How Much Does it Cost to Start a Membership Site?

It has become easy to increase user engagement by creating a membership website. You can allow your daily visitors to become a member of your website to benefit from discounts, sales, exclusive content, and much more.

You may easily create a membership site for yourself with a dedicated website builder that gives you the opportunity of built-in functionalities and plugins.

But before going ahead, let’s take a closer look at:

What is a membership website?

A membership website offers gated content, many benefits to its members like discounts, sales, free giveaways, newsletters, special field related reports, webinars, courses, invitations to events, and much more things. Many businesses have membership websites, for example, nonprofits. You can also launch your website if you are offering some courses, some of your expertise that you want to sell.

Membership websites are the best ways to earn a good amount of money by giving access to your members that requires a member to buy its membership to view the gated content.

How much does it cost to have a membership website?

Now let’s break down the cost of starting the best membership website. Depending upon, many different website factors affect the cost. But once you explore the essential things you spend on buying your components.

That way, you can easily control your budget. The average charge of a membership site is about $two hundred dollars to over $11,000. If you ever begin thinking about whether or not that is a big investment, you have to look at some of the most famous, successful membership sites.

Now let’s calculate the major expenses:

• Website Hosting: $20 to $30 per year
• Domain Name: $10 to $15 per year
• Content Management System
• Plugins
• Website Design
• Payment Processor
• Email Marketing Services

Domain Name Cost

You need a web address for your membership website. But blueshot offers you a one-year free domain name, and you also need to purchase its extension like .com, .net, .biz, etc. Recommendation to buy the top-level domain extension. 

If you’re growing your membership as a separate, standalone website online, then you’ll want to buy a brand new domain name; but if you’re “tagging it onto” a current website online – i.e. members.mywebsite.com then there’s not anything greater to buy for.

If a person else owns a site you desperately want, then be organized to doubtlessly pay hundreds to purchase the best domain name from them.

The recommended option for the cheap price of buying a domain name is Godaddy, Namecheap, etc. that cost you around $5 to $10 yearly.

Membership Website Hosting

Like other websites, membership websites also need the hosting to look it live. Typically the best hosting costs around $2.75 to $25 per month. 

But this cost is for just a basic shared hosting plan, and you can buy other VPS hosting if you feel your site speed is lowering due to the shared hosting that cost you around $100 to $150 monthly.

My recommendation will be to buy the Bluehost or SiteGround hosting, both excellent options. These are the official oldest hosting companies.

Content Management System

We’re huge lovers of WordPress usage because the content management system powers your membership, and the best information is that it’s free!

Other free and low-cost content management systems exist, including Joomla or Squarespace. However, none of them has the wide variety of membership plugins as WordPress does. There are very free and best options you can benefit from using WordPress. There are wordpress.org and wordpress.com websites, but you have to buy wordpress.org, which is free. When you buy hosting, it will come along.

Plugins

So plugins are an important part of every website that add different functionalities. Most of the membership plugins available in the marketplace require paid licenses, excluding 2: Paid Memberships Pro and s2Member. The free versions of those plugins are excellent if your desires are quite basic, but each plugin is an optionally available paid model with extra capabilities.

Most paid WordPress membership plugins contain an ordinary annual license. Maximum the renewals are required for persisted entry to aid and updates, so technically they’re elective – but take a look at together with your plugin company earlier than cancelling as a few have similar restrictions.

There are a few membership website plugins that contain a month-to-month cost. For the ones, I could critically query the price you’re getting and whether or not you can get the identical capabilities elsewhere, as the continuing month-to-month expenses can upload as much as manner past what you’d usually pay for different platforms. 

Website Design

So for designing your website, you can simply buy a theme, for example, Astra, or Navy that suits your website best. If you don’t want to spend too much on designing your website, you can just use drag and drop builders like Divi, Thrive, Content Builder, Beaver Builder, or Elementor, etc.

You can easily create your own custom layers where you need to be.

Naturally, you need your internet site to appear as a component, and with a club web website online, you no longer want to reflect on consideration on the public-dealing with an aspect of things, however additionally what it seems like to your non-public member areas. Many human beings expect that the club plugin itself will take care of the inner layouts of your web website online, but this is not often the case. 

Payment Processors

Assuming you need to clearly make cash out of your membership, you’ll want to apply a fee processor like PayPal or Stripe.

The foremost charges worried about right here come with inside the shape of transaction expenses. With PayPal, they’re usually around 3.4% of the transaction value, plus around $zero.30 in step with the transaction; but this does range through the vicinity and the sort of PayPal account you have.

With Stripe, they have a flat price of 2.9% + $zero.30 whilst you’re processing much less than $1M, but they keep onto your cash longer than PayPal do.

If you need to take credit score card bills on your web page without sending clients to PayPal, then you’ll want their “PayPal Payments Pro” account that’s around $30 in step with month, and in case you need ordinary bills, it’s an extra $10 in step with month.

Note that if taking credit score card bills on your web page, then you may want something known as an SSL certificate to preserve the one’s transactions secure. This fee is around $one hundred in step with yr. and may generally be bought via your web website hosting company.

Transaction expenses are deducted from your bills in preference to being billed as separate expenses so that you possibly won’t remember those ongoing ‘charges’. 

Email Marketing Services

While now no longer simply important to get your membership website off the ground, your email listing could be one in every of your maximum precious assets in nearly all examples.

And it’s now no longer only for advertising and marketing to non-individuals either; your e-mail advertising and marketing provider could be a vital element to member onboarding and retention too.

Basic, entry-stage e-mail advertising and marketing systems like Aweber, Mail chimp, and Get Response are less expensive enough, however in case you need superior functions together with advertising and marketing automation, integrated ecommerce and CRM, then a higher-stop answer together with Infusion soft or Ontraport can be a higher fit.

Now build your membership website if you want to start and to be paid. Make it happen today!