How To Create A Membership Site

Secure Your WordPress Blog

Posted on 04. Oct, 2009 by Steve in Wordpress

This is a very quick and useful tutorial on how to maximize your revenue while also improving security for your WordPress Membership sites.

For this tutorial we will use:

* WP Members – Probably the best wordpress membership plugin
* Login Lockdown – Helps prevent brute force attacks

http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/login-lockdown.html

Password Sharing vs Password theft

Your Minder protects a membership site from two common forms of revenue loss through password sharing and theft. In both cases people who shouldn’t have access to your content are gaining access either because someone is willing to share passwords or because a password has broken normally because some one has guessed or used a program to crack the account. In many ways the first is more serious then the second as it is the user that has let the person in and before wed go much further we need to understand why?
Why do people password share?

If password sharing is happening often its worth taking a moment to think why people feel they can/should share their passwords. Here are just a few reasons:

* Group account – the user bought it for use by a group of people who all chipped in
* Company account – like a group account but they bought it for a company or formal organization use.
* Bad content – the content is so bad the user wishes he hadn’t paid for it and publishes his details so others don’t
* Great content – the content was so amazing everyone wanted it.
* Limited access – maybe the price is to high or the number of members has been deliberately locked meaning some users just couldn’t get access.
* I’ll buy one, you buy one – surprisingly common buddy sharing where users swap passwords on a one to one basis.

Obviously some of these things can be fixed, others not but if password sharing is common problem its worth looking at the underlying root cause as well as preventing the problem.

Tags: Secure Wordpress, Secure Wordpress Blog, Secure Your Wordpress