Video membership site guide

If you want to have a members-only video subscription offering on your site so you can share your passion with your audience and drive revenue for your business—you’re in the right place!

When you combine the restrict embed feature of a video hosting service like Wistia or Vimeo with Memberful and WordPress, you can create a powerful video membership site!

How to build a video membership site

1. Set up a WordPress website.
2. Install Memberful on your site.
3. Choose a video hosting platform.
4. Create your Plans.
5. Add Plan purchase links to your site.
6. Embed videos on protected WordPress posts.
7. Add membership account management links.
8. Connect to Stripe.

Some terms you should be familiar with:

• WordPress.org is software you use to create a website; hosting is not included.
• WordPress.com is a commercial company that uses the WordPress.org software, but provides hosting. Memberful only works with the WordPress.com Business Plan.
• A WordPress theme is a template you add to your website to set the design and layout.
• Web hosting is a service that stores your website on the internet.
• SSL establishes an encrypted link between your website and a web browser to ensure data passed between them remains private.

Set up a WordPress website

To start, make sure you have a WordPress.org website with reliable, managed hosting and a great theme or a WordPress.com hosted website (Business Plan only!) and a great theme.

Most WordPress themes are compatible with Memberful, but we recommend the Make theme if you need a theme with a page builder or Beaver Builder if you're looking for a page builder plugin.

We also recommend using an SSL certificate on your WordPress website. Memberful signs WordPress users into your WordPress website, and if you're not using SSL, that information is less secure. All our recommended WordPress hosting providers support easy SSL certificate installation.

Sign up and install Memberful on your website

Sign up for Memberful and install the Memberful WordPress plugin on your website. Try Memberful for free for as long as you need in test payment mode.

You can also upgrade to the Pro plan for free in test payment mode: Navigate to Account → Plans and billing from your Memberful dashboard.

Choose a video hosting platform

A video hosting platform is the home for all your bandwidth intensive videos. Wistia and Vimeo (Vimeo PRO or Vimeo Business) are two great options. Both platforms offer plenty of customization options, HD videos, and reliable playback. They also provide you with the option to restrict video embedding to specific websites.

Follow these steps to get started with Wistia:

1. Upload your videos to your Wistia account.
2. Configure your Wistia account and customize your video player.
3. (Important!) Enable domain restrictions.

Follow these steps to get started with Vimeo:

1. Upload your videos to your Vimeo account.
2. Customize your Vimeo video player.
3. (Important!) Configure your Vimeo privacy settings and be sure to enable the Only on sites I choose embedding option.

Step 3 is important because it restricts the embedding of your Wistia or Vimeo videos to your domain. This ensures your members-only videos stay private.

Create your Plans

To create your Plan(s), log in to your Memberful dashboard, navigate to the Plans tab, and click New Plan. We recommend that you offer at least one monthly Plan and one yearly Plan.

If you want members to be redirected to a different page on your site after their purchase, make sure to specify a Redirect URL in your Plan Settings.

Thinking of selling multiple Plans? Learn how to set up Plan Groups.

Add Plan purchase links to your site

There are two ways to add a Plan purchase link to your site:

Option 1: Select Buy Plan from the Memberful editor button on any WordPress page or post.

Option 2: Copy the raw HTML link from the Plan Settings page in your Memberful dashboard and use it with the button options provided by your WordPress theme.

Learn more about how to add Plan purchase links to your site.

Embed videos on protected WordPress posts

We recommend that you embed each video in a new WordPress post. (Learn more about how to embed Wistia videos and Vimeo videos.)

Then protect each post using the Memberful WordPress plugin.

Categorize your video posts

Create categories to organize and filter your posts. Once categorized, you can create a dropdown menu with the categories so your members can easily access your videos.

• From your WordPress dashboard, navigate to Appearance → Menus.
• Click the Categories dropdown arrow. Select the required categories and click Add to menu.
• In the Menu Structure section, drag the categories into your preferred order. Click Save menu.

Add membership account management links

Here are a few options to add Memberful account links to your site:

• Option 1: Add a sign in link to any post or page.
• Option 2: Add sign in, sign out, and account links to your menu.
• Option 3: Add a profile widget.

To hide the sign in link from signed in members and to prevent your members from accessing your WordPress toolbar or dashboard, we recommend that you install these additional plugins.

Connect to Stripe

To test Memberful as an end user while in test payment mode, log out of your WordPress dashboard and sign up with a different email address than the one associated with your WordPress admin account. You can use the + sign with your email address to create unique accounts, e.g. lauren+test@gmail.com.

When you’re ready to start processing orders, choose your currency and connect to your Stripe account through the Memberful dashboard: Navigate to Settings → Payment. We'll automatically purge all your test orders when you switch to live payments.

Way to go! 🎉

Now that you have a paid video membership site, it’s time to announce your offering to your loyal followers and solicit some feedback. This will get you selling right away. Then, you can slowly start adding new video posts as you go. You may also want to:

• Import existing members.
• Edit the Memberful email templates.
• Customize your branding.
• Integrate with an email newsletter app (like Mailchimp or a discussion forum (like Discourse).