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The Best Pay Wall WordPress Plugins

After blogging for a while you might want to start making money from all your efforts. Maybe you create a web series that you want to keep hidden only for exclusive guests, or maybe it’s time to see if your online magazine can start making money. This is where a paywall WordPress plugin comes in, helping you restrict a certain amount of content on your site unless people pay for it.
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After blogging for a while you might want to start making money from all your efforts. Maybe you create a web series that you want to keep hidden only for exclusive guests, or maybe it’s time to see if your online magazine can start making money. This is where a paywall WordPress plugin comes in, helping you restrict a certain amount of content on your site unless people pay for it.

I know a few bloggers who create membership sites with featured content, or they simply want to sell a couple videos or books they created. In short, developing content online for free eventually gets old, and unless it leads to some sort of compensation you can’t keep investing all that time to create.

Let’s take a look at some of my favorite paywall WordPress plugins, each of which offers a little something different.

Paid Member Subscriptions

Paid Member Subscriptions

Paid Member Subscriptions is a full-on WordPress membership plugin that lets users build membership plans for their website and, thus, monetize the content on it right away.

The plugin lets you create and manage member subscriptions, and grant and revoke access to posts, pages, categories as well as custom post types based on the membership level visitors subscribe to. With the Paid Member Subscriptions plugin, you can restrict access to certain parts of your website so that only specific users have access to it, or you can even make your entire site exclusive to paying members.

The plugin also seamlessly integrates with WooCommerce allowing you to restrict product viewing, purchasing, and special product prices to members.

Zlick

Zlick paywall - power up your subscriptions

Zlick is a WordPress paywall plugin created with the goal of maximizing conversions and generating revenue for content creators of all types.

It’s a great service to create and sell premium content on a subscription basis. Zlick makes it really easy to set up your subscription pricing, customize your paywall signup form, and manage your subscribers from your account portal.

One feature that made this solution stand out to us in our full Zlick review was its analytics. It shows you stats such as active subscribers, the current month’s revenue, and projected revenues. It even includes what are called “Top Content By Sales” reports. The latter is a brilliant way of understanding which of your premium content is performing the best, and therefore, where you should focus your attention going forward.

Cleeng

cleeng

If you’re a video creator and all that content is just sitting around making no money, Cleeng is the paywall plugin for you. The plugin is designed to help you create your own little Video On-Demand Channel to bring in a subscriber base and even checkout comprehensive reports from these followers.

I like that you can schedule promotions and coupons to keep your subscribers coming back and push them to share with their friends. You can also start testing the plugin for free and move onto the paid option once you see that it fits. Where Cleeng really excels is the Live Pay-Per-View Event functionality, where it schedules your events and charges people who want to watch. This is great for a conference, sporting event, or concert.

Leaky Paywall

leaky-paywall

Leaky Paywall is nice for all website owners because the company offers a free demo to see how the plugin works with your site. Access various additional add-ons and plugins that work with Leaky Paywall, such as a nag popup plugin that tells readers how many articles they can read before they must subscribe. I wouldn’t recommend forcing readers to pay for your blog, but it’s a nice feature for magazines.

With a metered paywall and multiple subscription levels, the price tag is worth it, since you receive dedicated support for all your questions.

Pigeon Paywall

pigeon

Pigeon isn’t a traditional WordPress plugin, but it lets you search for your members by name and see what types of payment methods they use along with what type of subscription they are signed up for. One thing I like about this is the Transactions tab, so you can always see how many times someone has been charged. This also works nicely for when someone wants to cancel the subscription.

Like I stated before, the Pigeon plugin actually works on any CMS, so you have to purchase the system through their website instead of searching around for it in your WordPress dashboard.

Memberful WP

memberful-wp

One of the main ways to keep your subscription-base happy is by making it easy for them to access content, modify subscription settings and feel comfortable using your system. Memberful WP is not as popular as some of the other paywall plugins on this list, but it offers a sleek interface along with widgets to include on your website for users to modify their subscription settings.

This plugin also works directly with WordPress, so when people sign into the Memberful WP plugin it also signs them into your WordPress site. There is no need to remember two sets of login credentials.

Wrapping Up

Based on the research we’ve done so far, the best two solutions we recommend for adding a paywall to your WordPress site are Paid Member Subscriptions or Zlick. Which one you choose depends very much on your needs.

Let me know in the comments section below if you have any questions or suggestions for this paywall WordPress plugin list. If you’ve already tried any of them, share your experience with our other readers below.

Brenda Barron is a freelance blogger for hire and WordPress specialist, with a particular fondness for the latest gadgets. She lives in So Cal with her husband, daughter, and two cats.

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13 Responses

  1. Hi,

    is there a paywall that grant access to newsletter subscribers? I don’t want my users to pay for premium content, the only way to get it should be a newsletter subscibtion.

    Thanks in advance
    Jan

  2. I want to add a paywall, but I really want to restrict purchases to individuals who are within the UK (where I am) or the US. I don’t want to have people from the EU making payments, then end up having to file for EU VAT.

    Anyone got solutions to this issue? Thanks!

  3. It seems like Leaky Paywall is the only site here that will limit the number of free article views a user can get like the newspapers are doing lately. Is this correct?

  4. Free Version of Leaky is great for an all-around paywall without much options.
    But what do you use, when it comes down to let the reader pay for individual posts oder like the first 10 ever published on a Blog?

  5. Does this HAVE to be used with a WordPress site? I maintain my own site on my own server space (at a provider) and my code is “very old fashioned” (so I have been told). I work the site with Dreamweaver and there is no mobile version. I have neither the time nor the inclination to re-do the site (which has been in existence for 20+ years) to some other format. But at the same time it’s widely used all around the world, and I’d like to get some income from it.

  6. Tinypaas recently changed the fee it charges my site from 3% to 13%. While I appreciate all the product does, I’m in the market for an alternative.

  7. Brenda what is the typical cost for a small single title publisher to set up a pay-wall using one of the above.

    1. Tinypass is free to set but takes a cut from all transactions/sales, around 9% + 30 cents per transaction, but it’s very easy to use and works with caching plugins and CDN’s without any modifications. Memberful is also free and doesn’t take a cut, but doesn’t work well with heavily cached websites. I’m using Tinypass because of how easy it is to implement.

  8. I am looking for a Paywall solution that will allow me to limit a post to a single purchase. In essence, I want to create a custom post type called “Sales Leads” and then sell those leads, but I only want one person to be able to purchase each lead. Do any of these have that functionality?

    1. Hello Seth, this may be a little late, but Pigeon Paywall has a resource option which allows you to identify and protext downloadable items or individual pages for sale. Full disclosure: I am the lead developer for Pigeon Paywall. Contact me via Twitter or through our website at for more information.

  9. Thanks for the mention Brenda!

    FYI we have a huge update with Leaky Paywall that lets you easily launch iOS and Android apps for your readers… and manage everything in WordPress. Check it out at

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