Best WordPress membership plugins
A WordPress membership plugin gates content and bills members. MemberPress and WooCommerce Memberships (by SkyVerge, 30,000+ installs) are the commercial names; Paid Memberships Pro's wordpress.org listing closed in October 2024; Restrict Content Pro now ships as Kadence Memberships. WebJi sells none of them and quotes no plugin prices.
For Indian creators and associations setting up paid member content with recurring billing.
knowledge
- Read time
- 3 min
- Sections
- 4
- Updated
- 14 Nov 2026
- Written by
- WebJi® team
Last editorial update: 15 November 2026.
Write the job in one sentence before comparing membership plugins
Membership plugins are bought wrong when four different jobs — gating, billing, courses, community — are bought as one. "Members pay monthly and see a category" is a different product from "students finish a graded course", and only the first one is a membership plugin's core job.
- Gating: hide pages, categories or files until a membership level is active.
- Billing: renewals that charge themselves, without you raising a manual invoice each month.
- Courses (LMS): lessons, quizzes and a progress screen — many membership plugins do not include this at all.
- Community: forums and profiles; add it only if members must talk to each other.
Security, backup and SEO plugins sit on the essential WordPress plugins list, not here. A membership plugin multiplies the value of daily backups — see the backup plugin guide once the member list starts holding real money.
The four names, and what each is actually known for
MemberPress, Paid Memberships Pro, Kadence Memberships and WooCommerce Memberships cover three different shapes: rules-plus-billing, plain gating, and access tied to a shop. Facts below were checked against wordpress.org and the WooCommerce marketplace on 15 November 2026. WebJi® does not sell any of them and quotes no plugin prices.
| Plugin | Shape | Dated facts from this read | Verify on the vendor page |
|---|---|---|---|
| MemberPress | Membership rules and billing in one commercial plugin | Not on the free repository; sold on its own site | Which payment gateways the licence you buy includes |
| Paid Memberships Pro | Content restriction by level; long used by associations | Its wordpress.org listing shows as permanently closed since 17 October 2024, at the author's request | Current distribution channel, and which features are core versus paid add-ons |
| Kadence Memberships | Simpler content gating; formerly Restrict Content Pro | Existing Restrict Content Pro sites may still show the old name | The current Kadence bundle contents before renewing an old RCP licence |
| WooCommerce Memberships | Membership access tied to WooCommerce products | By SkyVerge on the WooCommerce marketplace; 30,000+ active installs, 4/5 across 154 reviews; supports content dripping | That you are ready to run a full WooCommerce shop as well |
None of this is a prize list. The Paid Memberships Pro closure is exactly why plugin choice should include a distribution check: a plugin that leaves the official repository must be obtained and updated through its vendor's own channel, and old reviews stop being a buying guide the day the listing closes.
Indian recurring payments: UPI Autopay lives at the gateway, not the plugin
UPI Autopay is a payment-gateway capability, not a membership-plugin setting, so no plugin's feature table can promise it. The plugins above usually ship Stripe and PayPal for recurring billing; Indian cards, netbanking and UPI in INR arrive through the gateway you connect.
- Cards and international recurring: MemberPress, Paid Memberships Pro and Kadence Memberships bill through Stripe or PayPal — confirm both the licence tier and your Stripe account support the currencies you need.
- UPI, cards and netbanking in INR: WooCommerce Memberships plus Razorpay's official WooCommerce plugin is the combination to verify; confirm subscriptions are enabled on your own Razorpay account before advertising them.
- UPI Autopay renewals: test with a real renewal and cancel it. A one-time UPI payment succeeding proves nothing about subscriptions.
Do not take "India" on a marketing slide as a payment promise. Place one live renewal, refund it, keep the receipt — then publish your pricing page. WebJi® sells neither the plugins nor the gateways; running the store side is covered under WooCommerce hosting.
Why member sites need more from hosting than blogs do
Logged-in members bypass the full-page cache, so every lesson view runs PHP and database work that a public blog serves from cache. A course site with many simultaneous students hits the PHP worker or process limit long before it runs out of disk.
- Estimate how many members could be inside a lesson in the same hour — enrolment day is the number to use.
- Accept that logged-in pages skip the full-page cache; that is correct behaviour, not a fault to fix.
- Ask the host for the PHP worker or process limit on the plan you are about to buy, in writing.
- Keep large videos out of the PHP request — embed them so the lesson page itself stays small.
- Move up a plan before enrolment opens if the limit is below your concurrency estimate.
WebJi®'s WordPress plans — Unlimited ₹400/month and Unlimited+ ₹500/month before GST, read from billing on 15 November 2026 — bundle daily backup and staging, which matter when a plugin update can lock every member out at once; check the current plan limits on WordPress hosting before opening enrolment, and the hands-off alternative on managed WordPress hosting.
Frequently asked questions
Is Paid Memberships Pro still usable after its wordpress.org closure?
Its wordpress.org listing shows as permanently closed since 17 October 2024, at the author's request, so it cannot be installed from the official repository. Existing installs keep running; new buyers must check the vendor's current distribution and support channel directly rather than relying on old directory reviews.
Which membership plugin works best with Razorpay in India?
The cleanest verified path is WooCommerce Memberships with Razorpay's official WooCommerce plugin, because Indian cards, netbanking and UPI flow through the gateway integration. Enable subscriptions on your Razorpay account first, then test one real renewal and cancel it before promising recurring debits to members.
Do I need a membership plugin to sell an online course?
If students must progress through graded lessons, look at a dedicated LMS rather than forcing a membership plugin to fake it. Membership plugins gate content and handle billing; quizzes, lesson order and progress screens are course-plugin territory. Use both together only when each does its own job.
What hosting should a paid membership site run on?
One with daily backups, staging and enough PHP workers for uncached member traffic. WebJi's WordPress plans at ₹400 and ₹500 a month before GST include backup and staging; before enrolment day, confirm the PHP worker limit in writing against your peak concurrent-members estimate and move up a tier if needed.
Can members' content be protected from search engines too?
Gating stops non-members reading a page; search engines are just another non-member visitor, so blocked content stays out of their reach while gated. For pages that must never appear even as a title in results, combine the plugin's protection with a noindex rule on those specific pages.
Last editorial update: 15 November 2026. Prices follow the dated sources on this page; checkout confirms current charges.
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