S2Member WordPress Membership Plugin Review

If you want to transform your WordPress website into a fully functional membership site, you need to have WordPress Membership Plugin.

However, searching for a WordPress Membership Plugin can be a tough task.

Really tough for the ones who are looking for a WordPress Membership Plugin for the first time.

This is probably because the plugin needs to be secure, powerful, feature-rich and most importantly your website’s credibility depends upon this plugin.

So, you cannot just have any WordPress Membership Plugin.

Here comes the role of s2Member WordPress Membership Plugin which is a secure, powerful and fully functional membership plugin.

In this extensive review, you get to know all about s2Member.

What is s2Member?

S2Member is a free membership plugin (its paid version is also available) that transforms your WordPress website into a fully functional membership site. It protects your content, post, pages, categories, tags, specific URLs, downloads and more.

With s2Member, you can even protect downloadable files and streaming audio / video. It can be seamlessly integrate with WordPress and automatically generates accounts, and passwords for users. It is highly extensible and can be configured quite easily. It also comes integrated with Amazon S3/CloudFront and also provides the option to store files locally.

S2Member core framework is available for free and you can download it from WordPress.org. s2Member Pro that is a paid version of s2Member has been built on top of s2Member framework. S2Member Pro is highly flexible and has plenty of resources for a professional membership site.

S2Member WordPress Membership Plugin
Moreover, s2Member is easy to use. Upon installation, it provides a “quick start” guide which list down all the basic settings for membership options. Within an hour, you can turn your WordPress site into a complex membership website.

S2Member allows four membership levels with a “free” membership labeled level 0. These membership levels designate different parts of your website to different users based on their membership. This means that a silver member on your site cannot access gold member stuff.

You can set up several payment options for registration such as one-off, daily, monthly, quarterly, yearly. It supports payment gateways such as PayPal, Clickbank, Google Checkout, and Authorize.net. S2Member integrates with autoresponders such as Aweber, and MailChimp. So, you can add a registered user to the “registered” group for MailChimp and can also subscribe them to the general list, all in one go. With s2Member robust API, you can integrate Affiliate Software easily.

Installation and Admin User Interface

S2Member is 100% free and can be downloaded from WordPress.org. You can install s2Member from within your Admin Dashboard. S2Member Admin UI is thoroughly easy to use and very well organized. Although the Admin UI of s2Member has the same colors and shades as the WordPress native UI, but it has its own visual elements and layout. Apart from this, other sections of s2Member UI have been integrated with existing WordPress screens. For example, in the user profile, you will find new fields added upon by s2Member.

Member Management

s2Member brings in excellent member management functionalities. s2Member adds new columns to the native WordPress users table like “Custom Capabilities”, “Registration Date”, and “# of Logins”. With s2Member, you can customize the registration form in number of ways. You can even add custom fields to it. Apart from this, s2Member supports membership levels too.

S2Member WordPress Membership Plugin
Main Features of s2Member

  • Supports Aweber and MailChimp Integration
    PayPal Standard Buttons Integration
  • Add Custom Registration Fields
  • Customizable Membership Levels
  • S2Member is compatible with bbPress and BuddyPress
  • Supports Manual Account Creation
  • Supports Content Restriction
  • Shortcode for member profile editing
  • Customizable templates for email

Pro Version

Apart from its free version, s2Member is also available in a pro version format. Its pro version has been named as s2Member Pro.
S2Member Pro has all the features of the free version as well as supports many upgraded features too. Some of its prominent features include unlimited membership levels (the free version supports 4 membership levels), an actual login widget, and PayPal Payments Pro. It also provides free upgrades to all future releases. It also includes free life-time support, as well.

s2Member Pro comes in two variants. You can get the single-site license for $69 and the unlimited site license can be purchased for $129. So if, you want to use s2Member on multiple sites you have to buy s2Member Pro with unlimited site license.

The Final Verdict

s2Member is an incredible WordPress Plugin for building a membership site. It is easy to set up and brings in lots of powerful, and highly use features for creating a secured and fully functional WordPress Membership Site. Moreover, apart from its free version, s2Member also provides fully featured Pro versions at a reasonable price. You also get to have a life time support and free upgrades, as well. So if you want to have a fully functional membership site, you can surely depend upon s2Member WordPress Membership Plugin.

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