Learn how your visitors discover and sign up for your paywalled blog, videos, course, or member site.

This guide shows what a visitor to your site experiences when learning about and signing up for a member site, enrolling in a course, reading a monetized blog, or purchasing access to a videos page.

All of the example screenshots in this guide are from a version 7.1 site for an example yoga studio named Lolasana. If you have a version 7.0 site, the member experience may be slightly different.

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Discovering your content

Before a visitor to your site signs up to access your content, they'll want to explore your offerings. Blogs, videos pages, courses, and member sites are hidden behind paywalls that display their relevant pricing plans. How your visitors find the paywall depends on the type of page you’ve created:

• Paywalled blogs, courses, and videos pages - You can add the page to your site’s main navigation. When visitors click the link, they find your paywall or product preview, if you’ve set one up.
• Member sites - You can create a link to your member site in your site’s main navigation. When customers click the member site link, they find your paywall.

You can also share links to any of your paywalled content using the page’s URL. Sending out a link to your paywalled page is a helpful way to direct traffic to the content you’re selling.

Sites with multiple pricing plans

If you offer an array of pricing plans for various forms of paywalled content, help your visitors learn about all the options with a sign-up page or section. On our example Lolasana site, we created a sign-up page using a digital product page layout that contains two digital product blocks.

This gives visitors a place to compare what each pricing plan includes. The blocks display plan descriptions, benefits included, and price.

Signing up for a pricing plan

After your site visitor chooses their preferred pricing plan, they'll click the Sign up button. A pop-up window prompts the visitor to create a customer account or sign into an existing account.

In our example, the site visitor—Sage Example—selected the Meditation & Yoga pricing plan. Because they don’t already have a customer account on the site, they enter their name and email address, and create a password before clicking Create account.

Paying for the pricing plan

If you charge for your pricing plan, the visitor lands on a checkout screen after clicking Create account. Free pricing plans skip the checkout process. How a customer pays depends on the pricing plan type they're purchasing:

• Fixed-amount installment and subscription plans - Customers can only use credit cards
• One-time fixed amount plans - Customers can use credit cards or PayPal

The Meditation & Yoga pricing plan has a fixed-amount installments option of $10 per month for three months, so Sage Example enters their credit card information and clicks Continue. They then review the checkout details and click Subscribe.

Keep in mind, if you've created a custom checkout form, your member's experience will look slightly different than in these screenshots.

Visiting the paywalled content

After completing the checkout flow, Sage Example’s customer account panel opens to display the Digital Products section. From here, they can click the blog, course, member site, or videos page they signed up to access.

Receiving the email confirmation

When a customer creates an account and purchases access to your gated content, they become a member of your site. They will receive your welcome email confirming their new membership and a verification email. By default, this email welcomes your member, invites them to sign in, and links to the blog page, course overview page, member site homepage, or videos page (depending on what their pricing plan includes).

If your customer chooses a pricing plan with a recurring subscription, they will also receive an order confirmation email every time their payments go through.

Viewing account details

After one of your customers creates a customer account and completes the checkout process, the Customer Account panel opens on the right side of the screen. This panel also appears immediately after a member signs into their customer account or clicks the Account button in the top navigation.

In our mock site, Sage Example logs into their account and opens the Customer Account panel.

They then click Digital Products or Memberships in the panel to view a list of the pages that they can access through their pricing plan(s). At this time, they’ve only purchased a membership to the Meditation & Yoga pricing plan. 

By clicking the name of the pricing plan, all Sage Example’s membership details appear. These include:

• The cost of their pricing plan 
• The frequency at which their plan renews (if applicable)
• The renewal date (if applicable)

In this panel, Sage can cancel their membership to specific pricing plans. If they sign up for a new pricing plan, it will appear here as well.

Learn more

• To learn more about how members sign up for and navigate around their account, visit How members access their customer accounts. 
• To gain insight into how your members engage with your paywalled content, visit Digital products and pricing plan analytics.
• To review your pricing plans and add more options for your members, visit Pricing plan details.