How to Create a WordPress Membership Site with Stripe and WP Full Pay

First, we’re going to handle the payments, the subscriptions, the taxes, the invoices—basically the money side of the project through Stripe.

Then, the content side of the project, meaning your membership content, all the pages that you want to put behind a membership and actually control who gets to see which of those pages, we’re going to do of course in WordPress and also by using the WP Full Pay plugin along with the membership add-on.

So, yeah, the setup is super simple. I’m going to show you how to do it step by step, and yeah, let’s see how it works.

Getting Started: The Demo Site

Okay, so welcome to my website. My membership website is going to be ‘The Procrastinators Heaven,’ a safe space for putting things off together.

As you can see, I have basically all of my content ready. This is the homepage; it lists all the reasons why you would want to become a member of The Procrastinators Heaven.

We even have some tools like the excuse generator and delayed task planner, my favorite.

Installing WP Full Pay Plugin

To get started, just go to the dashboard, then into plugins, add new, and the plugin we need to make it all happen is called WP Full Pay. It’s this one. All you need to do is install and activate it.

So, I already have it installed, I just have to activate it, so let’s do that. The main plugin is here, it’s installed. This is the first element that we need to connect it all together.

What we also need is the membership add-on of WP Fullpay.

Getting the Membership Add-on

If you go to WP Fullpay, you can of course get the free version of the plugin, which we just did. As long as you want to sell individual or even subscription products through Stripe, you can do it totally for free using WP Fullpay.

However, if you want to go the next step and turn your site into a membership site, this is when you need the membership add-on. So, let’s check it out.

If you go to pricing, you’re going to see that the membership add-on is available on the middle plans. Apart from the membership add-on, it also removes the fees on any transaction that you do through this plugin.

So, yeah, once you subscribe, once you get this version, you will be able to download the add-on.

Activating the Add-on

Once you do have the add-on, just go back to WordPress and just add this separate plugin through the normal WordPress interface, just upload it here. As you would expect, I’ve actually already done that.

So, let’s just go to plugins and you’re going to see the add-on added in here. Once you activate it, just go to WP Fullpay to the settings, click on this inactive button which is going to take you to the place where you can input your WP Fullpay license.

Of course, you’re going to get that license from the website. So, let me just enter mine, let’s activate, and right now my website is ready to start working as a membership site.

Connecting with Stripe

The next thing you need to do is connect your site with Stripe. So, let’s click on the main button, and this is going to take you to Stripe.

If you don’t have a Stripe account yet, you’re going to be taken to the homepage where you’re going to be able to set up a new account. I’m not going to show you how to do that exactly in this article, but it’s basically like signing up to any other online service. Just fill out the form, provide any detail that they want, also any business detail that might be important for you to operate using Stripe.

Then, once you are done with that, you’re going to be able to integrate Stripe with your WordPress website. If you already have your Stripe account, Stripe is just going to ask you to confirm that you want to integrate that account with your website.

So, let’s just click connect. After a couple of seconds, you’re going to be taken back to your website and you’re going to see that your account has been connected, that everything is enabled.

You also get to pick if you want to work in a test mode or live mode. Of course, if you’re just setting things up, test mode is what you want to do.

How the System Works

Great, so Stripe has been connected to your WordPress website. Now what?

The way this whole system works is that Stripe is going to take care of all the payments of subscriptions themselves and making sure that you don’t have to worry about any money-related features or settings. So, basically, Stripe handles the money side.

To get started with that, what you actually have to do is go to Stripe and create your new subscription products.

Creating Subscription Products in Stripe

So, in Stripe, just go to product catalog and just add a new product. Just give me a couple of seconds, I’m going to fill out this form and show you what a finished subscription product looks like. A few moments later… and I am back.

I have three products now, they are basically three tiers of my membership website. With those done, I can now come back to WordPress and connect them to my website.

Creating Payment Forms in WordPress

Okay, so back in WordPress, let’s go to Full Pay, let’s go to payment forms, and let’s just create a new form. This is all pretty simple, it’s a basic form, so let’s just start filling it out.

Let’s call the form “Membership”. What we’re doing is that we are selling a subscription product. Let’s put the entire form on the page and create an edit.

Next, let’s go into payment, and this is where you get to pick the products that you actually want to be selling through that form. Clicking on this will show you the available choices, the products that you created in Stripe a couple of seconds ago.

For me, I will pick the first one. You can set some additional setup fees. I will just add the plan, and the form right now allows me to sell just a single plan.

Of course, to make it a more realistic form, let’s add my remaining products as well. So, let’s add this one and finally let’s add the highest tier. Okay, looks good.

Let’s move into tax. WP Fullpay is going to help you figure out the tax situation that you have. I’m going to just go with no tax, and I’m going to leave the tax question to you because, you know, it’s individual based on everyone’s specific setup, specific website, and specific business. So, let’s just go with no tax.

Customizing Form Appearance

Let’s go into appearance, and this is where you get to choose how you want to display the choice of which membership tier the user is going to select. You know, you can go with a simple drop-down or with a list of all the tiers one next to another.

I’m just going to go with a drop-down, I’m just going to go with “Subscribe”. Of course, you can change the labels to whatever you want.

Next, if you are interested, you can add some additional form fields. This of course depends on what you need from the customer. You can also customize the email notifications and even use the webhooks if you are building some more advanced functionality.

For me, I think that my form is going to be just fine. So, I’m just going to save it. It’s been saved and you can see it right here.

Adding Forms to Pages

Okay, so let’s now put this form somewhere. Quite predictably, we’re going to go into pages. Let’s set up a new page, let’s title it maybe “My Offer” just as a demo.

WP Full Pay comes with its own block. So, I can go in here, I can start typing “WP Full,” and I have the block here. Let’s just add it, let’s select the form, let’s save the draft, and just a quick demo of what the form looks like.

Right now, it’s just a standard form. The customer can pick the subscription level that they are interested in and then proceed to subscribing and buying the membership.

Creating Individual Subscribe Buttons

This is just a basic demo of how to set up the form, but I can do better. What I’m going to do instead is create some individual subscribe buttons just like this one, and I’m going to put them on like a more appealing sales page, something like this one.

I’ve already prepared it beforehand, as you can see, I think it’s a lot more convincing. So, I will just basically replace those three buttons and hook them up to WP Full Pay and let the customer select the subscription level, the membership level, that way.

So, let’s go back to Full Pay. This is the first form that I created. Let’s just clone it, let’s call it “Free Tier Clone,” and let’s edit.

In the edit, what I’m going to do is just remove all the other products, so basically just the first one is available. In appearance, let’s just switch to list of products, let’s save changes.

Let’s make two more copies of this form for the other membership tiers that I have available. So, let’s just call it “Second Tier,” let’s go, and of course, let’s change the product. And let’s just do the same for the “Third Tier”.

Okay, and there we have it. All I have to do now is take those forms, those individual forms, and include them on this page.

Implementing the Forms on Sales Page

So, let’s do that. It’s all going to be super simple. Let me just pick the right spot, this looks good.

Full Pay, let’s pick this one, let’s select the free tier form. Next one, WP Pay, let’s select the second tier. And here, let’s pick the first tier. I don’t need those buttons anymore.

Alright, let’s save the page, and here are my forms. Again, the whole form is actually condensed to a single button.

Which means that you can put it on your sales page and basically make it more convenient for the visitor to subscribe to the plan that they are interested in. If someone were to get subscribed to any of those plans, they would be able to actually go through Stripe, pay using real money, and you would get those payments in your Stripe account.

However, at this stage, they’re not actually subscribing to any content. So, let’s handle that last part now.

Setting Up Membership Roles

Through the WP Fullpay settings page, you can get to the membership settings. This is where you get to set the roles of your subscription and then based on that, pick content that should be available for a given role.

So, let’s do that. Let’s pick “Basic” as my free tier, “Bronze” that could be “Serial Delayer,” and finally “Silver” the “Master Procrastinator”. As you can see, you can also use two other tiers of subscription, but for me, for now, this is good.

So, let’s just save settings.

Configuring Access Settings

Lastly, let’s just go to the other settings page. In here, you get to pick the page that someone will see if they don’t have access to a specific page on your site. I just created a basic page for that called “No Access”.

If you’re interested in what those other options do, there are good explanations here on the right, so feel free to read that. I’m just to going to save settings, and at this stage, my site has become a membership site.

Assigning Content to Membership Tiers

All I have to do now is basically go through your content on your website and assign some of that content to be membership content. This is very, very simple.

Let’s just go into pages. I created some “Membership Central” page beforehand, this is it. I think that it’s going to act as a good home for my membership for my Procrastinators Heaven. It has some resources, it links to some tools, all great.

As you can see here, there’s a new section in the sidebar, and this is where you can set some of your pages to be available to subscribers only. You can even select the role, so this one can be basic. Let’s just save it.

Basically, this is how you make some of your pages subscriber only. This is the entire task. So, what you would do is just go through your content one by one and assign some of that content as membership content.

Conclusion

Okay, and there you have it. The technical side of the project is pretty simple. All you do is just sign up to Stripe, create your membership products in Stripe, and then just integrate them with WordPress through WP Full Pay.

The interface is pretty simple, the integration takes basically a couple of seconds. Then of course, most of your work is going to be putting together your membership content.

And, you know, I hope you’re not going to be procrastinating too much over this project, unless you want to be a member of my Procrastinators Heaven. Eithe away, I hope you’ve liked it. Let me know what you think.