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:

Set up a WordPress website

If you're new to WordPress, check out our WordPress website quick start guide.

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.

Sign up for Memberful

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. You can also check out Streamable, Cloudflare Stream, SproutVideo, and Vidyard.

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.

Plans tab

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

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.

Memberful editor button

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.

Memberful HTML Plan purchase links

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.

Protect WordPress video content

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.

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

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:

Can't find what you're looking for? We'd love to help! 💪

Send us a message through the orange chat bubble in the lower right corner of the page. You'll hear back within a few hours Monday - Friday. 😀