Squarespace makes creating a membership site simple. Their Member Area feature allows you to protect pages on your site for members only while customizing an experience that matches your brand.
Create membership plans and add content that you would like to protect. Choose whether member-only pages should flicker briefly or be blacked out entirely.
Create a page for your membership area
Membership areas on your website provide you with an ideal way to attract paying customers and generate recurring revenue streams. Membership areas allow you to share premium information with your audience – be it recipes, business advice, art tutorials, personal finance newsletters or fitness advice. Your audience will gladly pay you for access.
Although creating a membership site may seem daunting, the process can actually be fairly straightforward. All it requires is having the appropriate mindset. Your first step should be identifying what type of content you would like to offer your members; video, webinars and eBooks are all effective options that could work. There are also countless free and paid templates that can help get things underway quickly.
Once you’ve selected your content, the next step should be creating a page for your member area. If using a template which already allows Member Areas, this step may be simpler; otherwise manually enable them by visiting your Admin panel and clicking “Membership”.
Once Member Areas is activated, you can create a landing page where customers will be able to login and subscribe for your courses. Either add a custom member sign up block or select one of Squarespace’s Member Areas layouts; either way the block will inherit its design style from your website but can still be edited as necessary.
Create separate landing pages for each course so you can customize their experience based on what they purchased or are interested in – this will provide customers with more tailored offerings and strengthen customer loyalty.
After creating your membership site, Squarespace’s analytics dashboard enables you to track its success with ease. This dashboard offers you a breakdown of revenue, purchase funnel metrics and traffic sources as well as which pages your visitors find most engaging – providing opportunities for upselling or cross-selling opportunities.
Add a sign-up form
Membership sites are websites with content locked behind a paywall that requires users to log in and pay in order to gain access. The content could range from being free, such as private VIP blogs or PDF downloads, or paid services like coaching resources, course materials or premium podcasts – with the goal being building communities while generating recurring revenues through subscriptions.
To create a sign-up form for your membership area, navigate to your Pages panel in Squarespace dashboard and add a new section with the Member Sign Up block. Customize it according to membership pricing, what benefits members will enjoy and a link to payment gateway. When visitors fill out your form and make their purchase, two emails are generated as confirmations: an order transactional confirmation message as well as one with personalized welcome instructions detailing how to navigate their client area.
Squarespace provides an intuitive user experience, but also offers templates designed specifically for member areas to make your site look better once it has been enabled. In some instances, this may even outshone Teachable’s functionality as it ensures member content fits in seamlessly with your site design for an engaging experience.
Squarespace stands apart from Teachable by not providing an inbuilt way of adding videos directly to your site. Although you could technically do this using video content blocks, you will first have to upload them onto an outside service like YouTube or Vimeo in order to add them directly into Squarespace – this may present challenges if your membership content relies heavily on videos.
Squarespace doesn’t allow users to set up tiered memberships or bundles of products and services together, which may be an issue if you sell several offerings at once. You can still set up a recurring membership offering customers either monthly or annual subscription options.
Add content to your member area
Membership sites can be an effective way of uniting your audience and offering them exclusive content. From building communities of Mediterranean food enthusiasts, to mentoring new solopreneurs on how to run their business and host virtual Q&As with influencers – Squarespace makes creating and hosting your membership website effortless!
Squarespace makes it easy for you to add member-only pages, while providing other features that make your website more appealing to potential members, including social sharing, blog posts, podcasts and video interviews. Plus you can easily set up a membership portal so that members can access exclusive content while managing their account.
As you develop your membership site, keep in mind that members will experience it differently from the rest of your audience. Therefore, when planning content and membership structures before launching it is vitally important. Know who your target market is as well as their expectations so you can meet them effectively.
Squarespace’s Member Areas feature makes creating a membership site simple. Simply create a page in the Not Linked section that contains your content and membership plans, while search engines still know about it. For an easier sign-up experience for visitors, add a Member Sign Up Block directly onto this page.
Squarespace Member Areas differs from some popular membership site platforms in that you cannot share content across multiple subscription tiers, which may present difficulties for businesses that provide lessons or modules across these tiers. For example, if you offer Silver, Gold and Platinum levels of content you must create separate pages for each level – time-consuming and inconvenient for members alike. It is also essential to consider offering refunds as these can be initiated via your main dashboard’s Commerce panel.
Set up a payment gateway
Payment gateways allow businesses to accept online payments from customers securely. They can process credit/debit/e-check payments. Using one can increase website visits and revenue; however, be careful in selecting an appropriate gateway; choosing an insecure one could lead to fraudulent activity and security risks – so ensure your business chooses a reliable one!
Are You Looking to Monetize Your Squarespace Site Through Membership Areas? A membership area can be an effective way of doing just that. By creating gated content on your site and charging users a one-time or recurring membership payment fee, and offering limited free membership access periods. In doing this, it allows you to market the membership site while growing your email list and increasing sales.
Create a Stripe account quickly and easily on your Squarespace site to accept payments through Stripe. To get started, enter your bank information and review your settings before clicking “Finish.” Once complete, your website will feature an easy Stripe payment button as well as alternative methods like Apple Pay and Clearpay payments.
Squarespace makes it easy to create membership sites to sell engaging content to your target audience, such as video interviews with industry leaders or podcasts about art tutorials, financial advice or fitness advice. If you wish to offer multiple pricing tiers for subscriptions, separate websites would need to be set up.
At present, only Stripe and PayPal support payment gateways but third-party solutions like WooCommerce or Shopify allow integration between them both; plus you could even integrate your Squarespace site with a Square POS device so your visitors can make purchases via cash or card.
