How do I create a secure members area for all my products?

Securing, customizing your login page and members area can be done with optimize members or s2 member (both are wordpress plugins).

For the ability to access additional products INSIDE as they purchase them or upgrade, I'm not sure how to do that.

OptimizePress, with its included OptimizeMember facility, will do all this, if I understand your requirements correctly.

You can set up multiple products and levels and categories as well as sales pages and internal links to those pages for upgrades etc.

IMO it is very flexible for memberships. It's a WP plugin, of course.

You really need something that integrates with your payment processor so your members don't have to manually "upgrade" themselves upon ordering a new course.

We've used Wishlist Member WP plugin for years and love it. It integrates with most of the popular processors out there and I think it will work for what you want to do.

I should add that I'm using 1ShoppingCart as my payment processor...

Wishlist has been popular with Profits theme and OP1, or if you don't really want the troubles, Kajabi is famous too.

I also recommend S2Member Pro - I use it on multiple sites and is very stable. Also the pricing scheme is very attractive.

I also used WLM but am underwhelmed with their support but the plugin works.

Payment processing and membership management are 2 independent legs of your business and, therefore, can be achieved via 2 independent solutions: one for payments and another one for membership management. You just need to make sure that both platforms integrate with each other.

The most common membership gateways (Optimize Press 2, Kajabi, DAP, WishList, Amember, etc) already integrate seamlessly with the most common payment gateways, so any tech-savvy person will be able to integrate them both together within a day. My personal favorite is Amember, which has a bit of a learning curve but it's extremely powerful and customizable.

Take a look at SiteManPro. It's a hosted service and you can build, control all your sites, sell digital files and automate the sales process from one dashboard.

Hi Jonathan,

Everybody's going to recommend something different based on what's working for them right now.

But since I set up membership sites for a living, I'm going to recommend a solution that works across the board for a lot of people, works well, and is relatively future proof:

Wordpress Theme = OptimizePress

Membership Plugin = Digital Access Pass

A few finer points.

1. You wrote:

In terms of creating a members area, there are already members area templates available in the OptimizePress theme that are functional, responsive, and look great.

DAP will protect this members area for you.


2. You wrote:

That's perfectly doable.

However, you may want to consider signing up with Stripe or Authorize.net.

These payment processors offer so called 'Card on File' functionality, which means that once you've accepted payment from one of your members, you can offer them upsells at any time without having to collect their credit card info again.

In other words, you get true 1-click upsell functionality even after the prospect has left the sales funnel. Any time a member is logged in they can purchase a product from you with 1 click.

The caveat here is that you'll need an SSL certificate on your site. These run about $50-$100 per year depending on who you buy your certificate from.


3. You wrote:

That's simple to do with most membership plugins, including OptimizeMember and DAP.


4. You wrote:

First, Digital Access Pass is a membership plugin, whereas 1SC is a payment processor.

So there's no conflict between using both DAP and 1SC (which integrate with each other).

I know 1SC has membership functionality but it looks terrible and I wouldn't recommend it.


Second, you can easily customize your login page and members area to fit your brand colors/style with OptimizePress in a drag and drop fashion.

Again, you know what they say about opinions, everybody has one...

But take it from somebody who has set up hundreds of membership sites:

DAP + OptimizePress is a killer, functional, easy to use (once you surmount the learning curve), and future proof combination.

I can't tell you how many clients I've migrated away from a solution that was unable to support growth to some variation on this combination of software.


Best Wishes,
Vic