Squarespace Membership Area Demystified: A Complete Guide

Squarespace Membership Areas (also known as Squarespace Member Sites) allow you to create restricted access areas on your Squarespace-created website.

With a Squarespace Membership Area, you can provide access to members-only content such as premium articles, videos, online courses, e-books, webinars, community forums, digital downloads, discounts, or any other type of exclusive material or experiences.

You can choose to make your Squarespace Membership Area free to register for, or charge a subscription fee.

Setting up a Squarespace Membership Area offers a huge range of benefits for your brand, business, and bottom line.

Squarespace Membership Areas:

• Provide a reliable source of income: by restricting your best content to paying subscribers, you can generate a consistent stream of revenue. And, by creating different membership tiers – each with its own unique benefits and pricing – you can cater to a wider breadth of audience preferences and income levels.
• Are free to create: it won’t cost you anything to add a Squarespace Membership Area to your website. However, you will need to be on one of Squarespace’s paid plans – either Digital Products or a Business or Commerce plan – to enable this feature.
• Are simple to set up and manage: Squarespace’s drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to create your Squarespace Membership Area in your brand’s own image; customizing the content and layout to fit your business’s unique look and feel.
• Build a community around your brand: Squarespace Membership Areas facilitate greater member interaction, allowing them to discuss, debate, and get to know each other through comments, forums, and other community features such as webinars, events, and live Q&A sessions. This fosters a sense of belonging among members; it enhances the community experience and engenders participation and interest.

Want to take a look at Squarespace Membership Areas in action? Let’s dive into three real-world Squarespace Membership Areas for a peek.

Zarraffa’s

Australian-owned coffee roastery Zarraffa’s’ Squarespace website utilizes its Membership Area feature for subscribers to its Z Card program.

By registering, customers not only get a free drink now (and on their birthday), but exclusive access to recent news, offers, giveaways, and competitions, too – all offered through Zarraffa’s’ Squarespace Membership Area.

Vocal Kinesthetics

Founded by Kimberly Moller, Vocal Kinesthetics is a San Diego-based voice coaching provider.

Built with Squarespace, VK’s website utilizes a Squarespace Membership Area to collect a monthly subscription fee of $99. This provides access to VK’s online studio, as well as a membership to VK – and all the community building and benefits that come with it.

Yellow Co

A membership service for female entrepreneurs, Yellow Co’s gorgeous, minimalist website is emblematic of Squarespace’s committed, laser-like focus on design and aesthetics.

Yellow Co is also, however, an excellent example of a site using a Squarespace Membership Area to win and retain subscribers. Signing up offers members exclusive access to PDF downloads, conference speaker videos, online courses, and quarterly “realign” sessions.

Ready to create your own Squarespace Membership Area? Here’s how.

First, you’ll need to build a website with Squarespace – that seems straightforward enough. And, fortunately, it is. In our tests of the best ecommerce website builders, Squarespace ranked easiest to use and scored 4.3 out of 5 in our ease of use metric.

With your Squarespace website set up, you’ll need to be on a paid plan – either Squarespace’s Business Plan ($23 per month), Basic Commerce ($27 per month), or its Digital Products add-on. If this feels like information overload, don’t panic. You can learn more about Squarespace’s pricing plans in our simple, jargon-free guide.

On top of this fee, you’ll need to select one of Squarespace’s membership site pricing plans. These start at $9 per month (when you bill annually; it’s $12 per month when you bill month-to-month), and max out at $119 per month.

That’s a big difference, but the most expensive plan also scores you zero transaction fees. With the cheapest plan, you’ll need to pay 7% on every sale you make.

With that in mind, choose carefully – and be sure to select the plan that’s the best fit for your business’s size and sales volume.

Once you’re in the Squarespace editor, open the “Settings” menu from the left-hand menu and select the “Member’s Area” tab. Click on the “Create Member Area’ button and hit the “+” to choose a name for your member area, set a description, and select a landing page that reflects your business’s specific style and flavor.

This next stage is all about customization, and it’s where you’ll choose a pricing model (will you offer subscriptions, for example, on a monthly, annual, or lifetime basis?) and set a price for your memberships. At this point, you’ll also be able to choose what’s included in your membership plan and select which specific pieces of content, feature sets, or benefits each level of membership will unlock.

From here, you can start actually adding the content to your members-only area, filling your site with exclusive pages, blog posts, videos, and downloadable resources to keep your paying subscribers engaged. At this stage, be sure to organize your Squarespace Membership Area’s content into categories or menus so it’s easy for you – and your subscribers – to navigate.

Finally, you’ll need to connect with your preferred payment processor, so you can actually accept all those membership fees once the subscriptions start flowing in. Fortunately, Squarespace makes integration a breeze – and it’s far easier than it sounds!

Keen on creating a membership website, but want more general – rather than Squarespace-specific – tips? Head to our guide on how to create a membership website for the full rundown.

Putting together a Squarespace Membership Area is easy – and relatively quick – to set up.

But, to make it successful, you’ll need to put the work in. That means choosing the right membership business model, creating good content, setting the right price, and promoting your membership area to the right audience.

Here are our top tips to help you do just that.

• Choose the right content: understand the interests and needs of your target audience – through conducting surveys or research to identify the topics, formats, and subjects they’re most passionate about. Armed with more information about your target audience, you’ll know what type of content to create. You can offer members-only resources that provide real value, address specific problems, and offer the most relevant solutions.
• Set a fair price: research other membership sites, especially those offering similar content or experiences, or that operate in the same niche, to gauge what your audience might be willing to pay. Consider offering multiple membership tiers (each with varying levels of access and benefits) to appeal to all budgets.
• Promote your Squarespace Membership Area: use compelling language and visuals to showcase its exclusive content, community interaction, and the plethora of perks your member site offers. Then, shout about it through every channel you have a presence on, be it your website or social media accounts, or via your email marketing database.
• Provide excellent customer service: respond to member enquiries, concerns, and comments with speed and courtesy. Organize regular, member-only events, live Q&A sessions, and polls to keep them involved and engaged; and make them feel valued.

Setting up a Squarespace Membership Area can help you build a community of paying subscribers, then – by engaging and re-engaging them with targeted, relevant content exclusive only to them – help them build a strong, enduring connection with your brand.

Better still, Squarespace is one of the best website builders to do it with. Along with Wix, it’s the easiest website builder to use (scoring 4.4 out of 5 in our comprehensive in-house research), and, at 4.7, offers the most design flexibility going. Even if you don’t find Squarespace immediately easy to use – which we think you will – our guide to how to use Squarespace should clear up any initial teething pains.

Want to get stuck in, and try Squarespace out yourself?

Start your Squarespace journey today with a 14-day free trial, and take your first strides towards a stunning members-only area for your customers.

Just don’t forget to let us know how you get on in the comments section below!