Disclosure: I work on Crownerr, and this is the Crownerr blog, so treat this as biased. I will point out where a WordPress stack or a general site builder beats a hosted platform like ours, and where it falls short. A membership website is a site where some content or community sits behind a login and people pay a recurring fee to get in. That part is simple. The plumbing is what gets you: gating, billing, renewals, and keeping track of who still has access.
The short answer: to create a membership website, pick a build route (WordPress plus a membership plugin, a site-builder add-on, or a dedicated membership platform), connect your own domain and Stripe, set up two or three tiers, gate your content by tier, and add real content before you charge anyone. A dedicated platform is the fastest route; WordPress gives you the most control.
What a membership website actually needs
- Gated content that only paying members can see. A leaky paywall is worse than no paywall at all.
- Recurring billing that renews on its own, retries failed cards, and lets members cancel without emailing you first. In the UK that usually means Stripe at 1.5% + 20p per payment.
- Member management: who sits on which tier, when they joined or left, and access that gets revoked the moment a subscription lapses.
- Your own domain and brand. It buys trust and SEO, and it means you keep your audience if a platform changes the rules on you.
None of these are exotic. The trouble is that they have to work together, every day, without you watching. A renewal fails at 3am and the member should still have access for the grace period you set, not get locked out mid-month and churn in a huff. Someone cancels and their access should run to the end of the period they already paid for. Get the seams between gating and billing wrong and you either give content away or you punish people who paid. Both cost you.
Option 1: WordPress plus a membership plugin
You run WordPress, add a plugin like MemberPress or Paid Memberships Pro, connect Stripe, and you have your membership portals. The upside is real: total control, your data lives in your database, and there is no per-member platform fee beyond Stripe and the plugin licence. If you want a custom field on the signup form or a weird tier rule, you can usually build it or buy an add-on.
The downside is that you are now a sysadmin. Hosting, PHP updates, plugin updates, security patches, backups, and the moment two plugins disagree, you are the one reading the error log. The headline cost looks low and then the bill climbs: managed WordPress hosting, the membership plugin licence, often a separate plugin for the parts the first one does badly, and your own hours. Plugins also drift. A major WordPress or WooCommerce update can break a paid-membership flow, and you find out when a member emails to say the card page is blank. Pick this if owning your stack is something you actually enjoy maintaining, not just something you like the idea of.
Option 2: a site builder add-on
Squarespace, Wix and Webflow all bolt a member area onto the website you were already building. For light gating, one or two members-only pages behind a single paywall, the built-in feature is the least painful route, because you are not adding a new tool. It lives where your site already lives.
Where it bites: tiering is shallow, so anything past one or two membership levels gets awkward. Community features are thin or absent, so if you wanted discussion, a feed, or member-to-member interaction you are bolting on yet another service. And the pricing is layered, you pay for the site plan and then a membership or commerce upgrade on top, sometimes with its own transaction cut. The deeper trap is that the member area is a feature of a website builder, not the point of the product, so it gets the engineering attention a side feature gets. If memberships are the main event rather than a sideline, you will outgrow this within a year.
Option 3: a dedicated membership platform
Patreon, Memberful, Mighty Networks and Crownerr treat gating, billing, member management and tiers as the core product, not a bolt-on. Signup, checkout, renewals, dunning when a card fails, access revocation, tier upgrades and downgrades all ship working out of the box. You get speed, you launch in an afternoon, and you get reliability, because the flows that break a WordPress stack are the flows these companies maintain full-time.
The trade is that you live inside someone else's product decisions. If they do not support a layout, a payout schedule or a tier rule, you wait or you leave. Most of them also charge a platform fee on top of Stripe, and the fee structures vary wildly, some take a flat percentage of everything, some gate the good rate behind a higher monthly plan. A few make it hard to export your member list or take your audience with you, which is the thing you least want to discover after you have grown. Read the fee and the export terms carefully before you commit. See how to price a membership.
The three routes compared
| Route | Time to launch | Who maintains it | Cost on top of Stripe | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress plus a membership plugin | Days: hosting, plugin, Stripe and theme to wire together | You: updates, security patches, backups and plugin conflicts | Hosting and the plugin licence; no platform cut | Owners who want full control and are happy maintaining the stack |
| Site-builder add-on (Squarespace, Wix, Webflow) | Hours, on the site you already have | The builder, but tiers are shallow and community is thin | The site plan plus a membership or commerce upgrade, sometimes with a transaction cut | One or two members-only pages next to a main website |
| Dedicated membership platform (Patreon, Memberful, Mighty Networks, Crownerr) | An afternoon | The platform maintains billing, renewals and access | A platform fee, either flat or lower on higher plans | A business where memberships are the main event |
Step by step on a hosted Space
- Create your Space and connect your domain. Do the domain first, because it is the thing people remember and the thing search engines index, and you do not want to migrate it later.
- Connect Stripe for payments and Stripe Connect for payouts, so the money lands in your account rather than passing through a middleman first. Stripe takes 1.5% + 20p per UK card payment, and that is separate from any platform fee.
- Define your tiers: a free Member (£0, 0 credits), then Pro at £39.99/mo with 2,000 credits and Ultimate at £79.99/mo with 5,000 credits. Two or three is plenty. A free tier is useful as the front door, it lets people in to look around before they pay. See how to set up memberships on Crownerr.
- Gate content by tier. Access flips on and off automatically as subscriptions start and lapse, so you are not manually adding and removing people.
- Seed it with real content before you charge anyone, so your first member gets value on day one rather than an empty room and a promise.
- Open the doors, then watch the first few signups closely. The early ones tell you whether your pricing and your gating actually make sense to a stranger. Starting from zero? See how to start a paid community.
Model your real take-home before you pick
The sticker prices hide the number that matters, which is what you keep per member. Take a member paying you £10 a month. Stripe takes 1.5% + 20p, so about 35p, leaving £9.65. Then the platform fee comes off whatever is left. On a 6% fee that is another 60p or so, on a 3% fee about 30p, on a 0% fee nothing. The percentages look small until you multiply by a few hundred members and twelve months. Run that sum across the plans you are weighing, including the WordPress route where the platform cut is zero but you carry hosting and your own time instead. The cheapest option on paper is rarely the cheapest once you price in maintenance, and the priciest monthly plan can win if its fee is low and your volume is high. Do the arithmetic with your own numbers, not the marketing ones.
Here is that sum on Crownerr's three Space Plans, for members paying £10 a month by UK card. It assumes the platform fee applies to the full £10 and leaves out VAT on the plan price, so treat it as a model rather than a quote.
| Members | Free (6%, £0/mo) | Creator (3%, £79/mo) | Studio (0%, £149/mo) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100 | £905 | £856 | £816 |
| 300 | £2,715 | £2,726 | £2,746 |
| 1,000 | £9,050 | £9,271 | £9,501 |
Monthly take-home after Stripe (1.5% + 20p per payment), the platform fee and the plan price. Free comes out ahead below roughly 250 members at £10; above that, the lower fee on a paid plan more than covers its monthly price.
Where Crownerr fits
Crownerr is the dedicated-platform route: gated content, Stripe-backed billing, member management and your own domain, with none of the maintenance landing on you. Space Plans run Free (6% fee, £0/mo), Creator (3% fee, £79/mo) and Studio (0% fee, £149/mo), and any paid plan gets a 15% bundle discount on monthly Pro and Ultimate. The maths above is why the higher monthly plan can come out ahead, the lower fee earns its keep once you have members. If you want to own your stack from end to end and you enjoy the upkeep, WordPress is the honest answer. If you want this live by this afternoon, see pricing.