March Free Plugin of the Month: WooCommerce Pay Per Post

In this month’s free plugin review, we’ll take a look at how you can restrict content access to only customers who purchase a product on your WooCommerce store. This is similar to creating a simple membership site where paid members get access to additional content.

You can restrict content access on a per-post or per-page basis using the free WooCommerce Pay Per Post plugin. Let’s take a look at how you can set this up.

WooCommerce Pay Per Post: Create paid content access

The WooCommerce Pay Per Post plugin does require you to have WooCommerce active on your site. After you’ve installed the WooCommerce Pay Per Post plugin, the first thing you can do is to set up a product that customers need to purchase in order to gain access to specific content.

Let’s set up a virtual product priced at $50 that will give access to posts on the site.

Next, we will grab the product ID – “22” in this example – and create a generic message that is displayed when a user lands on a restricted area of the site. To do this, we will go to Settings > WooCommerce Pay Per Post in the WordPress dashboard.

This message will be displayed whenever a user lands on a restricted page for which they have not purchased the prerequisite product. You can use WooCommerce shortcodes to link to specific products that users can purchase to gain access. If you have custom post types that you would like to display this message for, you can include these in the field at the bottom.

Next, let’s create a post that’s restricted. You can restrict any page or post by defining the product(s) that need to purchased to gain access in the WooCommerce Pay Per Post section.

You can select multiple products that are required to be purchased for certain posts or pages. The Delay Restriction, Page View Restriction, and Expiry Restriction features are not available in the free plugin.

WooCommerce Pay Per Post: Display restriction

Once you’ve set up the restricted content, whenever a user lands on the page, post, or on the post archive pages, they will be shown the message that’s created in the plugin settings.

In the example above, the “Another hello world” post is restricted, whereas the “Hello World!” post is not restricted. The restricted content area links to the product that can be purchased to gain access.

You can add links back to the posts or pages that a product provides access to in the checkout notes section for easy navigation.

WooCommerce Pay Per Post: Additional views

You can use the shortcode [woocommerce-payperpost template='all'] on a page to display all content that is available for purchase on your site in an unordered list.

This can help users see an inventory of restricted content on your site. For logged in users, you can display all content that they currently have access to using the shortcode [woocommerce-payperpost template='purchased'].

WooCommerce Pay Per Post: Summary

The WooCommerce Pay Per Post plugin provides a simple and easy way to have users pay for access to restricted posts on your WooCommerce site. This allows you to set up a basic membership site where customers pay for different areas of access.

Is there something else you use to create paid content access? Please share in the comments below.

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