Protecting membership content and giving access to authorized members is one of the prime concerns of any membership site owner. Often times you just protect entire pages from unauthorized users, however, there are several other strategies for protecting your membership content.
For example, instead of restricting access to the entire page you can show or hide portions of the page based on Infusionsoft tags, membership levels, login status, and user’s identity.
In this article, I will cover 18 different methods you can use to protect or grant access to your membership site content using Memberium. At the end of this article, you will have learned how you can protect pages, posts, custom post types, portions of pages, documents, videos, audio files, and content categories.
You will also learn how you can restrict users access to your site based on their membership, Infusionsoft tags, IP address, or how many times the user has logged in within a specified time limit.
It is possible that you may not need all of the advanced content protection features of Memberium, but it will be useful to know what is possible as your site grows and your needs expand.
Here Is the List of 6 Content Protection Strategies We’ll Cover Throughout This Article
- Protecting Pages, Posts or Custom Posts types
- Protecting a portion of a page, post, or widget
- Protecting Your Files (Downloadable Documents, Pdf, Videos, and Audio)
- Protect Categories and Other Special Pages
- Restrict Access to the site with Unique Memberium Features
- Protect a Sub-Page with Inherited settings from the Parent Page
Protecting Pages, Posts or Custom Posts type
Membership sites are all about creating a personalized user experience. As a membership site owner, you’d want to display certain elements of a page only to the users for whom it’s applicable.
For example, you might want to show the Upgrade Membership button only to users who haven’t upgraded yet. Memberium offers multiple options to display elements like call to action buttons, forms, resources, etc. conditionally to members. The options are listed below.
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Protecting Pages, Posts or Custom Posts types
Memberium allows you to protect your pages, posts, and custom post types on your WordPress membership site through Memberium’s Content Protection Metabox. It is the most popular and widely used Memberium content protection feature.
Memberium’s Content Protection Metabox helps you protect your content with combinations of various controls such as active membership, Infusionsoft/Keap tags, logged in user’s contact ID, and logged-in status.
You can also determine what happens if the user doesn’t have access. You can display an excerpt or teaser content (if your theme supports excerpt) or redirect them to a different page altogether.
Protecting a portion of a page, post, or widget
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Protect content based on the permission to the specified page or post
You can show or hide content based on if a user can access another post using the [memb_can_view_post] shortcode. This shortcode verifies if the user has access to the specified page or post, and displays or hides content accordingly.
This shortcode is more advanced than its other counterparts as it takes access tags as well as payment failure tags into consideration to determine whether a user has permission to view the page or not.
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Protect content based on active membership levels
You can create your membership levels within Memberium and protect content based on if a member has that level or not. To protect portions of the page, post or the widget based on the user’s active membership you will use [memb_has_membership] shortcode.
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Show or hide content based on Infusionsoft tag(s)
There are a couple of shortcodes for protecting a portion of page, post or custom post type based on Infusionsoft tags. You can use [memb_has_any_tag] (one tag required) to display or hide content if the user does or doesn’t have one of the specified tags.
Alternatively, if you want to grant or restrict access based on all the specified tags, you can use [memb_has_all_tags] (all tags required) shortcode.
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Protect or hide content according to user’s logged-in status
If you want to display or hide a certain portion of the page, post or custom post type based on if the user is logged in or logged out, you can do that using [memb_is_logged_in] shortcode. This shortcode is useful to display marketing messages to the logged out user and serve personalized content to the logged in users conditionally.
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Show or hide a portion of the page if user has a valid credit card
Protecting the portion of the page, post or custom post type based on a valid credit card is super useful when you want to display the Call to Action button, especially related to payment when a user has a valid credit card attached to his record.
Memberium’s [memb_has_creditcard] shortcode allows you to show or hide content based on whether the user has a valid credit card on file or not.
Protecting Your Files (Downloadable Documents, PDF, Videos and Audio)
In comparison to the text content you have on your membership site, files are at higher risk for unauthorized sharing. However, Memberium is equipped with the functionalities to protect your downloadable documents, PDFs, videos and audio files as listed below.
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Generate secure, expiring Amazon S3 links
Protecting the downloadable content is one of the trickier parts for membership site owners. Memberium integrates with Amazon S3 and allows you to create expiring links that can be used just once, thus preventing the users from sharing download links with non-members.
Though you completely can’t stop someone determined from sharing your content, you can certainly make it harder with Memberium’s Amazon S3 Integration.
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Secure your videos with Memberium and AWS S3 Hosting
Memberium integrates with Amazon S3 to secure streaming video with [memb_secure_video] shortcode.
Combined with Amazon’s cloud services, streaming video can be inexpensively delivered and played using WordPress’s built-in media player, while Memberium protects your video content.Members won’t be able to download or share links to videos.
They’ll only be able to watch videos while logged into your membership site.
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Secure streaming audio with Memberium and Amazon’s cloud services
Memberium also integrates with Amazon S3 to securely stream audio with [memb_secure_audio] shortcode. MP3 files can be securely streamed from Amazon S3 to your membership site and played using the built-in WordPress media player.Members won’t be able to download the audio files or share links to it. In order to listen, they’ll have to be logged into the site.
Protect Categories and other Special Pages
One of the most effective ways to organize your content in a WordPress site is by segmenting them into different categories. With Memberium you can protect the category itself.
Also, if you have hundreds of pages/posts on your site that you need to protect, it won’t be easy even with the Bulk Editor. In that case protecting entire categories or author pages will be much quicker and effective.
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Protect Categories
Apart from pages, posts, and custom post types, Memberium also allows you to protect your categories. You can edit the category and set the category to be accessed by logged in or logged out status.
You can also use a PHP Boolean Expression to protect your categories. Also, you can decide if you want to hide the category completely if the user is not qualified to access it, or you can redirect the user.
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Protect Special Pages like Category Pages and Author Pages
For protecting categories you have the default Memberium options as explained above, however, to protect other special pages like Author Pages you will use Memberium’s WPaL Path Protect tool.
You will set the rules for the specific URLs and define if an anonymous user can access the path or only logged-in users will be able to access that URL. You can also set what happens when users don’t have access to the URL. You can hide the pages completely or redirect users to the other page.
Restrict Access to the Site with Unique Memberium Features
In addition to various options for protecting pages, posts and post types, portions or elements on the page and files, Memberium has several unique protection features that enable you to prevent unauthorized users from logging into your site.
You can also prevent users from logging in based on IP address or ban them completely from accessing your sites.
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Allow only active members to login to the site
With the help of Memberium’s Required Membership feature, you can allow only users with a valid membership to log in to your membership site. Users who do not have valid membership can be redirected to the sales page or payment page to buy access to the site.
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Set Memberium to log in users with WordPress user record only
Normally when a user attempts to log in and no local (WordPress) record is found, Memberium searches the Infusionsoft database for a matching record and creates a local record on-the-fly.
However, you can turn on “Known Logins Only” feature to restrict users who don’t have a local user record.
This setting is effective in protecting your API usage against brute force login attacks, without impacting the ability of your users to login.
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Restrict members to one active session
Memberium’s Prevent Simultaneous Logins feature helps you restrict users to log in from multiple places at the same time. When this feature is turned on users will be allowed only one active session at a time.
If the user account is already in use, and a second login takes place, the first login will be disconnected immediately. The main use case for preventing simultaneous logins is to deter account sharing – many people using a single, paid account.
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Limit Logins based on IP Addresses
Membership site owners can define the number of different IP addresses a user can log in from within a specified period of time. For example, you can set the Maximum Login IPs feature to 5 different IP addresses within 24 hours.
If a user exhausts the maximum limit of unique IP addresses allowed, they will have to wait until the specified time duration has elapsed.
Used in combination with preventing simultaneous logins, this helps deter account sharing.
You can set the time duration in hours and set the limit for the maximum number of unique IP addresses users can login from within that time period using Memberium’s Maximum Login Window feature.
You can view the video tutorial how Maximum Login IPs and Maximum Login Window features work together and help you protect your gated membership content.
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Lockdown Your Site – Require Login to See Any Page
If you wish only logged in users should have access to your membership site, you can lock out anonymous users with the Site Lock option. When this feature is turned on, users will not be able to access any page on the site without logging in.
If the anonymous user attempts to access any page, he will be redirected to the login page.
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Ban specific users from logging in to the site
Banning a user is the last thing a membership site owner wants to do, however in some circumstances, for example, if a user is violating your policies or abusing your content, you don’t have any choice left. In those situations, you can use Site Ban Tag.
You can define an Infusionsoft tag as a site ban tag and assign it to the user you want to ban. It will override all other access control and prevent the user from logging in to your site.
Protect content based on Parent Page access
The most common structure for membership site content is dividing content into courses and further chopping into smaller chunks as Lessons or Topics. In this structure, the Course is a parent page for the Lessons and similarly, the Lesson is a parent page for the topics under it.
You can set Memberium to check if a user has access to the parent page when he tries to access the child page.
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Restrict access based on parent page access
Memberium gives you an option to grant access only if the user has access to the parent page. You can turn on Page Security Inheritance setting which will pass on the parent page’s Memberium Protection to the child/subpages. This setting requires the user to have access to the parent page also in order to access the child/subpages.
Summary
In this article, we discussed 18 different ways to protect your membership content. This article covered how to protect your membership site pages, posts, custom post types, videos, audio, downloadable content, category pages, and author pages.
You also know about several Memberium features to restrict users from logging in to your site under specific conditions. You may not need all of these features but you can use combinations of these methods to protect your membership content the way you want.
