Adding subscription features to your WordPress site is easy with the right plugin. Whether you are looking to manage access to services you provide or offer premium content to subscribers, here’s what you need to keep in mind when choosing a subscription billing plugin for your WordPress site.
What’s Your Budget?
Depending on what you are planning on doing with subscriptions, and the current state of your website or business, you might be looking to spend as little as possible or you might be ready to invest substantially. It’s helpful to know going in how much you have available to spend. Of course, just because you have set aside $100 to spend on a plugin, it doesn’t mean you have to spend that much.
Once you know what the upper limit on your budget is, you can filter out a large number of irrelevant results when searching for a plugin.
What Features Do You Need?
There is a wide range of use cases for subscription billing plugins. Some websites will just be looking to offer content according to the type of membership a user has. This is the model that lots of new websites have adopted, offering a limited number of free articles each month before readers have to buy a subscription to keep reading. Other websites will be using different membership types to enable access to different SaaS solutions – users with a subscription for software A but not software B should only be able to access A.
Inevitably, the more features a plugin has, the more it will cost. Some of the plugins on the WordPress store are aimed firmly at big enterprises, others at the individual user. Don’t be tempted to spend more on features that you don’t need and probably won’t use.
What Do Other People Recommend?
You can see user reviews of plugins on the WordPress store and these are a good place to start researching any individual plugin. However, it is also worth doing some more in-depth investigating. If you search for the name of any individual plugin and the word ‘review’, you will find plenty of results most of the time. If you don’t have a specific name in mind yet, there are review sites like best services that cover this niche.
Pay particular attention to reviews coming from people who are looking to implement subscriptions in the same way as you. Their experiences will be invaluable in helping you to decide whether a plugin is right or not, without having to go through the hassle of installing and testing it.
What Payment Processors Do You Need it to Support?
Depending on the size and spread of your audience, your choice may be restricted by the supported payment processors. Most of these plugins will support PayPal and Stripe, but beyond that, it’s a bit of a crapshoot. Of course, PayPal covers most of the world, but the more choice you can offer, the more people will be able to use your services.
It’s worth taking the time to make sure that you pick the best plugin for your needs. Making the switch from one subscription plugin to another one can be a hassle and is disruptive for your users. There are so many options out there that there’s bound to be one that works for your website.