ProfilePress Review: Pros and Cons You Need to Know

Last updated on Jan 27, 2025

Dependency is one of the biggest issues in the WordPress ecosystem. Oftentimes, a plugin requires us to install another plugin to add a certain functionality. In the membership plugin category, for instance, we need to install WooCommerce or SureCart to accept payments.

ProfilePress is a plugin that offers a single solution to both create membership and accept payments. The plugin is useful for content creators looking to offer paid content or sell digital products on their WordPress website.

I have tested ProfilePress. And in this review post, I will show you my findings around the plugin and provide a take whether or not the plugin is worth using.

Here are what I will cover in this review:


A Brief Intro About ProfilePress

Let’s start this review by getting to know about the plugin first.

ProfilePress is a membership plugin for WordPress which is available as a freemium product. Meaning that you have a chance to use it for free, which is super crucial if you haven’t added a membership functionality to your site before.

With the free version, which is downloadable via the WordPress plugin repository, you can figure out how a membership plugin works without needing to spend a dime. If you enjoy the experience, you can upgrade to the pro version to unlock more advanced features.

Even with the free version of ProfilePress, you can accept payments for your membership program although with fewer payment options.

To make the membership fully functional, ProfilePress also comes with features like registration form, member profile page, member directory, and so on.

Fun fact. ProfilePress was previously known as WP User Avatar. The rebranding to ProfilePress took place in 2021 following the repurpose of the plugin.

What Can You Do with ProfilePress?

In a nutshell. You can use ProfilePress to build a membership-based business with WordPress. On your membership program, you can offer anything you want. From access to digital files (think of files like PDF, JPG, JSON, ZIP, etc.), access to exclusive content, and so on.

Users who have become a member on your website will have a custom dashboard where they can access the stuff you offer.

If you offer PDF files, for instance, they can go to the Downloads tabs to access the stuff.

Downloads tab

From the dashboard, users can also view the membership plan they are currently subscribing to, view the order history, edit their account, and so on.

You can also use ProfilePress to set content access restrictions on your website. With this feature, you can adopt a business model similar to Medium’s.

In Medium, free users can access content for free, but are limited to only 3 articles per month. To read more than 3 articles per month, users are obligated to subscribe to one of the plans offered by Medium.

You can adopt the precisely same business model using ProfilePress. You can also offer tiered plans where higher the tier, the more features you offer.

ProfilePress itself allows you to accept either a one-time payment option or subscription-based payment (great to build a sustainable business).

You Can Use ProfilePress to Sell Your Software Too

From what I have elaborated above, ProfilePress is an ideal plugin for content creators.

But since it has a Downloads tab on the user dashboard, you can also use ProfilePress to sell your WordPress plugins or themes if you are a developer.

Here are some monetization ideas you can apply with the plugin:

  • Sell paid content
  • Sell digital products (e-books, templates, images, etc.)
  • Sell WordPress plugins and themes

Key Features of ProfilePress

As previously mentioned, ProfilePress is released as a freemium plugin. All core membership features are available on the free version, allowing you to build a membership site at no cost.

You can even collect payments with the free version of ProfilePress.

Here are the key features offered by ProfilePress:

On the list:

Content Protection

The first notable feature that ProfilePress offers is content protection. With the feature, you can protect the content on your website to make it only accessible by your members.

The feature supports all WordPress content types. From the default post (blog posts), page, to custom post types.

You can add multiple content types to be restricted. If you have certain posts you want them to be accessible by everyone, you can exclude them.

Include and exclude content to be restricted

About the condition, you can set who can access the content based on the user role and login condition.

For your information, when you create a new membership plan, ProfilePress automatically creates a new user role dedicated to users on the plan.

If you want your content to be accessible only by users on a certain membership plan, you can simply select the user role created by ProfilePress when you created the membership plan.

Restriction role

Users who have no access to the content will be presented with the following message (this message is customizable) when trying to access the protected content.

No access message

ProfilePress offers shortcodes which you can use to hide a part of content written with block editor (Gutenberg) or Classic Editor.

Built-in Payment System

This is one of the most crucial features you need if you plan to use ProfilePress to sell something. As I said in the opening section, ProfilePress doesn’t depend on another plugin to be able to accept payment. It has its own payment feature.

Even if you don’t use the pro version, you will still be able to accept payments via credit card. All you need is to connect your Stripe account with ProfilePress.

Connect with Stripe

Apart from credit card, you can also accept payments via both Google Pay and Google Pay using Stripe.

One thing to note. If you use the free version of ProfilePress, there will be a 2% cut for every payment made by your customers. Using the pro version will eliminate the cut.

Also, you will be able to accept other payment methods when upgrading to the pro version. Including PayPal, Mollie (a Stripe alternative) and Razorpay.

Membership

The ability to manage membership is the core functionality of ProfilePress. So, let’s cover this area carefully to find out whether ProfilePress is really the plugin you need to add the membership functionality to your website.

To start adding a new membership plan, you can go to the sub-menu of Membership Plans under the main menu of ProfilePress inside your WordPress dashboard. You can then click the Add New button to add a membership plan.

There are three setting blocks available on the Add Plan screen. On the Plan Details block, you can add basic information like plan name and description. You can also set the price of the plan here.

Plan details

On the Subscription Settings block, you can make some settings related to the subscription. From billing frequency, subscription length, sign up fee and trial mode.

If you want to adopt subscription-based payment, ProfilePress supports 6 billing cycles: daily, weekly, monthly, every 3 months, every 6 months, and yearly.

Billing cycles

And on the Downloads & Integrations block, you can upload the files you want to offer on the membership plan. You can set the download limit and expiration link.

Digital Downloads and Integrations

If you have one of these LMS plugins installed on your WordPress website — Tutor LMS, LearnDash, LifterLMS, and Sensei LMS — you will have an extra tab on this settings block.

From this tab, you can select a course to enroll users in who subscribe to this plan.

LMS integration

Membership Plans Group

You can add multiple plans to your membership program. On each plan, you can offer different features. Normally, the higher the plan, the more features the customers will get.

To offer a better experience from the customers’ perspective, you can add a group for your membership plans.

By creating a group, your customers will be able to select a membership plan from a list of plans on your program during checkout.

Membership plans group

Also, your customers will have options to upgrade or downgrade to another plan in the same group from their account page.

Switch between plans

Coupons

Everyone loves discounts. If you plan to boost the sales of your membership program by offering a discount, then you can use this feature.

With this feature, you can create a coupon code to be used by your customers to get a discount.

You can apply the discount whether on the initial payment only or for the lifetime of the billing cycle.

You can also set whether the discount to be applied to new customers, existing customers or both. Furthermore, you can also set the validity duration of the coupon code.

Coupon

User Profile

Every time you create a new membership plan, ProfilePress creates a new user role in your WordPress system. Every user who registers to the membership plan will automatically be assigned to the user role belongs to the membership plan.

Every user will also have a custom dashboard where they can access the files available on the plan they subscribed to.

From the same dashboard, users can also make other actions like updating their password, upgrading or downgrading their subscription plan, uploading a cover image and so on.

User profile

To make your membership site look more professional, you can disable the WordPress admin bar and prevent your users from accessing the WordPress dashboard.

Disable admin bar

For every user who tries to access the WordPress dashboard (assuming they know the dashboard URL), you can redirect them to the user profile dashboard instead.

Dashboard redirect

Member Directory

In ProfilePress, you can showcase people who already subscribed to your membership plans. This practice is quite useful to get potential users to subscribe because in many cases people need a trigger to take action.

When they see your membership site has many subscribers, they know they will be in a good company when subscribing.

Member directory

ProfilePress allows you to create multiple member directories. By default, it brings in a member directory which you can edit.

You can set who to display on the directory by user role. You can also set what elements to display.

Set elements on member directory

You have total freedom to set where the member directory to be shown on. For instance, you can create a dedicated page using a page builder of your choice. Then, you can simply add the provided shortcode to embed the directory on your page.

Checkout Page

Every membership plan and group of membership plans has a dedicated checkout URL which you can add to the CTA button on your landing page.

By default, the checkout page offered by ProfilePress consists of 5 standard fields as below:

  • Email address
  • Username
  • Password
  • First name
  • Last name

If you want it, you can add more fields to the checkout page. To do so, you can go to the Settings screen of ProfilePress and click the Payments -> Checkout Fields tab.

Custom checkout fields

The design of the checkout page itself is totally customizable. You can even create a custom checkout page using a page builder plugin of your choice (Elementor, Divi, Breakdance, etc,).

If you want to do this, you can simply add the shortcode [profilepress-checkout] to the custom checkout you create.

Form Builder

ProfilePress brings in the following forms upon installation:

  • Login form
  • Registration form
  • Password reset form
  • Edit profile
  • User profile form

Some of these forms replace the default form of WordPress. For instance, the login form of ProfilePress will replace the default login page of WordPress. When you type yourdomain.com/wp-login.php on the address bar of your browser, you will be directed to a new login page provided by ProfilePress.

The look and elements of the forms above are customizable.

In terms of design, you can set things like background, text style, form width, border radius, button style, and so on.

Login form design

By default, the ProfilePress forms come in a stacked style. You can change the layout by setting the width of the fields (you can click the gear icon to edit a field).

If you want to apply a small custom CSS style to a field, ProfilePress can accommodate via CSS class.

Custom CSS

In terms of form elements, you can add extra fields other than the ones already in place. For a registration form, for instance, you can add extra fields like password strength indicator, nickname, profile picture, cover photo, and so on.

Custom form fields

To edit the forms above, you can go to ProfilePress -> Forms & Profiles on your WordPress dashboard.

Every ProfilePress form has a shortcode. That means, you can embed the ProfilePress forms to a page created with a page builder plugin as long as it supports shortcode.

Social Login

If you want to adopt the freemium business model for your content-based website (like Medium), then you need to get as many users as possible. And to boost the registration rate, you can leverage social media login.

ProfilePress has a feature that allows you add social media login to your membership website. With this feature, users who have no account can login to your website using their social media account.

To add the social media platforms to forms itself, you can edit the forms (login form and registration) and simply add the social media platforms you want to add on the Social Login Button option under the Appearance tab.

Social media platforms

The social media login feature of ProfilePress supports the following social media platforms:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter/X
  • Google
  • LinkedIn

Apart from the social media platforms above, you can also add the following platforms on your login/registration form.

  • Microsoft
  • Yahoo
  • Amazon
  • GitHub
  • WordPress.com
  • VK.com

In order to make the social login work, you need to connect every social media platform you want to add to your form. To do so, you can go to the Social General -> Login tab on the Settings screen of ProfilePress.

Social media integration

Here is the look of your form with social media platforms added.

Login form with social media

Metered Paywall

Do you count how many times I mentioned Medium in this post? That’s because Medium is a perfect example of how you can implement ProfilePress. Although, once again, you can also use the plugin to sell digital products instead of content.

In Medium, you can read the articles for free, but limited to only 3 articles per month. To read more articles in the span of one month, you need to upgrade your account.

You can adopt the precisely same business model with ProfilePress thanks to its metered paywall feature.

With this feature, you can set the maximum number of articles a free member can read during a certain period (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly).

Metered paywall

Metered paywall can be set when you are adding a content protection rule. You can simply click the Metered Paywall tab.

If you want it, you can also display a floating message to notify your users about the remaining free posts they can read.

Floating message

Email Confirmation

Email confirmation is another crucial enough feature that every membership plugin should have. This feature can help to ensure that those who register to your website really have a strong intention to become a member. Thus, converting them into paid members should be easier.

Email confirmation will be automatically sent to the newly registered members. They won’t be able to login with their account until they confirm their email address.

Before they confirm the email address, they will see the following message every time they attempt to login.

Email confirmation message

The content and subject of the email confirmation are editable. You can use your own words that reflect your brand or personality.

Email confirmation template

You can also set things like the expiration date of the confirmation link and enable auto login after confirmation.

Unfortunately, this feature is only usable if you use a third-party email delivery service like Sengrid and Mailgun. It doesn’t work if you use the default email delivery function of WordPress.

Passwordless Login

If you have ever noticed, some modern apps offer a passwordless login feature. Instead of the traditional login method by entering username and password, they offer a passwordless login experience by sending a one-time URL via email.

A user who clicks the URL will automatically login to the app.

In ProfilePress, you can offer the same login experience to your members.

By default, the one-time login URL will expire in 10 minutes, but you can set a duration yourself.

Login URl expiration duration

Same as email confirmation, the content of the login URL-contained email is also editable.

Email Marketing Platform Integration

This is another useful feature that ProfilePress offers. As you know, email is a key marketing channel in digital marketing.

But what can the integration do?

First, this feature only supports Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor. It depends on which email marketing platform you will integrate ProfilePress with.

If you integrate ProfilePress with Mailchimp, ProfilePress will add new subscribers who subscribe to a membership plan on your website to an audience on your Mailchimp account.

The rest is up to you. You can, for instance, use the automation feature of Mailchimp to send a welcome email series.

The integration also offers a synchronization option. If you enable this option, every change made by your members on their profile dashboard will be synced with Mailchimp. For instance, if a user changes their name, the change will also be applied to Mailchimp.

Syncronization

LMS Plugin Integration

Above, I briefly mentioned that when adding a new membership plan, you can select a course that your subscribers can enroll in. The course itself can be created using an LMS plugin of your choice.

ProfilePress supports major LMS plugins for WordPress as follows:

  • Tutor LMS
  • LearnDash
  • LifterLMS
  • Sensei LMS

The features you get for each LMS plugin are varied. If you use Tutor LMS and Sensei LMS, you can only enroll your members to an existing course during registration.

If you use LifterLMS and LearnDash, your members will be able to view the courses they enrolled in via the profile dashboard.

LifterLMS integration

The integration support with an LMS plugin gives more ideas to market your membership program.

A simple idea. You can offer a free course to those who want to subscribe to a membership plan.

User Moderation

It’s true that your membership website is useless without subscribers. But you also know that spammers haunt every website that has a registration form.

Email confirmation can help fix the issue. But again, you need to setup a third-party SMTP service to enable it.

As an alternative to combat spammers, you can enable user moderation.

If you enable this feature, you will be able to make a decision (manually) whether you want to approve a certain subscriber to become a member on your website.

ProfilePress will display a notification if you have pending registration requests (an email notification will also be sent to you).

User moderation

Your subscribers will see a message when their registration is pending. They will also see a message when their account is blocked. The content of the messages are editable.

Spam Protection

Email confirmation and user moderation are great to combat spammers. But if they are not enough (or if you want to use a different approach), then you can use the built-in spam protection features offered by ProfilePress.

ProfilePress offers spam a protection feature using reCAPTCHA. You can add reCAPTCHA to the login form, registration form and other forms associated with ProfilePress.

The addition itself should be done manually by adding a dedicated field.

reCAPTCHA

ProfilePress itself supports both reCAPTCHA version 2 and reCAPTCHA version 3.

Invitation Code

Apart from reCAPTCHA, another approach you can use to protect your membership website from spammers is by adopting the invite-only registration method.

With this approach, only those who have the invitation code can register to become a new member on your website.

Customizable Emails

Plenty of emails are involved when you build a membership website. When a user subscribes to a membership plan, for instance, you can send them a confirmation email.

Or when they subscribe to a paid membership plan, you send them the order details.

Every email has the default content, but can edit them to align with your branding style. To edit the content of the emails, you can go to the Emails tab on the ProfilePress Settings screen.

Simply click the gear icon to edit the email content.

edit email content

Apart from email content, you can also edit the design of the email. You can set basic design settings like background color and text color.

You can also add your website logo on the email header if you want it.

Custom email design

ProfilePress Free vs Pro

You can use ProfilePress to build an online business without needing to spend a huge amount of money, which is great if you are inexperienced.

As I mentioned in the opening section. Even with the free version of ProfilePress, you can accept payments for your digital products, although the payment option is limited to credit card, Apple Pay and Google Pay (you need to make sure that your country is supported by Stripe, by the way).

With the free version of ProfilePress, you can:

  • Create membership plans
  • Sell digital products
  • Accept payments via credit card
  • Apply content access restriction

These capabilities are more than enough to run an online business.

But if you need more advanced features, you can use the pro version of ProfilePress.

After installing and activating ProfilePress Pro, you will be able to use all the add-ons available on the Addons screen.

To make it easy for you learn the differences between free version and the pro version of ProfilePress, I have created the following comparison table:

ProfilePress FreeProfilePress Pro
Create membership plans
Membership plan groups
Ability to create coupons
Apply content access restriction
2% cut fee per transaction
Stripe payment gateway (to accept payment via credit card, Google Pay and Apple Pay)
Direct bank transfer
PayPal payment gateway
Mollie payment gateway
Razorpay payment gateway
Metered paywall
Create custom forms
Form custom fields
Social login
Passwordless login
Spam protection
Email confirmation
User moderation
LMS integration
Email marketing platform integration
User profile
Member directory
Features comparison between ProfilePress Free and Pro.

ProfilePress Pricing

Although upgrading to the pro version is not mandatory, there will be some useful features you can unlock for the sake of providing a better experience for your users.

You can upgrade to the pro version anytime you are ready.

During this review itself, I use the full version of ProfilePress so that I can unlock and try all of the key features as I have elaborated above.

The pro version of ProfilePress consists of tree plans. The features you can unlock varied on each plan:

StandardPlusAgency
Price$129/year$299/year$499/year
Number of websites allowed13Unlimited
PayPal, Mollie, Razorpay ✅ ✅ ✅
Metered paywall ✅ ✅
Custom form fields ✅ ✅ ✅
Social login ✅ ✅ ✅
Passwordless login ✅ ✅
Spam protection ✅ ✅ ✅
Email confirmation ✅ ✅ ✅
User moderation ✅ ✅
LMS integration ✅ ✅ ✅
Email marketing platform integration ✅ ✅ ✅
Features comparison between ProfilePress Pro plans.

Pros and Cons of ProfilePress

If I were to build a website like Medium (yes, I mention it again) with WordPress, then ProfilePress would be the first plugin I try. I could use it for free to build the revenue foundation before scaling up.

Selling paid content is just one example of how you can use ProfilePress to build your online business.

As mentioned several times above, you can also use the plugin to sell digital products and software.

No obligation to use the pro version to accept payments. That’s one of the best things that the plugin offers.

No product is perfect, however. ProfilePress has limited options of email marketing platform. It only supports integration with Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor. Some email-involved features, email confirmation in particular, also require a third-party SMTP service to work properly.

Here are some pros and cons of ProfilePress I found during the review:

Pros:

  • Usable to sell digital products and software
  • Usable to sell paid content
  • Useful features on the free version
  • No dependency on a payment plugin
  • Design flexibility thanks to shortcodes
  • Customizable email content
  • Passwordless login to offer a smooth login experience
  • Smooth integration with LMS plugins

Cons:

  • Some emails require a third-party SMTP service to work
  • No one-time payment option for the pro version
  • Limited option on email marketing platform integration

Conclusion – Is ProfilePress a Good Plugin to Create a Membership Website?

Yes. ProfilePress is a great plugin to create a fully functional membership website for free. Although there will be a 2% cut, I think it’s not a big deal. Other platforms, such as Gumroad (10%), Lemon Squeezy (5%) and Teachable (5%), have a higher cut per transaction.

ProfilePress is especially a great plugin to use if you have no experience in creating a membership website. With it, you can learn how a membership website works. You can also learn the business opportunities you can build with it.

With ProfilePress you can:

  • Sell digital products. From e-book, images, videos, templates, you name it
  • Sell paid content on your website. Be it text or video
  • Sell software (WordPress plugins, WordPress themes, etc,)
  • Offer exclusive content for registered members
  • Build a paid community
  • Build email list out of the registration form
  • Etc

The best part?

It takes no dolar to start.

This page may contain affiliate links, which help support the project. Read our affiliate disclosure.

Aliko Sunawang

Aliko is a professional blogger and web creator. He has been blogging with WordPress since 2013. In his spare time, he loves going out to take some photos. More

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