Take Advantage of Comprehensive Plugins to Create WordPress Membership Site

Posted on 05. Jul, 2010 by Steve in Tips & Tricks, Wordpress

WordPress has always been a popular option for setting up membership websites.  Before there commercial membership plugins were available, there were a variety of ways to piece together multiple free plugins in order to create a WordPress membership website.  However, commercial plugins have proven to be a much more comprehensive option, which holds a number of advantages to webmasters.  There are a number of reasons that using a single plugin is beneficial when compared to piecing together multiple free plugins to create a WordPress membership site.

1. Cohesion

The most obvious advantage of using a single plugin is the cohesion that it creates.  It allows you to manage all aspects of your WordPress membership website from registration to recurring billing and everything in between.  This cohesion makes setting up and maintaining a membership website on a daily basis much easier.  This is especially true when it comes to adding content and making large scale changes to the setup of the website.  If you are working with a large number of plugins that have been piece-mealed together, there is a much greater chance that you will need to make modifications in several plugins in order to create a single change.  With a comprehensive plugin, you will be able to make almost all of your changes from a single place.

2. Support

If you are using a single, comprehensive plugin to manage your WordPress membership website then getting support, if a problem arises, is easy because you know exactly who to talk to.  If  you are using several plugins together, there is a good chance that each developer will tell you that the problem lies in the other plugins.  This means that you will need to convince a developer that they need to change their plugin.  Additionally, when dealing with free plugins, there is a higher chance that their plugins come with no support, which means that you will need to find out what is causing the problem and then fix it yourself.

3. Maintenance

Obviously, maintaining a single plugin is much easier that maintaining 5 plugins, regardless of what they are.  By using a comprehensive WordPress membership website plugin, regular maintenance is simple.  However, if you are using several plugins then there is a good chance that they will need to be updated and maintained at different times.  Additionally, if you are using several plugins, then when you update one, it may become incompatible with the other plugins that you are using.  This can become especially problematic when it comes to updating the WordPress core.

As you can see, there are some big advantageous to using a comprehensive WordPress membership plugin rather than piecing together multiple plugins.  All of these advantageous can be measured in the savings that they provide.  You will be able to save time, money, effort, and a whole lot of stress by using a single, comprehensive WordPress membership site plugin.

Tags: comprehensive membership plugin, membership plugin, membership site, membership website, memmebership website, Wordpress, wordpress membership plugin