How Membership and Subscription Websites Work

Hi I'm David with Tiny Frog. I'm a web developer and I'm here to talk to you about the differences between a membership website and a subscription website.

So you hear a lot of different terms applied to different kinds of websites and you call the people visiting the websites a lot of different things - visitors, members, subscribers clients, editors, authors, all kinds of stuff. Most of the websites we make have a system where visitors can log into the website. A visitor, we call someone who just arrives at the website. So they can either create accounts or pay to create an account and that's the main difference between membership which is non-paying and subscribing which is paying. Now, not all industries use that same terminology but that's what we use here to differentiate the two and a lot of really popular systems like WordPress, which is our favorite development platform, use the same terms, so we tend to go with those. Subscribers are people that pay, members are people that just log in.

Either one of those types of visitors, by logging into the website, can receive content that's restricted for people who have created an account. And that's a really popular way to generate leads for your business and create excitement about your website and repeat visitors by giving them a way to log in and then giving them something in return. It can be a series of videos, like if you're a personal trainer or it can be access to a password-protected shop page, where you sell items that are only for members or it can just be PDFs of information that you want to deliver only to people who log into your website.

So that's what we call those different types of websites and it's very easy to set up that system using WordPress. We really like WordPress because it has a lot of those login functions already built into it. So if you have questions about the difference between membership and subscriptions or the various types of visitors that go to your website, please let us know here at Tiny Frog and we will help you out. We're experts on building membership websites or subscription websites or ones that don't require any login information.

Thanks again, David with Tiny Frog Technologies