5 Best Membership Website Builders of 2023
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Our Methodology
Artists told us they most value quality template designs and value for money, so these factors carried extra weight in our research.
Written and researched by:
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If you are looking to create a website that offers members access to a VIP community and exclusive rewards, our research shows that Wix is the best membership website builder. It is seriously easy to customize and implement into an existing site – and it’s completely free!
It may not be for everyone though, so we’ll be looking at the top website builders to use when creating a membership site. We researched and rated each one in terms of use, design, features, and value for money.
Whether you’re offering online courses or special entry to never-seen-before content, creating a membership website is a great way to earn recurring revenue and build your customer loyalty.
5 Best Membership Website Builders
- Wix – Best website builder for greater member security and control
- Squarespace – Best for creating premium member content
- Shopify – Best for adding a membership section to an online store
- GoDaddy – Best for creating a membership website quickly
- Wordpress.com – Best for adding membership plugins
What Is a Membership Website?
Before we jump into how to choose the right one, let’s go back to the basics for a refresher on what a membership website actually is. A membership website is a private part of your site that offers exclusive access to content for registered users only.
What’s the difference between a subscription and membership website?
A subscription website requires users to enter into a financial contract with the site to access its content and services. Take Netflix, for example. We’re unable to consume all those binge-worthy TV series and classic films without paying a monthly fee, right?Alternatively, membership websites don’t necessarily require payment. Instead, users can simply sign up with an email address to unlock rewards, newsletters, and whatever else is included.
| Best overall for creating membership only areas  |  |  |  |  |
| Wix | Squarespace | Shopify | GoDaddy | WordPress.com |
| Overall Rating 4.8 | Overall Rating 4.7 | Overall Rating 4.3 | Overall Rating 4.2 | Overall Rating 3.2 |
| Starting from | Starting from | Starting from | Starting from $9.99 | Starting from $4 |
| Free plan or free trial Free plan | Free plan or free trial 14-day free trial | Free plan or free trial Free trial | Free plan or free trial Free plan | Free plan or free trial Free plan |
| Ease of use 4.4 | Ease of use 4.4 | Ease of use 4.0 | Ease of use 4.1 | Ease of use 3.2 |
| Design Flexibility 4.6 | Design Flexibility 4.7 | Design Flexibility 4.0 | Design Flexibility 4.1 | Design Flexibility 1.8 |
Through a combination of hands-on experience and our dedicated in-house research team, we’ve created this list to only include the most up-to-date and necessary information so you can make your choice in the most informed way possible.
If you would like to know more about our methodology, you can read it in our dedicated section at the end of the article.
Wix
Best Website Builder for Greater Member Security and Control
Wix
Best Website Builder for Greater Member Security and Control
- Really easy to use
- Dedicated members page
- Plenty of integrations
Free plan available
Paid Plans: $16 - $159 / month
Pros
-
Drag and drop editor - Ability to integrate apps
- Access to community forum
Drag and drop editor Cons
- Have to upgrade for payments
- User logins fairly complicated
Have to upgrade for payments 
Wix’s easy-to-use, drag-and-drop editor makes it a strong fit for creating almost any website and, in this case, it’s also the easiest website builder for adding a members-only area to your site.
While you’re in the process of designing your Wix website, simply head over to the toolbar on the left-hand side of the editor and click on ‘Add Apps.’ This will pull up a range of apps you can install onto your site.
Wix’s Members Area tool gives you access to login bars and user profile accounts. This means every member gets their own dedicated page which stores things like account information, redeemable rewards, and any exclusive content you’ve given them access to.
When creating a membership website, it’s handy to include a community forum as a space for online members to share knowledge, questions, and recommendations with each other. It’s a great way for users to connect through your brand, which boosts customer engagement on your site!
You can create your own online community with the Wix Forum app. As the community admin, you can create discussion boards and even post internal news like exclusive job posts.
- Stores on Wix: Members may check the progress of their orders, save their information, and handle their payment cards to speed up the purchase process.
- Wix Reservations: Members have control over their schedules.
- Events on Wix: Members can organize their meetings and examine their activity history.
- Stores with Pricing Structures: Subscriptions can be seen and managed by members.
The best part of the Wix Members Area? It’s completely free to use on any Wix website.
Even if you’re creating a basic website with Wix’s free plan, you’ll still be able to play around with the membership app, adding a personal touch to your site. With it, you’ll be able to let members customize and manage their accounts from mobile devices and provide exclusive access to content chosen by you. Ultimately, this will strengthen your brand’s community and the loyalty your customers feel towards it.
It’s worth noting that, should you wish to accept payments and enable bookings with your members, you’ll need to upgrade to a Wix paid plan. This is particularly useful information if you’re thinking of providing online classes that members would need to book, or if you wanted to charge for any services.
Wix Gallery
Click the image below to expand “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
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.
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
Best for Creating Premium Member Content
Squarespace
Best for Creating Premium Member Content
- Best value for money
- Three membership types
- Member area starts at $9
Free trial available
Paid Plans: $16 - $49 / month
Pros
- Best overall value for money
- One Time, Recurring and Free memberships
- Beautiful designs
Cons
- Member area starts at $9/month
- No file-specific protection
Similar to Wix, Squarespace’s Members Area is a private part of your website that gives signed-up or paying members of your community access to premium content.
Squarespace’s members-only feature can be added to your Squarespace site for $9 per month. If you set up a Squarespace website at the standard pricing of $16 per month, this will bring the price of running a premium online community up to $25 per month. If this sounds reasonable, then you don’t know half of it! Since our last round of testing, Squarespace is now our best value for money builder with a solid 4.6 out of 5, an amazing improvement of 15% in our rankings
Squarespace Membership Types Explained
Squarespace offers three different types of memberships that you can set for users depending on the content you’d like to offer:- One-Time Membership – This is where customers make one payment for lifetime access to the exclusive content
- Recurring Membership – Customers make monthly or annual repeat payments (like an ongoing subscription) to access the content. If the payments stop, this access is revoked from their account
- Free Membership – Users aren’t required to financially commit to anything. Just a simple email sign-up lets them in on the premium content!
How to set up a members-only area with Squarespace:
- Create a Squarespace account and sign up to one of its premium plans
- When editing your website, go to ‘Settings’ on the left-hand side
- Click on the ‘Members Area’ tab
- Press ‘Create Member Area’ which brings you to the members panel
- Hit the + button to create a new member area and give it a name! We’d recommend something nice and simple, like ‘Members Only’
- Then set up your membership type, either One Time, Recurring, or Free (if you’ve chosen a paid membership type, make sure to enter the amount you’d like members to pay)
- Now, a brand new member area has been created!
Creating Premium Content for Your Members
In the member’s panel, you’ll see a tab called ‘Pages.’ Here you can select a ready-made page layout or a blank page, which lets you create something from scratch for your members.
You can choose anything from blogs to portfolios, and even pages that showcase upcoming events!
Squarespace Gallery
Click the image below to expand Squarespace also provides dedicated, beautifully designed templates specifically for membership websites, so you can really make the most of its wealth of customization features.
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.
- 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!
Want to Know More About Squarespace?
Check out our in-depth Squarespace Review that looks at the website builder as a whole.Alternatively, you can see our top two membership website builders go head to head in our Wix vs Squarespace comparison article.
Shopify
Best for Adding a Membership Section to an Online Store
Shopify
Best for Adding a Membership Section to an Online Store
- Best for online commerce
- Third-party integrations
- Stiff design
Free trial available
Paid Plans: $29 - $299 / month
Pros
- Best for online stores
- Apps like Locksmith are quality
- Great scalability
Cons
- Have to pay for some of the apps
- Site design isn't as good as others
Shopify is our third-best overall web-building platform, scoring 4.3 out of 5 in our in-depth research. Even though it’s an ecommerce-focused platform, you can still build a non-online store membership area if you want. However, if you want the best of what Shopify has to offer, then keep to online stores!
Unlike Wix and Squarespace, Shopify has no built-in membership area feature, but you can password-protect pages on your online store. Here’s how:
How to add your online store password:
- From your Shopify admin, go to Online Store > Preferences.
- Scroll to the Password protection area, and check Restrict access to visitors with the password.
- In Password, enter the password that you’ll give to the customers who you want to access your online store. Don’t use the same password that you use to log into your admin.
- In Message for your visitors, enter the message that you want to show on the password page. If you don’t want to show a message, then leave this field blank.
- Click Save
If this isn’t quite what you had in mind, don’t worry! Shopify has a number of apps that fulfill a similar purpose through its +8000 app store.
What third-party apps are available?
Locksmith is the most popular of these apps. You can control access to products, pages, collections, and variants by giving chosen customers ‘keys,’ These ‘keys’ can be based on anything at all, from customer tags, email addresses, passcodes, secret links, geographical location, purchase history, schedule, and more!
Locksmith offers four plans that begin at $9 per month and come with a free 15-day trial. Each plan is designed to integrate with whatever Shopify plan you choose – for instance, the $9 per month option is designed for the Shopify Basic Plan, which starts at $29 per month.
Another app that Shopify offers is Bold Memberships, which allows you to actively sell memberships on your Shopify store and give access to exclusive prices, products, pages, and blog posts. You can even change Shopify templates for members!
Shopify Gallery
Click the image below to expand 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.
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,
- 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.
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
Best for Creating a Membership Website Quickly
GoDaddy
Best for Creating a Membership Website Quickly
- Fastest builder
- 25 members on free plan
- Subscribe members to blog
Free trial available
Paid Plans: $2.99 - $469.99 / month
Pros
- Fastest way to build a website
- Import members
- Included in normal plans
Cons
- Only 25 members allowed on free plan
- More manual process
GoDaddy’s membership builder involves a manual process than other website builders.
Similar to other email marketing platforms, GoDaddy requires you to add individual members to your site, or upload an existing file of members who have given their permission to be contacted in the past.
Top Tip:
You can only begin to add members to your site after you’ve created at least one private page. Private pages can be any page on your site except the homepage, and will only be visible to members.How to add members to your GoDaddy site:
- Head over to your GoDaddy products page
- Scroll down to find your list of GoDaddy sites
- Click on the ‘Manage’ button next to the site you want to add members to
- Once you’re in the editor, click on the ‘Dashboard,’ and select ‘Connections’ > Members
- Select ‘Add Contacts’
- You can now add individual members to your site by filling in their personal data such as names, email addresses, and phone numbers – or add members via file upload
Once you have all your members on your site, you can start creating members-only content and emails to send out. You can manage all your member’s areas from an all-in-one dashboard. You can even delete a user’s member status from this dashboard if they cancel.
Unique to GoDaddy as well, you can import contacts from a small contact list, meaning you don’t have to start from scratch if you’re building a new site.
Here’s a visual breakdown of the process:
GoDaddy Gallery
Click the image below to expand 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.
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.
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.
WordPress.com
Best for Adding Membership Plugins
WordPress.com
Best for Adding Membership Plugins
- Third-party plugins
- Member analytics
- Large price range
Free plan available
Paid Plans: $4 - $45 / month
Pros
- Free plan
- Large choice of plugins
- Lot of freedom (code preferable)
Cons
- MemberPress can cost $150
- Not the easiest to use
This platform allows you to build a membership site with the help of third-party plugins.
These plugins are completely free to install, and allow you to create members-only content that you can charge for or offer to users at no extra cost.
One popular plugin option to help create your membership site with WordPress.com is Members by MemberPress. This plugin gives you full control over the permissions each individual member gets. For example, a member who has signed up for the entire year can access more gated content than a member whose subscription only lasts a month.
Bear in mind that, should you wish to go beyond what the free version has to offer, a MemberPress plugin has a premium version that costs around $150 a year. It’s important to factor in how detailed you want your membership site to be, and whether you’ll require added features, such as special permission to access the content.
WordPress.com Gallery
Click the image below to expand 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.
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.
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.
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!
Good to Know:
One common confusion with WordPress is the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org – so let’s go back to the basics real quick to just clear this up!WordPress.org is the popular CMS (content management system) that works as open-source software to give you full control over the outcome of your site. The drawback is that you need to host the site yourself, have your own domain name, and take responsibility for all updates and backups.
WordPress.com, however, takes the shape of a blogging platform and works similarly to other, less technically demanding website builders. It’s an all-around ideal choice for hobbyists and personal bloggers who enjoy heavy customizing and it comes without all the maintenance involved with WordPress.org.
Our Testing Methodology
Here at Website Builder Expert, every website builder we talk about goes through some pretty rigorous testing in our research process. Not only that, but each of our writers has hands-on experience with every builder we mention. When we give our recommendation, you can trust it comes from a place of earnest knowledge and expertise.
We approach each topic differently, including member areas, but our methodology is primarily based on analyzing each builder in six key areas:
- Ease of use
- Features
- Value for money
- Design functionalities
- Help and support
- Customer satisfaction
Every one of these categories has multiple sub-categories we rate on a scale of 0-5, which then get collected and funneled into an overall score out of five in each of these main areas, which allows us to generate its total rating at the end.
Depending on the article, we will weight each category a different amount so as to accurately reflect the most important aspects to our readers. From our years of writing and researching, we’ve developed a strong idea of what readers want from their builder, but we also take care to ask real people and get real opinions from both professionals and amateurs so you can be sure you’re getting the best and most honest rankings possible.
Let’s take a closer look at how we weighted our categories for the best membership website builders:
- Website features – weighting: 20%
For website features, we compare what is offered by a website builder and its level of quality, including features such as domain names, email addresses, blogging functionality, internalization capabilities, SEO and marketing functionalities, and app market – plus an analysis of site speed and storage space.
Membership areas fall under this category, so we have weighted it a little higher than some other industries, at 20%. Having a membership area is obviously a requirement for this list, but the quality of that area is dependent on the website features offered by the builder. You need to be able to show tangible reasons for a customer to want to subscribe, or they simply won’t.
- Design functionalities – weighting: 20%
This covers a website builder’s aesthetic capabilities, such as the quality of the templates, how many templates they offer, a mobile editor, an image editor, UX design, whether it has ADI, and if you are able to switch templates once you’ve started.
This category is equal to website features in importance, especially for member areas. Your member’s area should look the part and preferably have a different design to indicate this. Having good design and UX is fundamental to a visitor liking your site, and they will expect this level of design if they choose to subscribe.
- Value for money – weighting: 10%
Less weighting has been attributed to this category due to a member area often not being available on website builders unless you upgrade to a paid plan. The sub-criteria we look for in this category is the average pricing plan, the features versus the price, and an evaluation of the free trial (if offered).
Because you have to pay to be able to utilize memberships on a website, it stands to reason we would weight this less. The quality of the member area takes precedence over the price for this ranking, though we do acknowledge that a price tag too high will turn customers away, so we have given it a respectable 10% weighting.
- Help and support – weighting: 5%
The support options offered by the website builder are important for first-time builders. We evaluate what support options are available for customers, the knowledge center, restore options, and what help features are available on the lowest cost plan.
This category has the lowest weighting of just 5%, due to the fact that it is not super relevant to membership areas. For the website builders that have them, a members area is quite easy to set up and implement.
- Customer satisfaction – weighting: 25%
This is our highest-weighted category at 25%, one that is dedicated to user reviews. Sub-criteria include Trustpilot scores, brand recognition, market analysis, UX, and whether current customers or our own testers would be likely to recommend.
In setting up member areas, the most important feedback is from the actual subscribers who use them. As a builder, your enjoyment of the member’s area is second-fiddle to how your customers use it. Therefore, it’s important to know what real people think about the builder when using it, resulting in a higher weighting than the other categories
- Ease of use – weighting: 20%
This category measures how easy it is to actually build a website using the builder. We rely on regular in-house user testing for this, testing each platform ourselves, and compiling quotes and scores from real testers to give you honest, undoctored views.
Having an easy-to-use website means you can make changes to the member’s area faster, jump on trends, and change prices and designs all without a massive headache. This a huge bonus for those trying to get a members area up and running as quickly as possible, and a reason to weigh this category a little more heavily with 20%.
Final Thoughts
That’s a wrap, folks! We’ve gone through our five best membership website builders, putting each of them through some pretty stringent testing while paying close attention to design, features, pricing, and ease of use.
Let’s do a quick overview of the fabulous five:
5 Best Membership Website Builders
- Wix – Best website builder for greater member security and control
- Squarespace – Best for creating premium member content
- Shopify – Best for adding a membership section to an online store
- GoDaddy – Best for creating a membership website quickly
- Wordpress.com – Best for adding membership plugins
Each of these website builders offers a plethora of features to help you create an awesome membership site. If you’re looking to make the most of your members-only area and want to interact with users via forms and online courses, we’d recommend using Wix. If you’re focused on elevating the aesthetics of your website, Squarespace is a beautiful choice that doesn’t take away from an effective member experience.
Your site has fans, so make them feel special. Use our guide to create the ultimate membership website for you and your loyal community today.
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