Create a paid memberships area on your WordPress site

TL;DR

Building a paid membership intranet with WordPress is easier with the right combination of tools. Paid Memberships Pro helps you create membership levels, manage subscriptions, restrict content, and handle payments, while Woffice turns your website into a professional intranet with user dashboards, private spaces, collaboration tools, and team management features. Together, they provide a flexible solution for businesses, online communities, schools, and organisations that need a secure members-only platform.

An Overview

In this article you will learn how to create restricted and membership areas on your WordPress website. To achieve this we will use Paid Memberships Pro, the best plugin to manage paid membership levels and add restricted contents, available only for a fee, to your website.
If you want to create paid contents for your community or e-learning, this is the article for you.
In addition, we will show you Woffice – a WordPress theme designed for communities, e-learning and intranets/extranets. It is totally compatible with Paid Memberships Pro and adds more features to it.

Quick overview on Paid Memberships Pro

Paid Memberships Pro is a powerful WordPress membership plugin that helps businesses, creators, and organisations build and manage membership websites, subscription services, online courses, and restricted content platforms.

It allows you to create membership levels, manage user registrations, accept one-time or recurring payments, control content access, set membership expiration dates, and automate subscription management. Paid Memberships Pro offers a free core plugin with essential membership features, while its premium plans provide advanced add-ons, enhanced integrations, developer tools, and priority support.

The plugin supports popular payment gateways, including Stripe, PayPal, and Authorize.Net, with additional gateway integrations available through official add-ons and extensions. It is designed to be flexible, scalable, and suitable for small membership sites as well as large organisations with thousands of members.

Initial Setup of Paid Memberships Pro

Before creating your paid membership intranet with Woffice, install and activate Paid Memberships Pro from your WordPress dashboard. Once activated, go to Memberships → Settings → Membership Levels and create your first membership plan by clicking Add New Level.

Create a Membership Level

When creating a membership level, configure the following settings:

• Name: The membership plan name displayed to users during registration and checkout.
• Description: Optional information explaining what members receive with this plan.
• Confirmation Message: A message shown after successful membership registration.
• Billing Details: Configure pricing, recurring subscriptions, free trials, payment cycles, and membership expiration.
• Content Access: Choose which pages, posts, categories, or custom content members can access.

After creating your membership levels, Paid Memberships Pro will require a few core pages, such as checkout, account, login, and confirmation pages.

Go to Memberships → Settings → Pages and use the automatic page generation option to create the required membership pages.

Configure Payment Gateway and SSL

To accept membership payments, go to Memberships → Settings → Payment Gateway & SSL. Choose your preferred payment gateway and configure the required account details.

You can select between:

• Sandbox/Test Mode: Used for testing payments before launching your membership site.
• Live Mode: Used when you are ready to accept real payments.

Paid Memberships Pro supports popular gateways through built-in integrations and official add-ons, including Stripe, PayPal, and other payment providers.

After configuring payments:

• Select your preferred currency.
• Configure tax settings if required.
• Enable SSL/HTTPS to secure member transactions.

Also review the Email Settings section to confirm that membership notifications are sent to the correct email address.

Restrict WordPress Pages and Content

Paid Memberships Pro allows you to protect individual pages, posts, and sections of your website.

To restrict a page:

• Open the page editor in WordPress.
• Find the Require Membership settings box.
• Select the membership levels that should have access.
• Update the page.

Only users with the selected membership level will be able to view the protected content. This feature works well with Woffice when creating a private company intranet, employee portal, or community website.

Manage Member Access and Permissions

Administrators can manually assign or update membership access for individual users.

To manage a user’s membership:

• Go to Users → All Users in WordPress.
• Open the user profile.
• Update their membership level, status, or expiration date.

This is useful when granting special access, correcting membership issues, or managing internal users within your Woffice-powered intranet.

Build a Powerful Paid Membership Intranet with Woffice

Developing a membership system designates your community as a paid facility; however, it isn’t enough to ensure success for your community or company intranet. A satisfactory user experience requires having a professional service area as a workspace, where community members can communicate, collaborate, interact with resources, and have full control over their user profiles.

Woffice enables you to upgrade your WordPress website and build a full-featured community and workspace intranet with user dashboards, private areas, project management, knowledge bases, and collaboration features, all available. Woffice, coupled with Paid Memberships Pro, enables you to create a working, engaging, fun environment for your employees, clients, students, and your online communities. Start creating your easy-to-use, professional membership intranet with Woffice now.

Frequently asked questions

Can I create a paid membership intranet with WordPress without custom coding?

Yes. WordPress allows you to build a complete paid membership intranet using plugins and themes without writing custom code. Paid Memberships Pro manages memberships, payments, and content restrictions, while Woffice provides the intranet structure with user profiles, dashboards, collaboration features, and private areas.

Why use Woffice with Paid Memberships Pro for a membership website?

Paid Memberships Pro handles the subscription and access-control side of your website, but Woffice focuses on the member experience. By combining both, you can create a professional intranet where members can access protected content, communicate, manage projects, share resources, and interact within a dedicated online workspace.

What types of websites can be built with Woffice and Paid Memberships Pro?

Woffice and Paid Memberships Pro can be used to create various membership-based platforms, including company intranets, employee portals, client portals, online communities, learning platforms, private associations, and subscription-based resource websites. The combination is suitable for organisations that need secure content access and a structured member experience.