ARMember Plugin Review: A Comprehensive Membership System

By 2023, subscription ecommerce is expected to reach $38 billion in revenue, more than doubling since 2019. This emerging trend is a key opportunity for businesses to create more revenue and build engaged online communities, and WordPress users can leverage a plugin like ARMember to make it happen.

With ARMember, you can add all the elements you need to build a robust membership site to your existing site, including membership plans, registration forms, and payment gateways. You can offer premium content to paid members, or you can provide free membership to your customers who want to join your beta product launch.

Either way, now is the time to invest in a quality membership system. In this post, we’ll review the ARMember plugin and discuss how it can help you create a membership site using WordPress.

What is ARMember?

ARMember is a freemium WordPress plugin for building and managing membership websites. The tool requires no coding experience to set up and enables site owners to create several types of membership websites. Plus, the plugin’s user-friendly interface makes it easy to configure and manage your membership site.

With the plugin activated, members can register for a plan, get access to gated content, and submit membership payments with multiple payment options. Plus, with a premium add-on, you can grow your membership business with an affiliate program.

Key Features of the ARMember Plugin

ARMember is a comprehensive membership system designed to help you build a fully functional membership site. Next, let’s unpack some of ARMember’s most important features.

Content Restrictions

All WordPress membership plugins have a way to restrict access to content on your site based on the visitor’s membership status. ARMember makes it simple to toggle which parts of your website are available to whom.

You have the ability to set access rules for certain pages, posts, categories, navigation menus, and more. If you have multiple membership levels, you also can set up different levels to view specific content.

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Want to restrict only part of your content? ARMember also offers partial content restrictions to protect specific parts of content based on certain conditions, allowing you to, for instance, lock a block of content on an accessible post or page.

Membership Setup Wizard

Some membership plugins limit how many membership plans you can offer to visitors, but ARMember stands out by allowing you to quickly build plans and integrate registrations, payment methods, and coupons in one place. This feature means you don’t have to create multiple membership setup pages, saving you time to focus on generating sales. Once your plan setup is ready, you can place it on your website with shortcode.

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You can also build membership plans that support multiple payment durations for recurring plans. For example, your members can choose to pay $40 for a monthly subscription or $400 for an annual membership. There’s also an option to offer a free or discounted trial period to entice members to sign up for a paid plan.

Form Builder

ARMember comes with its own drag-and-drop form builder for creating unique forms, sign-up pages, and login modals. You can customize predefined form templates to fit your brand’s style. There are 12 built-in color schemes, plus the option to make your own scheme and apply custom CSS.

Plus, if you like the form you created, just duplicate it so you never have to start from scratch.

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Your members receive a streamlined form experience, too. You can add ready-made social logins to connect members to your site using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. The no-CAPTCHA forms also ensure members can safely log in without having to answer security questions. No worries if users forget their login either — the plugin includes a user flow for resetting passwords.

Drip Rules

Some membership sites choose to release content gradually to members, instead of all at once. This is called “dripping” content, and is also possible in the ARMember plugin. This premium feature is perfect for businesses offering membership courses with weekly modules where they want to delay the release of content.

A drip rule can be based on the type of content, like a page or post, or the membership plan. You also can drip the content immediately after subscribing, after a certain time of subscription, on a specific future date, or after a certain post is published or modified.

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Security Measures

Cyberattacks are always possible. ARMember helps mitigate the risk with security protections that prevent cybercriminals from accessing your membership site. Namely, the plugin includes a brute force login to stop hackers from logging in and stealing sensitive information.

Hackers can also enter your site when members casually share their login details with friends. You can use the Cheat Off feature to disable the sharing of account credentials and automatically lock the liable account.

ARMember Add-Ons

While the ARMember plugin is free, you can upgrade to get premium add-ons to extend the functionality of your membership site. Here are some highlights:

ARMember Affiliate

This add-on gives you a chance to own an affiliate program and pay your affiliates for referring new members. When members pay for a plan on your website, the add-on will cross-check the referral with your affiliates and then give the commission to the affiliate who referred the member. You also can create banners and text links for your affiliates to promote your website.

ARMember Digital Download

Want to share a file with specific users? No problem. The ARMember Digital Download add-on lets you manage the access of your digital documents. Just set the access permissions and upload a file or add an external file link, and then members can get the digital download. You also can keep track of who downloaded the file.

ARMember Social Community

An effective online social community encourages interaction among its members. With this add-on, your members can create user profiles, send and accept friend requests, and communicate with other members through private messages. Members also can express their feelings with emoticons in messages.

Two Factor Authentication for ARMember

To enhance security on your website, ARMember offers a free plugin to enable two-factor authentication, requiring users to confirm their sign-on from a separate device. Consider this add-on if visitors are storing sensitive personal information on your site for an important extra layer of protection.

ARMember Pricing

ARMember is a freemium plugin, offering both a limited free version and a paid version that sells on CodeCanyon for $59.The free version comes with core, basic membership features for more straightforward membership sites. We recommend sampling this free version before deciding to upgrade.

With the premium version of ARMember, you have access to more advanced features for more control over your membership offerings. This includes drip content functionality, social logins, pay-per-post (letting visitors buy individual pieces of content, like courses, without signing up for a plan), and offering multiple payment options for different payment cycles (like monthly or yearly).

The paid version also enables integrations with popular WordPres plugins like bbPress, BuddyPress, and WooCommerce, as well as popular email automation tools like Mailchimp and Constant Contact.

ARMember Support

If you need help installing, configuring, or using the plugin, ARMember offers documentation as well as a video library to explain the fundamentals. Here's a video from ARMember's channel explaining how to get started with the plugin:

Build your subscriber base with ARMember.

Take advantage of the subscription trend amongst online customers. Using the ARMember plugin, you can build a membership site with customized forms, content restrictions, and security protections. With a membership site, you're on your way to generating more revenue for your business.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in October 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.