Why You Should Restrict Website Content: 4 Benefits of Membership

You should restrict website content. It gives visitors a reason to engage more with your pages, offers you a link to users that do engage, and provides you a foundation for income building.

If you’re looking for an easy way to restrict access to website content as a WordPress site owner, you’ve landed in the right place.

There are a lot of different scenarios where you may want to restrict access to website content. As an example, maybe you’ve created a site for an upcoming event that you only want guests to be able to access. Or maybe you have a site where you want an area that only members can access, like an online group or club.

In either case, there are several full-featured membership plugins you can use for the job. However, some of these may be quite resource-heavy and have features you don’t need that slow down your site.

If you don’t need a ton of membership features, you may be better off finding a plugin that’s lightweight and ultra-simple: One that gives you the functionality you’re looking for without having features you don’t need.

Restrict Content and Restrict Content Pro

This WordPress membership plugin is available in free and pro versions. It’s an incredibly popular plugin for WordPress site owners that are looking for a fast and easy way to restrict certain areas of a site. The plugin accomplishes this via shortcode.

It also restricts access to entire pages or posts using a simple meta box.

The key features in the free version of Restrict Content include:

• Restrict site access to specific sections or entire pages
• Offer private and public content to help keep sensitive content safe
• Collect user email addresses that opt-in
• Allows your site users to self-register and login from your site’s frontend

If all you’re looking for is the most straightforward way to restrict the content on your website, the free version of Restrict Content should be all you’ll need to use. But if you need more, you can upgrade to Restrict Content Pro, which will include additional membership site features, such as:

• Unlimited membership levels
• Users have the ability to manage their own account details
• Support for the most popular payment gateways, like PayPal and Stripe
• Integration with popular email marketing platforms, like AWeber, ConvertKit and Mailchimp
• Full integration with AffiliateWP
• Discount codes
• WooCommerce integration
• Detailed membership reports
• Full management of memberships, including automated email updates
• Export all of your data to CSV
• Many optional add-ons
• Friendly for developers looking to build custom integrations

An annual subscription to Restrict Content Pro will only run you between $99 – $749. The specific features will vary depending on which subscription you purchase.

There are also many benefits to using the FREE Restrict Content plugin.

Restrict Content Offers Four Benefits

Limit Access

Whether you are a writer or other creative, a company, or an organization with tiered memberships, you can benefit from limited access to certain content.

• Create pages only those who have signed up for your email list can view. This can be an insentive to get people to sign up for you email list and can allow you to dig into deeper to content those users have shown specific interest in learning.
• Block what might be contreversial content to the general public. Keep it available onlty to users at a certain level.
• Limit what can be seen on certain pages. You can make the page public and only limit some of the content.

Protect Content

Being able to limit certain content can protect that content from others. In the case of the author, new chapters of works in progress could be shared with certain users while blocking the content from the general public.

Build an Email List

It is all about relationships, and the way to build relationships is to create connections. An email list is perfect for engaging with users in a personal and direct way.

Provide User Access

The more users can access and engage the contact, the longer you can keep those users on your website. One of the top factors in SEO ratings is your bounce rate (or how long visitors stay on your site). When users can self-register for your different membership levels and then engage with the content offered to those levels then you will keep them on the website longer and ultimately lower your bounce rate.

Expand Use with Restrict Content Pro

Build a successful income stream sometimes requires thinking outside normal parameters. Nowhere you are building your business or what industry is your focus, the expansions and integrations provided through Restrict Content Pro will allow you to grow in ways you never imagined.

Drip Content

Schedule the release of member content according to your instructions instead of having the content become available as soon as they join. This matters because you don’t want subscribers to download your content and cancel their membership the next day.

With drip content, you can schedule out the release over several months, insuring your subscribers will remain active until the content had completed its cycle.

Restrict Past Content

This option keeps new members from seeing old content. It would allow you to re-run programs in the future and apply the drip content process to the re-runs.

Restricting past content provides you with opportunities to repurpose old content for your benefit but also for the benefit of your subscribers.

View Limits

Provide all users with the opportunity to view limited a limited amount of pages or content before subscriptions are required. You can set the view counts by day or by number.

Restriction Timeouts

Set up a date and time when the content you’ve restricted will become available to everyone. This could encourage potential subscribers to sign up and get the content without any delay.

Easily Restrict Access To Website Content

What’s great about the plugins we’ve covered in this guide is that you can use them for free. But even though they’re free, they still boast a lot of premium features.

This is perfect for site owners who are working with a small budget.

It’s a good idea to start out with the free version of Restrict Content Pro, because it offers a very simple way to restrict access to website content when you’re just getting started. Then, if your site begins to grow, you’ll be able to upgrade to the paid version that will give you a membership site that functions just like the pros.