What are membership sites?

In simple terms - a membership site is a website or part of a website that only registered members can access.

Membership sites allow your customers to offer exclusive content to their registered members. With Membership, you can create customized experiences, and offer exclusive content tailored for users logged into a given site.

What can you do with Membership?

With Membership, you can build more types of sites for more types of clients.

These new types of sites include:

• Sites for online communities. Communities come in many shapes and forms. In essence, all communities are groups of people held together by a common interest. A Membership site is an excellent tool for customers looking to establish a new community or interact with existing members of their community. By providing access to exclusive content such as newsletters, videos, and articles, your customers strengthen their relationship with their community members.
• Internal initiatives for private groups or organizations. These are private networks, such as employee portals, designed to support an organization's internal communications and to allow collaboration. With Duda's Membership solution, your customers can approve and delete site members. This is especially handy when managing internal portals, where your customer might want to add new members to the portal and revoke access from former members.
• Lead Generation sites. Lead generation is the process of gaining the interest of potential customers to increase future sales. It is a crucial part of the sales process of many companies. Using Membership, you can create lead generation sites that can help your customers capture email addresses. They can later use these addresses to promote other products & services.

How to add Membership

To get started with Membership, follow these easy steps:

1. Add Membership directly from our App Store. You can choose between our Start and Pro plans. The Starter plan offers all our Membership features and up to 5 site members; it should help you test out all Membership capabilities. Once your membership sites get more traction, you can upgrade to the Pro plan. The Pro plan offers the same features as the Starter plan, yet it supports up to 1000 site members.

2. Choose pages that will be accessible to members only.
 
You can do that by going to the page menu, opening the settings of the page you want to restrict, and clicking Set Access.

3. Configure approval type. You can choose between automatic and manual member approval.

• Automatic approval works best for sites where you want as many members joining as possible. An example of a site that would use automatic approval is lead generation.
• Manual approval is more suited towards sites where you need to control who is provided access to the site's restricted content. An excellent example of that could be an employee portal, where only company employees can access restricted content.

4. Place the login bar widget in your site's header. Remember that the page header is not responsive, so you should add the widget for each device type.

That's it! You added Membership to your site 🎉.

This is just the beginning

There are still many exciting features on the way. We know that many of you want to build sites that offer subscriptions, different membership groups, personal areas for your members, and more. We are working hard to have these capabilities available for you as fast as possible.

Want to influence what we should be building next? We created a dedicated section in our idea board where you can submit your Membership-related feature requests and ideas.