Here’s How to use a Member Area on Your Squarespace Website
How to know if Squarespace Member Areas are right for you.
Squarespace Member Areas is built into Squarespace’s platform
Creating exclusive courses for students, sharing specialized products with customers, providing unique content such as podcasts or coaching videos - these are the reasons many clients seek the expertise of an Expert in Squarespace design. They work for many clients - but not all clients. In order to know if they will benefit you, it’s important to answer some basic questions:
What are Squarespace Member Areas?
Does using a Squarespace Member Area cost money?
What are the pros and cons of using Squarespace Member Areas instead of another option?
Only then can I help my clients weigh the most important question:
Are Member Areas right for you?
From my years of work as a Custom Squarespace Expert, I can strongly recommend using a member space to most clients. There are very few clients, be they small businesses, non-profits, one-person operations or large corporate clients, who cannot benefit from having protected content that keeps customers and audiences steadily engaged. The important choice is whether to use Member Areas from Squarespace to generate those benefits for you.
I also will be adding a second blog post with a detailed look on how to enable a Squarespace Member Area, how to customize a Member Area to work best for you, and how Squarespace Member Areas stands up to the competition. My hope is that with this information, you can easily evaluate how or if Member Areas will work for you, and if you need to partner with me to maximize your benefits.
So read on to find out how best to use a Member Area on your Squarespace site.
What are Squarespace Member Areas?
Layout for Squarespace Member Areas
First, some basics - what are Member Areas?
A website membership is a way for your target audience member to access gated content. Member Areas, simply, is an integrated way to add a members-only “area” (or page) to your current Squarespace website by creating membership accounts for your customers or clients and charging a fee if you’d like to do so.
Adding this type of content allows you to entice new website visitors as well as deepen your connection with your target audience. Using this new option, you as a site owner can create and manage online membership programs yourself without the need for external sites, management or plug-ins. The content you provide to your members can take any form that works best for your business and your customers: virtual workshops, video exclusives, textbooks, personalized coaching, podcasts - if it works for your business, it can likely be added to your membership area.
Once added, these member pages can be used to generate profit - the memberships themselves can be free, a one time fee, or an ongoing fee for each member. My own website has free client libraries for past customers that don’t require a recurring fee, whereas some of my clients use Member Areas to generate the bulk of their business revenue.
How much does a Squarespace Member Area cost?
Another item to consider before you jump on board is the pricing for adding a membership area and if it works best for your business model. Squarespace Member Areas are a paid addition to your site and can be added to any Squarespace plan. Luckily, there are plans for scaling your membership site pages that work for most budgets.
The Squarespace Member Area pricing is scaled based on the amount of member areas that would work best for your Squarespace site, as well as on if you choose to pay annually or monthly for the addition of a member space. As of this publishing date, it’s worth noting that by paying annually, you do receive a 13% discount on your Squarespace Member Area pricing.
Squarespace Member Areas Pricing Plans
This has changed as of August 21, 2023. For updated pricing, please see this link.
Squarespace Member Area Features
Let’s review the top five features of Member Areas - there are more, but these are the top items to consider on your way to choosing if Squarespace Member Areas is right for you.
Protected Content for Free or At Cost
I’ve stated this earlier, but at it’s core, Member Areas allows you to membership-protect specific pages on your Squarespace website, and make those pages accessible only to subscribed members. This access is fully customizable depending on how you want to use Member Areas - it could be for free memberships, as well as paid memberships billed as either a one-time fee or recurring payment (subscriptions).
Protected content can include videos, text, PDFs, images, and much more
Seamless Integration with Squarespace
Why learn another platform? The number one reason to choose Squarespace Member Areas is for it’s seamless integration; you are keeping your members on your website, with your branding, and you are keeping all of your online business in one place.
Part of this integration includes Customer Account information. For site owners who also sell non-exclusive content or products, the Customer Accounts used for membership access via Squarespace Member Areas is actually the same account information used for other products on your website—so, customers will have one account to manage for all billing, shipping and membership access.
Custom Checkout for Members
In your checkout process for memberships or subscriptions purchased via Member Areas, you have the ability to add a custom checkout form - this could be used to collect additional information from your clients and customers, as well as require them to agree to your terms of service.
Email Notifications
Squarespace Member Areas has some built-in customer email notifications, including a Welcome Email, Cancellation Email, and other Customer Account Emails (like re-setting a password, etc.) that provide basic built-in customer communication. In addition, if you’d like some extra communication options, Member Areas does integrate well with Squarespace Email Campaigns. [I’d want to discuss using this option with any clients who are interested as their email marketing may not work for all clients.]
Consistent Branding
Using Member Areas makes consistent branding easier for any level of website owner. Even the Access Denied page that a non-member stumbles across can be customized with your branding and used to encourage membership access.
Limitations of Squarespace Member Areas
Your reason for using Squarespace and for needing a member space is unique - I have yet to come across a client who wants to use their website in exactly the same way as another client. For that reason, there may be a few cons to using Squarespace’s Member Areas for certain site owners. Here are five top limitations I’ve found while working with clients:
Fees and Fee Structure
The fees may not be an issue depending on your overall business model, especially if you are choosing to have free membership access. If you are planning to have member area pricing on your site, it is important to remember that at every plan level for Member Space, access pricing is an additional fee on top of your payment card processor fees.
So, for example, say you decide on the Starter level of Member Area Pricing and that you have chosen Stripe as your card processor. Stripe will charge you 2.9% for each transaction and Squarespace will charge you 7% for each transaction.
Video Hosting
Squarespace member areas do not offer video hosting, which means you still need to have a Vimeo Business account. Vimeo is my recommended option here, and this is a common workaround for many of my clients. However, since it’s not native to your site, it may bother some.
Video collections built in Squarespace Member Areas
Membership Packs
There is no current ability to offer membership pricing for packs or “bundling” of memberships in Squarespace Member Areas. If this is not something you’d ever add, it may never affect you. For clients who want to offer membership pricing for accessing multiple Member Spaces, it may be slightly annoying to use a workaround for this option [ie., Regular Membership vs. Student Pricing].
File-specific Protection
While the goal of having a Member Area is to have gated protected access to content on your site, the actual files you make available to your customers or audience are themselves not protected. Unfortunately, this means you are relying on your audience to not share links to those files, which could be accessed or downloaded by non-members.
Learning Management System
Certain clients use Member Areas as a learning tool, such as for yoga courses or supplemental education. It might be necessary for you to track course progression for your members - and that is mostly lacking in Squarespace Member Areas. I can help clients find helpful workarounds, for example using blog modules, but there isn’t currently a way to “mark off” each completed course.
Bonus Note: Growth
If you experience a large amount of growth, or currently have a large amount of customers or clients [50+], I’d want to have a discussion about your expectations for this type of usage. Member Areas is still new and not scalable in many ways - other options might fit your site incredibly well in ways that Squarespace’s current offering can not.
Is a Squarespace Member Area right for you?
Your content is important. How you share it to your customers matters - and having a way to generate larger audiences or profit is likely the main reason you are looking into Member Areas and member pricing.
For the majority of my clients, Squarespace Member Areas is still too basic and new for a large scale use. There are many options that will fit better, and in our follow up Member Area blog post, we will go over the top five alternative options. The idea of a fully integrated tool that works seamless with Squarespace is a great one and I look forward to seeing how Member Areas develops in the next year. That said, there is a portion of clients who don’t need a bonanza of features and will see a good amount of benefit from using Member Areas on their Squarespace website. If you’d like me to take a website audit of your current site, or if you are interested in creating a new website that has membership options, feel free to get in touch and we’ll talk about it!
NEED HELP WITH YOUR SQUARESPACE WEBSITE?
I’m Justin Mabee, and I’m a Squarespace Expert, having worked in the platform for nearly a decade. I’ve built well over 400 websites on Squarespace in that time, and can help you with your next project. Whether you need something simple to promote your business, or a full corporate startup website, I’m capable and ready to help you make your business great. Get in touch with me today.
