How to Add the Subscription-Based Membership Plan in Your Registration Forms?

This guide walks you through creating a subscription-based membership plan directly within your registration forms using User Registration & Membership Pro v5.0 or higher. By the end, you’ll be able to create tiered membership plans with pricing, trials, and payment options.

Prerequisites: 
User Registration & Membership Pro v5.0 or higher. 
Payment gateway accounts (PayPal, Stripe, or Bank) for processing subscriptions.

Start With Installation and Activation of Plugin #

1. Firstly, you need to purchase the User Registration & Membership Premium Plan.
2. Download the plugin zip file from your WPEverest account page
3. Install and activate the plugin:
   On your WordPress dashboard, visit Plugins > Add New > Upload Plugin.
   Upload the zip file, and then install and activate it.
4. Enable membership features:
   During activation, select Membership Registration and install essential pages (Registration, Pricing, Thank You, and more)

Here's a detailed setup guide on getting started with User Registration & Membership Plugin. 

Creating a Subscription-Based Membership #

Before you create your subscription-based membership, you can explore the pages installed, the default registration form, the default membership, and others.

Let’s start creating a subscription-based membership:

Step 1: Access Membership Settings #

1. From your WordPress dashboard, navigate to User Registration & Membership > Memberships.
2. Click on the Create new Membership button at the top-right corner.

Step 2: Configure Basic Membership Details #

A form will be displayed to Create a Membership, fill in the necessary details. Next, select a Membership Type, and Price. You can choose a Subscription-Based Plan as shown below:

• Membership Name: Give a name to the membership you are creating.
• Membership Description: Describe the nature of the membership or any other details you want to add.
• Membership Status: Enable or Disable the status of the Membership.
• Membership Role: Choose the role you want to assign to this membership type.

Step 3: Set Up Membership Type & Price #

1. Select Subscription Based as Membership Type

Subscription-based membership requires users to pay a fee at regular intervals based on the duration you set.

Trial Period

You can also enable Trial Period to let the users subscribe to the membership for the allocated trial period without paying for it.

2. Configure pricing and trial period

• Set regular payment amount
• Define duration as subscription interval
• Enable/Disable the trial period

Payment Gateway Configuration #

Before you enable the payment gateway on the membership plan, you need to first configure payment through the global setting. Here’s how you can do that:

Step 1: Access Payment Settings #

If you try to enable payment gateways on membership plans, you’ll be notified about the incomplete settings.

Click directly on the settings notification or navigate to UserRegistartion & Membership > Settings > Payments on a new tab to configure.

Configure details for available payment gateways: Stripe, Paypal, and Bank Transfers.

• PayPal: Enter API keys and enable sandbox mode for testing.
• Stripe: Add publishable and secret keys.
• Bank Transfer: Provide account details for manual payments.

You can get the keys for each payment gateway from your account dashboard on their respective website.

Save the settings.

Step 2: Enable Payment Methods on Membership #

1. Return to the membership creation tab
2. Enable the preferred payment gateways
3. Hit on Create Membership, once you are done.

In your Memberships tab, you can see all the membership plans that you have created. Enable/disable the plans as per your choice. For example, you might not need to enable Default Membership.

Create Membership Groups #

After creating the memberships, you can also create a Membership Group. A Membership Group is a way to organize and categorize multiple plans under a shared structure. This feature is essential when you have multiple subscription plans.

1. To create a new Membership Group, navigate to Membership Groups and click on “Create New Membership Groups“. Now, add the necessary information to the forms.

Group Name: Give a group name to the membership group you are creating.
Group Description: Describe the nature of the membership or any other details you want to add.
Group Status: Enable or Disable the status of the Group.
Select Membership: You can select the memberships you want to include in this group. Click on the field and the created memberships will appear in the list.

Click on Create Membership Groups once you enter the necessary details.

Example of subscription-based membership pricing page at the frontend:

Add Membership Plans to the Registration Forms #

Step 1: Add Membership Field to the Form #

1. Go to User Registration & Membership > All Forms > Registration Forms
2. Select the existing form or create a new form to add the membership
3. On your form, search for the “Membership Field” and drag it to the form builder page as shown below
4. If you’re using the default form, the Membership Field will be added by default with default membership. You can modify it as per your preference.

The form will now have all the active membership plans.

Step 2: Configure Membership Field Options #

1. Click on the “Membership Field” and you’ll see Field Options on the left.
2. From here, you can edit the general settings of the field.

3. Membership Listing Options

• Show all active memberships: To show all the active membership plans
• Select a group: To show the membership plans assigned under a specific group

If you wish to show Membership groups, you can select from the available groups.
4. Click on Update Form after you have completed creating the membership form.

Preview of subscription-based membership registration form:

Users can now fill in the details and submit the form:

Setting up Membership Registration and Thank You Pages  #

By accessing the Membership settings, you can easily set the preferred page as the registration and thank you page:

1. Navigate to User Registration & Membership > Settings > Membership.
2. From here, you can choose the Member Registration Form Page. This is the page that will have the membership registration form.
3. Next is the Thank You Page which redirects users after they register for the subscription.

Note: The Membership Page and Thank You page are automatically created and selected on default.

Example of Signing Up for a Subscription-Based Membership Plan: #

Now, you can easily manage members using the Payment History. Here's a detailed guide on using Payment History for managing members. 

Content Management for Membership #

Once you have created the Membership/s, you will then need to set content rules using the Content Restriction feature of the User Registration & Membership plugin.

For example, if you create a Free Membership plan, you need to restrict certain contents to the user who subscribes to this Membership. This way, the contents can be visible to the paid members only. Let us see how to achieve this:

• Go to User Registration & Membership > Content Rules.
• Click on the Add New button to add a content rule.
• Give a name to the rule and select either ‘Access‘ or ‘Restrict‘ on the Access Control option. The ‘Access’ option is used to provide access to the content for the designated users and the ‘Restrict’ option will restrict the content. For this example, we will select ‘Restrict’. Hit the Continue button.
• On the CONDITIONS & LOGICS section, you will need to choose ‘UR Form Field’ from the ‘Add Field’ option. This will then give you the list of the Memberships Forms you have created.

• On the TARGET CONTENTS, you will need to select the contents on your site that you want to restrict to the chosen Membership.

You can choose either Post Types, Taxonomy, Pick specific Posts, Pick specific Pages, or the Whole Site.

• On the ACTION, choose what you want to show or where they will be redirected if they try to access the restricted content.

• Click on Create Rule, to create and save the rule. If you want to pause the rule-making and continue it later, click on the Save as Draft button.

Display the Available Memberships on Frontend using Shortcodes #

To display the membership pricing, you can use the shortcode [user_registration_groups] on the Membership Pricing page.

Note: If the Membership Pricing Page is installed at the time of pluign activation, the page will automatically have the shortcode.

Here’s how it might look at the frontend:

Shortcode to show membership pricing in frontend: [user_registration_groups] 

Display the Specific Memberships Groups on Frontend using Shortcode #

You can use the shortcode [user_registration_groups group_id=”5″] on a page/post where you want to display the particular Membership Groups.

Shortcode to show membership group pricing in frontend: [user_registration_groups group_id="YOUR_GROUP_ID"]

Here the group id “5” is used just for example, you can copy the shortcode of the group you’ve created and paste it.

You can also modify the button text that has “Sign Up” by default. To modify, copy the shortcode: [user_registration_groups id=”5″ button_text=”Join Now”].

Shortcode to change button text in membership: [user_registration_groups group_id="YOUR_GROUP_ID" button_text="YOUR_TEXT"]

Again, you should replace the group id with the one that is available for your membership group. Next, you can replace the button_text value with anything you wish for. Once you make the changes, the membership pricing page might look like something similar to the image below:

Additional Resources #

• Creating Membership with User Registration & Membership
• Payment History for Managing Member
• Content Restriction Documentation