WooCommerce Memberships Settings

This document offers details on WooCommerce Memberships settings and content restriction modes. Memberships allows you to determine how your restricted content should be presented to non-members and lets you control the messaging used when content is restricted.

If you’d like to index some of your protected content for SEO, you can do so with excerpts enabled; you should use “Hide content only” or “Redirect to page” as your restriction mode to do so (we recommend using “Hide content only”).

Restriction modes

When setting up Memberships, you’ll first need to understand the restriction modes available to hide your content from non-members. Members will see content in its entirety if they have access, but non-members can see a few different things depending on these settings.

Hide completely

If you choose to hide content completely from non-members, it will be completely hidden until a membership is purchased or the member with access logs in. This means that restricted blog posts, products, or other content will not be accessible on your site at all and trying to access restricted content will lead to a 404 page.

Restricted posts or other content will not show up in archives, such as your shop or blog archive. If a non-member tries to visit the URL for restricted content, a 404 page will be displayed.

Comments on restricted content are hidden as well since the content cannot be accessed.

As a result, search engines cannot index restricted content. This mode should be used if you want membership content to be completely private.

Hide content only

Hiding content only will restrict content and comments unless a member has access. It differs from hiding completely because restricted content will appear in archives and on your site (such as your blog or shop page).

If content is hidden, restricted pages, posts, and content can be accessed, but none of the content will be displayed. Instead, a restriction notice is shown (only the title and featured image are available).

This is helpful if you want to “tease” restricted content in order to sell your memberships, as non-members can see that this content exists, but cannot access it and will encounter a restriction notice if they try to view the content.

“Hide content only” allows you to optionally show excerpts of content, which will display excerpts to both visitors and search engines.

 Free add-on available! Easily adjust the excerpt length with this add-on so you can control the amount of preview content available to non-members.

You should be aware of how products are treated when content is hidden. In the shop pages, products will be shown, but only the title (and optionally, the short description), will be included — no descriptions or images will be shown.

You can use the “Hide restricted products” setting within the Products settings to avoid this, which will remove restricted products from shop pages. They will still be accessible directly, and will show the content restricted message unless the member has access. The product page looks the same whether the product is hidden from the shop or not:

Redirect to page

Redirecting customers to a page behaves similarly to hiding content only, as content will be included in archives with the title and featured image. This means that restricted blog posts and products will show in your blog or shop, and excerpts can optionally be shown.

However, if the customer tries to access this content (i.e., tries to view the post or product), the customer is redirected to a page that displays the appropriate restriction notice. The customer will also be redirected from archive pages for the restricted term (such as the archive page for a restricted category), not just the individual posts or pages assigned to that term.

The content restricted page should contain the [wcm_content_restricted] shortcode by default. This is a “smart” shortcode that will have the referring source passed in — this means that the shortcode knows where the visitor came from so it can dynamically display the correct restriction message (i.e., one for products or one for content).

You can opt to customize this page or use a generic landing page instead by removing this shortcode or by customizing it with a developer.

General settings

General settings are located on the WooCommerce > Settings > Memberships page under the “General” section.

• Content Restriction Mode – The selected restriction mode determines what happens when a non-member views restricted content.
• Redirect Page – Shown when the Content Restriction Mode is set to “Redirect to page”. Select the page where non-members should be redirected when they try to access restricted content. Defaults to a “Content restricted” page created by Memberships.
• Show Excerpts – Shown when the Content Restriction Mode is not set to “Hide completely”. Select if you want to display excerpts of restricted content for non-members and search engines. By default, excerpts will include the first 55 words of the restricted content, but this length can be changed with a snippet. You can also enter a custom excerpt from within the page or post editor.
• Inherit Parent Restrictions – Select if the restriction rules applied to the “parent” should also apply to its “children” for hierarchical post types, such as pages.
• Redirect members upon login – Select where you want to redirect your members to when they log into your site.
• Login redirect page – Shown when Redirect members upon login is set to “Site page”. Select the page where members should be directed to when they log into your site. If this page is restriced from the member’s plan that is logging in, they will not be redirected.
• Account Erasure Requests – Select if you want to automatically delete memberships when a personal data erasure request is processed. See Memberships Privacy & GDPR for more details.

Groups integration

This settings area will only be shown if the Groups plugin is active on the site. Click Import Members from Groups to bring you to the Groups import workflow where you can import Groups members to Memberships.

Please see the Groups Integration documentation for more details.

Product settings

Product settings are located under WooCommerce > Settings > Memberships, under the “Products” section.

• Apply discounts when purchasing membership – Enable this setting to apply eligible discounts when customers are purchasing the membership product.
• Allow cumulative purchases – Enable this if, should customers purchase multiple products that grant access to a membership plan within the same order, you want to extend the membership length. If disabled, only “one” membership length will be granted per order, regardless of how many products in the order grant access to the plan.
• Discounts apply to subscriptions sign up fees – (Shown if Subscriptions is active) Enable this to apply member discounts to both the subscription sign up fee and the recurring price. If disabled, member discounts will only apply to the recurring price.
• Exclude products on sale from member discounts – Enable this if member discounts should not apply to products on sale.
• Hide restricted products – Enable this setting to remove products with viewing restricted from the shop catalog — applies to restriction modes of “Hide content only” and “Redirect to page”, as “Hide completely” already removes products from the catalog. Products will still be accessible directly.

Messages settings

The messages settings let you control the “content restricted” notices shown to non-members when visiting your site. These messages can adjust based on whether a purchase can grant access or not, along with what kind of content is being viewed.

Restriction messages can accept a limited number of merge tags to dynamically insert content:

• {products} inserts the product(s) needed to gain access.
• {date} inserts date a member will gain access if access has been delayed.
• {login_url} inserts the URL to my account page with the login form. If used, the member will be redirected back to the page this link was clicked from after logging in.
• {login} (or {Login}) inserts a full login link with the anchor text “log in”: Log in. If used, the member will be redirected back to the page this link was clicked from after logging in.

Blog restriction messages

• Post Restricted (Purchase Required) – The message displayed when a blog post is restricted and a membership purchase is required to gain access.
• Post Restricted (Membership Required) – The message displayed if a blog post is restricted, but is restricted to a membership that cannot be purchased (members can only be added by a shop admin).
• Post Delayed (Members) – The message displayed to a member when the member will have access to the post in the future, but not yet.

Page restriction messages

• Page Restricted (Purchase Required) – The message displayed when a page is restricted and a membership purchase is required to gain access.
• Page Restricted (Membership Required) – The message displayed if a page is restricted, but is restricted to a membership that cannot be purchased (members can only be added by a shop admin).
• Page Delayed (Members) – The message displayed to a member when the member will have access to the page in the future, but not yet.

Content restriction messages

These messages are shown for restricted content that is neither a blog post or page, such as content created by other plugins (or other custom post types).

• Content Restricted (Purchase Required) – The message displayed when content is restricted and a membership purchase is required to gain access.
• Content Restricted (Membership Required) – The message displayed if content is restricted, but is restricted to a membership that cannot be purchased (members can only be added by a shop admin).
• Content Delayed (Members) – The message displayed to a member when the member will have access to the content in the future, but not yet.

Product restriction messages

• Product Viewing or Purchasing Delayed – The message displayed when the member will have access to the product in the future, but not yet.
• Product Viewing Restricted (Purchase Required) – The message displayed when the product can’t be viewed / accessed and a membership purchase is required to gain access.
• Product Viewing Restricted (Membership Required) – The message displayed if the product viewing is restricted, but is restricted to a membership that cannot be purchased (members can only be added by a shop admin).
• Product Buying Restricted (Purchase Required) – The message displayed when the product be viewed but not purchased, and a membership purchase is required to gain access.
• Product Buying Restricted (Membership Required) – The message displayed if the purchasing the product is restricted, but is restricted to a membership that cannot be purchased (members can only be added by a shop admin).

Discount messages

• Product Discounted (Purchase Required) – Enter a message if you’d like to enable discount messages. This message will be displayed on the product page to non-members or guests if the product is discounted for a membership that can be purchased. Leave blank to disable the message.
• Product Discounted (Membership Required) – Enter a message if you’d like to enable discount messages. This message will be displayed on the product page to non-members or guests if the product is discounted for a membership that cannot be purchased. Leave blank to disable the message.
  

• Member Discount Login Reminder – Select when and where to display a login notice for members: never, on the cart page, at checkout, or both. This notice will only display to remind members to log in if a product in the cart has a member discount.
  

  

• Member Discount Login Message – Change the text of the discount login notice. Leave blank to use the default text, which will adjust based on the number of discounted items in the cart.

Shipping settings

Memberships can allow you to offer free shipping exclusively to your members. This can be done by adjusting the free shipping rate settings.

If you’d like to offer a free shipping method only to your members, you can choose that free shipping requires an active membership in the shipping method settings. You can then determine which members are offered this rate.

You can add one or more member-specific shipping rates. Non-members and guests will not be offered this rate in the cart and checkout; this rate is only offered to logged-in members.

If you’d like to also offer free shipping to non-members and guests, you can still do so with regular free shipping rates. If you do add a non-member rate, we recommend adding your members who will get their own free shipping as “disallowed”. This way, members do not see more than one available free shipping rate at a time.

In this way, you can offer specific free shipping to both members and some guests in your store.

Email settings

Memberships adds five new emails under WooCommerce > Settings > Emails.

• Membership note – Sent to members when a member-facing note has been added to a membership (not sent for private/default notes).
• Membership ending soon – Sent to members 1 to 60 days before a membership ends.
• Membership ended – Sent to members when their membership expires.
• Membership renewal reminder – Sent to members 1 to 60 days after a membership ends to ask for renewal. This email is only sent for memberships that are accessed via product purchase, since other membership types can’t be renewed.
• Membership activated – Sent to members when a delayed membership is activated.

For Ending soon and Renewal reminder emails, you can also reschedule all emails if you want to adjust sending times. Clicking the “Reschedule” action after saving your settings will allow you to adjust email schedules for all existing memberships (without this action, settings changes only apply to new memberships moving forward).

Content can be customized on a per-plan basis for ending soon, ended, and renewal reminder emails to respond to whether the plan can be renewed, can upsell other plans, etc.

For example, if a registration-based membership ends, this cannot be renewed, but you may want to upsell a “full” or paid membership. The “Membership ended” email provides an opportunity to do so:

Endpoint settings

Under WooCommerce > Settings > Advanced, you’ll find the endpoint settings for your store’s account section. Memberships adds a “My Membership” endpoint for the Members’ Area, which displays accessible content, etc, to the member.

If you’d like to disable access to the members’ area, you can delete this endpoint, and the “Memberships” item will not appear in the account navigation.

This setting will default to members-area for the endpoint, which means the URL for the Member Area will look something like this:

http://mysite.com/my-account/members-area/1008/my-membership-content/

Where 1008 is the ID of the membership plan for which the member is viewing accessible content / products / etc, and the “my-membership-content” will adjust based on which section is viewed.