How to create membership plans in WooCommerce

Write down the plan name, who can join, how access is granted, how long membership lasts and what members receive. Typical benefits include restricted pages, course lessons, products, downloads and member-only discounts.

Keep separate plans for genuinely different access levels. If the only difference is billing frequency, you can often use more than one product to grant access to the same plan.

Create the WooCommerce products customers will use to join. For a one-time membership, use a normal product. For recurring billing, use a subscription product with WooCommerce Subscriptions; Memberships handles access while Subscriptions handles recurring payments.

If you use a variable product, decide whether any variation should grant access or only a particular variation. Do not use a grouped product as the access trigger, because grouped products cannot grant membership access.

WooCommerce by itself does not provide membership plans, automatic access rules, content dripping or membership expiry. You can sell a product and manually assign users to a WordPress role or restrict content with custom code, but you must build and maintain the connection between purchases, access and cancellations yourself.

This manual route is reasonable for a small, one-off access list that an administrator will manage. It becomes risky when you need automatic activation, renewals, expiry dates, member discounts, protected products or course access. Customers may pay successfully but still lack access unless your custom system handles every order status and edge case.

Install and activate a WooCommerce membership extension, then go to WooCommerce > Memberships > Membership Plans and select Add Membership Plan. Enter the plan name and choose how access is granted: manual assignment, user account registration or product purchase.

For a paid plan, choose product(s) purchase and select the product or products that grant access. Purchasing any selected product grants the plan; the system does not require customers to buy several selected products. Set the membership length to unlimited, a period such as six months, or fixed start and end dates.

Use the plan's Restrict Content area to protect pages, posts, categories, tags and supported custom post types. Set access to Immediately or specify a delay for content dripping. You can also restrict products by viewing or purchasing, so non-members can either be blocked from seeing a product or allowed to see it but prevented from buying it.

Use Purchasing Discounts for member pricing and add the members area if you want customers to see the content, products and discounts included with their plan. Check your restriction mode under WooCommerce > Settings > Memberships; an overly strict mode can hide content completely from visitors instead of showing a sign-up message.

Place a test order with a test customer account and confirm that the membership is created after the order reaches a paid status, normally processing or completed. Check the protected page, product purchase restriction, discount and members area while logged in, then repeat the checks as a non-member.

The common Friday-afternoon failure is linking the wrong product or variation to the plan. Also check expiry, cancelled or paused membership behaviour, because inactive memberships should not retain access to restricted content and benefits.

Fast way: use WooCommerce Memberships to create the plan, connect its joining product, add the restriction and discount rules, and manage members from the WordPress dashboard. It is designed to connect WooCommerce purchases with content access and member benefits without maintaining custom access code.