Simple and Reliable
Throughout this website you will see me saying that I believe Digital Access Pass to be the superior WordPress membership plugin. However, this is not to say that Wishlist Member is not a great plugin. In fact, there are some situations where I would suggest Wishlist Member over Digital Access Pass. It is easy to use, has very good features, and has a great support section with in depth documentation and video tutorials. For this reason, you should use Wishlist Member if you:
- Are only planning to create one membership website
- Are planning to use Aweber as your email list builder
- Are planning to use Clickbank as your affiliate manager
- Do NOT want to drip content (meaning you will probably be updating the site with new membership content regularly)
What Wishlist Member Does Well
Wishlist Member is, in my opinion, the easiest of the WordPress membership plugins to use. It does not have as many features as Digital Access Pass, which is why I recommend DAP over Wishlist to power users. However if you’re creating a simple membership site and are OK with not being able to drip content easily, Wishlist Member is probably your best bet.
The support documentation is top notch, support through the ticket system is quick and reliable, and the plugin is easy to use in the first place. I started as a Wishlist Member user and I was up and running my first membership site within a day. I integrated it with Paypal, set up my email subscribers withAweber (and if you haven’t started building your email list do so now), and was ready to unvail the site quickly and easily. Among its many features are:
- Unlimited membership levels
- Partial content protection
- Free and trial membership
- Included WordPress themes (only with developers license)
- Ability to drip content (although it’s not very intuitive as will be explained below)
What Could Be Better
The main reason that I switched from Wishlist Member to Digital Access Pass is because of DAP’s ability to drip content with such ease. Although it is possible to drip content with Wishlist Member, it’s not easy. Basically, the only way to do this is to build a separate membership level for each piece of dripped content. So, for example, if you had 20 modules and you wanted to give your subscribers a new one every three days, you would have to create 20 different membership levels.
Personally, there are times when I would like to create a set-and-forget website. I’ll create the content for it over the course of a week or two, create the site, then set up my membership site to drip content to new members over the course of a year, upon which they have a lifetime membership. With Digital Access Pass, this is easy; with Wishlist Member, not so much.
Bottom Line
Still, as I said, if your membership site is going to be simple and in accordance with the 4 points in the introduction of this review, you can’t really go wrong with Wishlist Member as your WordPress membership plugin.