5 Best Membership Website Builders of 2023

Wix is tied with Squarespace for the best ease of use score out of all the builders we tested, which is proof of how simple and intuitive it is. With one click of the ‘Install’ button, your membership profile will appear on the page. You’ll have free reign over where to place it with the drag-and-drop editor.

With over 800 templates to choose from, Wix offers a lot of creative freedom when it comes to designing your website. Wix scores 4.6 out of 5 when put through our rigorous testing because of its varied customization features and large app market. This is a 4.5% increase from last year when it scored 4.4 out of 5.

“Wix has these drag-and-drop options available, and you just need to keep your eyes peeled on what may be most important to the kind of site you are trying to build. Wix’s membership site builder is an excellent option for total beginners, and can definitely set you up for success as a solo entrepreneur.” – Sam Shepler, career entrepreneur

As mentioned above, the Members Area app in the Wix App Market is completely free to install on your site. This means that whether you’re creating a website on the free plan, or optimizing a Wix eCommerce store, you can make certain content exclusive for members only.

However, if you’re looking to enable bookings or receive payments from your members, you’ll need to make sure you’re on a paid Wix plan before doing so. Paid Wix plans start at $16 per month when you pay annually and, with 24/7 customer support, the cheapest paid plan is ideal for anyone just starting out.

While you certainly get what you pay for with Wix, its value for money score has fallen by 11.8% since last year from 3.4 out of 5. While all builders have increased their prices, in our testing we found that Wix’s Features vs Price offerings took a 25% dip from 4 to a 3 out of 5. As the price rose, Wix did not adequately increase the features it offered, resulting in a loss of value for the customer.

Wix offers quality in-house features to help you build a professional membership website, and its app market provides access to a wide range of third-party integrations to support your site. Wix also increased its SEO capabilities from last year by adding Semrush integration, allowing you to do keyword research through the Wix platform!

If you find yourself seeking more than just the Members Area app, Wix provides other, easy-to-install apps like Wix Forum (free), Wix Bookings ($17 per month), and a Contact Form (free). These apps let users easily sign up to your online community with their personal information, as well as receive automatic notifications to keep members in the loop!

Squarespace’s ease of use had a dramatic rise since our last round of testing, jumping 11.1% since last year from 4 out of 5 to 4.4 out of 5! This now ties it with Wix as our easiest-to-use website builders. We found the process of designing our membership website with Squarespace super beginner friendly and straightforward. This is because Squarespace focuses on built-in integration, so you have everything you’ll need in the dashboard to really let your creativity shine through.

Squarespace scores an impressive 4.7 out of 5 for design, and we feel this has something to do with the huge improvements the builder made to its user experience (UX). Squarespace offers stunning templates that focus on minimalist design to avoid looking overly cluttered and messy.

Squarespace also provides dedicated, beautifully designed templates specifically for membership websites, so you can really make the most of its wealth of customization features.

Depending on your site’s needs, Squarespace offers four different pricing plans for you to choose from. The cheapest paid plan starts at $16 per month when you pay annually, and the most advanced Commerce plan reaches $49 per month.

Squarespace is the best value-for-money builder in our rankings, with unlimited storage and bandwidth up for grabs – even its cheapest plan. If you just want to try before you buy, there’s a free 14-day trial waiting for you – without any sneaky costs to worry about!

To start using Squarespace’s Members Area, you’ll need to be on a paid plan. The Members Area costs $9 per month and is a separate subscription from the website builder plan, which brings you to the cheapest total of $25 per month altogether.

With Squarespace Members Area, you can:

• Review Members Area subscription details, such as auto-renewal date
• Review individual invoices from each member
• Cancel a membership subscription if you wish to do so
• Use flexible payment options, like One Time, Recurring, or Free
• Enjoy SSL encryption that keeps all payment details and personal information secure

Squarespace is also helpful with social media integration, letting you announce the release of gated content across multiple platforms – and it allows for social sharing!

Shopify isn’t as sleek or as easy to use as Wix or Squarespace, as the editor can be clunky and quite difficult to use. Its themes aren’t as well-designed as Wix or Squarespace’s, plus you have to pay between $30 – $120 for most of them. Shopify does offer 10 free themes to use for those on a budget.

For online store owners though, Shopify is very good at intuitively knowing what commerce tool you’ll need exactly when you need it. This means you’ll never miss an opportunity to optimize your sales.

Shopify’s password protection is easy enough to implement, but be wary that any editing of themes or pages will involve the usage of ‘liquid Shopify’ to access the platform’s code and edit directly. This includes being able to hide your store’s header or name in the password-only pages. 

Luckily, Shopify offers great, easy-to-follow guides for users, so don’t feel you have to tackle these without any support.

Shopify is more functionality than form. You can expect to build a really impressive online store with Shopify, but in terms of total creative freedom, it can’t quite reach the heights set by Squarespace or Wix. Your password-protected membership pages are locked behind the design capabilities, too. However, with Locksmith, you do have access to change your Shopify theme directly by accessing the code.

It only has 86 themes, and the majority of them will cost you between $150-$350! Only nine of them are actually free, severely limiting your design freedom if you are on a budget,

Shopify ties with Wix by having a value for money score of 3 out of 5 due to its plan falling on the pricier side. You definitely get what you pay for, especially if you want an online store. Shopify pricing is split into three main plans:

• Basic Shopify: $29 per month

• Shopify: $79 per month

• Advanced Shopify: $299 per month

Shopify’s password protection features are available across all of its plans but, as we mentioned, to get features similar to Wix or Squarespace there are apps that you can download from Shopify’s app store, like Locksmith. Its prices are intended to match what Shopify plan you choose, with the $9 plan intended to be used with the Basic Shopify plan, and so on.

Shopify only offers password-protected pages as part of its plan. Users of  Shopify’s incredible inventory management features will really see this benefit, being able to lock prices, buy buttons, and even whole collections behind a password for customers.

Not only that, but Shopify has some of the best customer management tools available, meaning once customers are in your membership area, you’ll be able to track analytics. 

If you need even more features, these can most likely be found on Shopify’s amazing +8000 strong app store, where you can mix and match different apps to get the perfect system for your online store.

GoDaddy has a simple and user-friendly design layout in place, making it a solid website builder choice for small businesses. From members-only pages to product listings and email campaigns, everything is managed from the dashboard – so you won’t have to travel far to add an array of elements to your site.

Ultimately, GoDaddy is ideal if you’re not too sure what you’d like your membership site to look like just yet, and you’re happy to work with something simple and generic.

If you’re the type of designer who doesn’t want to waste time on every decision, GoDaddy is for you. Its ADI function builds the website for you. Just fill out a simple questionnaire about the type of website you want to build. On top of that, its stripped-back editor and simpler templates mean there are fewer features and options to go through, meaning you can design a fully functioning website in under 10 minutes!

All that being said, GoDaddty still dropped by 5.8%  in design after our most recent testing, from 4.3 out of 5 to 4.1 out of 5. A lack of template variety from last year reduced its template design score by 25% from a 4 out of 5 to 3 out of 5. 

GoDaddy also has an issue with only having a desktop version of its editor. While it promises its designs are mobile responsive, most designers would prefer the choice to edit on a phone.

GoDaddy’s pricing plans start from $9.99 per month for the Basic plan and reach $24.99 per month for the powerful, feature-rich Ecommerce plan. GoDaddy scores 4.1 out of 5 for value for money during our in-house testing, which is a slight dip from last year’s 4.3 out of 5. While you may still get a lot of bang for your buck, such as rapid page-loading performance, there has been a slight decrease in mobile responsiveness.

As for membership features, you can only add up to 25 members to your site with GoDaddy’s free trial plan. Anything beyond this will require you to upgrade to a paid plan.

If you’re looking to receive payments from your members or run appointments and events, you’ll have to choose either the Premium or Ecommerce plan.

We still found GoDaddy’s plans quite affordable when compared with a lot of the ecommerce pricing plans from other builders, though – so they’re definitely worth checking out!

• Members Imports – If you have a curated list of contacts from a previous site that you’d like to import into your new GoDaddy site, then you can absolutely do so! GoDaddy lets you import files and spreadsheets to save time.
• Marketing Emails – As soon as you’ve added a member, you can go ahead and create an email straight away to send to them. Members also instantly get an email to help them set up their new password.
• Subscribe Contacts to Blog – Once a new member has joined your community, you can add them as a subscriber to your online blog, so they’ll receive notifications when new content drops.

When compared with other website builders, WordPress.com takes a little more time to get used to. WordPress came out of our testing with a score of 2.7 out of 5 for ease of use because it has a steeper learning curve than other popular drag-and-drop editors. That was the second-lowest score in our overall rankings.

A simple installation process lets you activate plugins in no time. But still, this blogging platform lacks the sort of streamlined process you’ll tend to find with other builders because it’s not as beginner-friendly.

WordPress.com stands proud as a blogging platform, but this largely limits its ability to create a membership website for any other category. If you want to create a members-only area for your ecommerce store, we don’t recommend WordPress.com for you.

The open-source beginnings of WordPress and its continuing legacy as WordPress.org means WordPress.com is stuck somewhere between a website builder and software, making it really hard for beginners to get to grips with it.

However, WordPress.com has made real strides toward the website builder side and increased its design functionality dramatically since our testing last year. Its overall aesthetic capabilities in the editor increased by 200% from a 1 out of 5 to 3 out of 5. Improvements to its mobile editor led to a rise of 100% from 2 out of 5 to a solid 4 out of 5. 

However, WordPress is still difficult to use on its own. You are still expected to install plugins to fix a lot of your issues, such as with membership areas. But WordPress seems to be making real efforts to improve. In our research, WordPress increased its overall design score by 8.3% from 1.8 out of 5 to a 2 out of 5.

For as little as $4 per month, you get to install plugins and extend your site’s functionality, plus make use of premium design options. Just like us, WordPress.com also loves freebies and is more than happy to put a free plan on offer. The $0 per month plan lets you play around with themes without breaking the bank.

WordPress.com prices range from $4 to $25 per month. However, these prices are billed yearly, so check the annual cost against the plan you go for. The plan you should go for really depends on your budget, and how much you’re looking to grow your WordPress.com site. Just remember that membership plugins do require your site to be on a paid Business plan or higher.

Here’s what you can expect when creating a membership area with WordPress.com:

Social Media – If you’re trying to gather exclusive members for your site, WordPress.com’s social media integrations will help you spread the word. You can connect your site to various social media pages to get more eyes on your content and, soon enough, more email signups to your member’s area!

Analytics – You don’t need to worry about hunting down a third-party app to view your site’s analytics – WordPress.com has a handy one built in for you. By simply hitting the ‘Stats’ button in your dashboard, you’ll be able to keep an eye on how your members-only page is performing.

Marketing –  We should note that WordPress.com rose a very impressive 33.9% for features in our research, going from 2.1 out of 5 to 2.8 out of 5. This was due to a clear marketing features push from the company this year. In addition to social media integration, WordPress offers email marketing, SEO tools, and a custom domain name. WordPress rose 300% for marketing in our features category, going from a 1 out of 5 all the way to a 4 out of 5!

Keeping Your Members Secure – There’s nothing more frightening than personal data being mishandled and payment details being lost. WordPress.com makes sure all sites are encrypted with an SSL certificate. This ensures that all data is protected, and lets you and your members feel super safe when interacting with your site!