Membership sites overview

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Home > Membership sites > Membership sites overview

Get a quick overview of how membership sites work in Ontraport so you can create your own site, deliver your content, and protect your gated pages.

In this lesson you'll learn:

What you can do with a membership site
How to grant users access to your membership site
The value of page-by-page protection
How to redirect non-members from restricted pages

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Transcript

A membership site is a set of password-protected pages that only your members can see. Use one to deliver a course or other paid content, or to give customers a customer center where they can update their card, see their payment history and change their password. This lesson is a quick overview of how it all works. The rest of this section covers each part step by step. Ontraport gives you two options. Ontraport Membership Sites are built entirely with Ontraport Pages, with no WordPress or plugins needed. Ontraport recommends them for most users, and they're what this section covers. If your site runs on WordPress, you'll use PilotPress, Ontraport's WordPress plugin, available on Plus and above. It has its own section later in this course. To get up and running quickly, use a Setup Wizard. Click Systems, then New System, and find a membership site system. The wizard walks you through each step. Even if you use it, it helps to know how the finished site works, so let's look at the pieces. Every Ontraport membership site comes together in four steps. Set up the site. Publish your members' pages on its domain. Protect each page with its display settings. Then give access to the people who should be able to log in. To set up a membership site, open one of your Ontraport sites, go to its Membership tab, and click Enable. When you save the settings, Ontraport creates the login page, the registration flow, and the forgotten-password pages and emails for you, styled with your site's branding. After that, hover over Pages in the top navigation to find your Membership Sites. Next, build your members' pages with Ontraport Pages and publish them on your membership site's domain. That makes them part of the site, but it doesn't protect them yet. Protection is set page by page. In the page editor, click Settings, then Display Settings, and choose an option under "Display this page to whom?" All logged in members lets any member in. Some logged in members lets you add conditions, like whether they've ordered a certain product, or the value of a field such as their membership level. So logging in doesn't unlock everything. Say your site has three courses and a member bought one. They log in once, but they only see the course they paid for. You can also release content over time, with an automation that adds a new value to a field each week. The "Bringing it together" lesson builds that example. If someone without access opens a protected page and you haven't set a redirect, they see an access denied message. Use "Redirect users with no access here" to send them somewhere useful instead. For example, send someone who opens a course they haven't bought to its order form. Finally, give people access. To do it by hand, open a contact's record, go to the Membership tab, click New membership, choose your site and set the status to Enabled. To do it automatically, add the Update Membership Access action to an automation, for example right after someone buys. Its statuses are Enabled, Suspended and Disabled. When access is enabled, Ontraport emails the contact a registration link so they can create their password. Members can also sign up and log in with their Google, Facebook or Microsoft accounts. You create a login app with each provider, then turn it on in your membership site's Social accounts settings. And if you turn on Open registration, visitors can sign up on their own from the login page. So: set up the site, publish your pages on its domain, protect each page with its display settings, and give members access by hand or with an automation. Next up: creating a membership site, where you'll set yours up step by step.