

First for the Sales Page custom content the default option is the default membership content, so what you initially placed in as the information for your course.

You can change this to Show custom content, and a text input box will display where you can enter content about the membership that will only be displayed to visitors and non-enrolled students.

If you have a custom sales page set up, you can choose for the sales page to redirect to that page with Redirect to WordPress Page, and similarly you can redirect to a custom url of your choosing as well.

All these choices will display sales content only for users not enrolled in your membership and visitors to the site.

The second option is Restrictions where you can set redirect options to content restricted with your membership. The default setting is stay on page, display message, and a stock restricted content notice. 

These can be changed so that if someone attempts to access content restricted to this membership that they are redirected to the membership sales page, redirected to a custom WordPress Page, or a custom url. You can switch the display message on and off, and customize the restricted content notice as well.

The third option, and arguably the most important is the Auto Enrollment setting. This is where you can add and remove the courses that students should be enrolled in upon purchasing the membership.

You will see a list of the courses that you have set for auto enrollment, and below that the ability to add courses through a drop down menu.

Now that the membership is ready for launch, it’s time to add the pricing options. If you are using LifterLMS Stripe, PayPal, or Authorize.Net, follow these instructions to set up your access plans.

Note that in membership access plans, unlike course access plans, there is no setting to create a members only pay structure.

You could also set up pricing using the manual payment gateway included in the core LifterLMS.
If you are using WooCommerce to sell your course, follow these steps. This is how to decide between the LifterLMS native ecommerce system or WooCommerce.

After you have your access plan set up, you can also set a Checkout Redirect, to send the customer to a custom thank you page after the purchase is complete.

On top of the Auto Enrollment settings, you can have more control over student enrollment through the Student Management section. This will let you enroll individual students into the memberships as well as individually unenroll them.

This section will also show you what triggered the student enrollment and link to relevant order information for that student.

In building your membership page, it is important to consider the membership as a sales page versus the membership as an information hub for students to connect to the lessons they receive as part of the membership, and other membership level posts or downloads.

This is particularly important to consider when using additional plugins like Private Areas, where the membership and course are what connect your student to their private content.

Having a separate sales page for the membership, or enabling the sales information setting under the Membership Settings can help keep the page organized between unenrolled students/visitors and students enrolled in the membership.

You can customize your Membership page with shortcodes and other blocks offered through the Gutenberg editor.