Before you install anything, work out which membership site you are building. The term covers two different products, and picking the wrong one costs you a month of fighting software that was never built for your use case.
Step 1: Decide what your members are actually paying for
There are two kinds of membership site, and the fork happens at the very first decision.
A content membership sells access to material: articles behind a paywall, a video library, downloadable files, a course that unlocks week by week. The member’s relationship is with the content. They pay, they read or watch, and whether they ever interact with another member is beside the point. This is the job of a dedicated content-protection plugin. MemberPress and Paid Memberships Pro are both built for exactly this, and if what you are selling is structured courses specifically, Learnomy is our sister product for that.
A community membership sells access to a place. Members pay to be somewhere with other people: a feed worth checking, spaces for the topics that matter, a group of people who recognize each other by name. The value isn’t a file they download once, it’s an ongoing environment. This is what BuddyNext is for.
Neither product does the other’s job well, and pretending otherwise wastes your time. BuddyNext does not put a paywall on a post, a page, a custom post type, or a file. If you came here wanting to charge for blog content, stop reading this guide and go set up MemberPress or Paid Memberships Pro instead. The membership site on WordPress page walks through this fork in more depth if you’re still deciding.
A lot of real sites run both. A coaching business might sell a content library through MemberPress and a private discussion space through BuddyNext, with one purchase unlocking both. That’s a legitimate setup and this guide covers how to connect them later on. For now, decide which one you’re building first, because the rest of the steps assume you know.
The remainder of this guide is written for the community path. If you need the content path, the internal links above point you to the right plugins; a WordPress content-protection plugin follows a similar install-configure-restrict pattern, just applied to posts instead of spaces.
Step 2: Set up WordPress and pick your community plugin
You need a self-hosted WordPress install. Managed WordPress hosting works fine, a community with a few hundred members runs comfortably on ordinary shared or VPS hosting, and the cost is flat regardless of how many members you have. That’s the practical case for self-hosting over a hosted platform: a hosted community tool typically bills by member count or takes a cut of what you charge, while a self-hosted WordPress site does neither.
Install BuddyNext from the WordPress plugin directory or download it directly. The core is free, GPL-licensed, and requires no account or key. Activation creates the community’s basic structure: an activity feed, member profiles, spaces for group discussion, and private messaging. If you’re moving an existing community from BuddyPress or BuddyBoss, a free importer brings members, groups, and history across rather than starting from zero.
At this stage, resist the urge to also install a membership-plans plugin. Get the community working first. A paywall wrapped around an empty room teaches you nothing except that empty rooms don’t convert, and you’ll have spent setup time you could have used making the room worth visiting.
Step 3: Build the community before you price it
This step gets skipped more than any other, and it’s the one that determines whether the eventual membership plan sells anything.
Set up two or three spaces around real topics your target members care about, not a single generic “general” space. Specificity here matters the same way it does when you’re defining who the community is for: a space named “introductions” tells a new member exactly what to post; a space named “discussion” tells them nothing and mostly sits empty.
Seed each space with a handful of posts before anyone else arrives. A feed with three or four genuine posts reads as active. A feed with zero posts reads as abandoned, and the second impression is very hard to undo once a real member has seen it.
Invite a small group, ten to twenty people who already know why this community exists, and get a real conversation running in each space. Their presence and their posts are what a stranger sees when they land on the pricing page later. You’re not launching to the public yet. You’re building the thing you’re eventually going to charge for.
Step 4: Decide what a paid plan should open
Once the community has activity worth protecting, work out what a membership plan should actually control. There are two broad approaches, and they aren’t mutually exclusive.
Gate spaces. Some spaces stay open to everyone; others are visible only to members on a paid plan. This is the direct model: pay, get into the room.
Lift limits. Instead of, or alongside, gating spaces, a plan can raise what a member is allowed to do. How many spaces they can create, how many posts they can pin, how large a group message can be. This model suits communities where most content should stay open but power users are willing to pay for more capability.
Most communities land on a mix: a public space for anyone to browse, and a members-only space or two for people on a paid plan, with a few capability limits lifted as an extra perk. Write this down in plain language before you touch a settings screen. “Paid members get into the strategy space and can create up to five spaces of their own” is something you can build and something you can explain on a pricing page. “Paid members get more stuff” is not.
Step 5: Set up membership plans
With BuddyNext Pro, membership plans are built into the community rather than bolted on as a separate system. A plan carries a price and a billing schedule, one-time or recurring, monthly or yearly, with an optional free trial. You define it once, and that single definition drives the pricing page, the access checks, and your reports.
Run a free plan alongside one or more paid plans. Members see the free plan as their current plan on the pricing page, with paid plans sitting next to it so upgrading is something they choose rather than something they have to ask you about.
You don’t need a payment gateway connected to start. You can create plans and grant access by hand with nothing wired up yet, which is a genuinely useful way to run a handful of founding members through the system while you’re still deciding what to charge and whether the plan structure is right.
When you’re ready to take payment, Stripe and PayPal are both supported as first-class gateways, along with offline payment (mark a bank transfer as paid manually) and community points, if your community already runs on an internal currency. Coupons are available too, and you can extend or revoke a specific member’s access by hand whenever a real situation calls for a real answer instead of a rule.
Two member-facing pages are created automatically: a pricing page listing every active plan, and a settings page where a member manages their own billing. Both are ordinary WordPress pages, so you can edit them with the block editor the same way you’d edit anything else on the site.
Step 6: Connect an existing membership tool instead of replacing it
If you’re already running MemberPress, Paid Memberships Pro, WooCommerce, or Learnomy for a content or course membership, you don’t have to tear that out to add a community. BuddyNext can take the membership grant from an existing tool rather than running its own billing for that segment of members.
In practice this means the content or course plugin stays in charge of the purchase and the subscription, and BuddyNext reads that grant to decide which community spaces the same member can access. One checkout, two systems, each doing the part it’s actually built for. If you’re running Learnomy specifically, course completions and issued certificates show up in the community feed, and notifications from both land in the same notification center rather than arriving as two unrelated emails.
This is the setup for anyone who answered “both” back in step one: a content or course membership handling the paywall, and BuddyNext handling what that purchase unlocks inside the community.
Step 7: Test the whole flow as a new member, not as the admin
Before you announce anything, walk through the entire path as someone who has never seen the site. Register a test account, visit the pricing page, subscribe to a paid plan using a real (or sandboxed) payment method, and confirm you land in the spaces that plan is supposed to open. Then check what happens if you let the subscription lapse or cancel it: access should close cleanly, without leaving stale content visible or throwing an error in a space that’s supposed to be locked.
Check the settings page too. A member needs to be able to see their current plan and manage or cancel it without emailing you, or your inbox becomes the support system by default.
If you’re bridging a grant from an external membership plugin, this test matters even more, because it’s the point where two separate systems have to agree on who has access to what. Run it with a test purchase before a real customer’s money is on the line.
Step 8: Launch to a small group first
Resist inviting your entire list on day one. Open the paid tier to the people you seeded the community with in step three, plus a small wave beyond them. Watch what they actually do: which space gets used, where a plan’s perks matter and where they don’t, whether the price feels right for what’s on the other side of it. A membership site is easier to adjust while twenty people are watching than after two hundred are.
Once the plan structure and pricing hold up under that smaller group, widen the invitation. The community and the billing are both already proven at that point, so growth from here is mostly a matter of getting the word out, not fixing the mechanics underneath it.
Where to go from here
If you’re still unsure whether your project needs a content membership, a community membership, or both, the membership site on WordPress page walks through the fork in more detail, and the WordPress membership plugin page covers what a BuddyNext plan can carry once you’ve settled on the community path. If you’re currently evaluating MemberPress specifically, the MemberPress alternative comparison is worth a look, though remember that comparison is about content protection, not the community side covered here.
The fastest way to see whether any of this fits your project is to try it rather than read about it further. The live demo runs a real BuddyNext community you can click through in a browser, no install required, and the features overview lists what the free core includes if you’d rather read it than click through the demo first.