LifterLMS Memberships and Access Plans Explained

Two ideas control who can get into what on a LifterLMS site: access plans and memberships. Pricing problems tend to start when the two are mixed up: a membership built where an access plan would do, or the other way around.

The short version: an access plan is a way to buy or join something. A membership is one of the things you can buy or join, and its job is to open up other things. Courses and memberships are both sold through access plans.

This explainer walks through each piece, how they combine, the structures that work in practice, and the mistakes that cause support tickets later.

What an access plan is

An access plan is a price and a set of terms attached to one course or one membership. It is what puts an enroll or buy button on the page. When a student completes checkout on a plan, LifterLMS creates an order and enrolls them.

Without at least one plan there is no button, and the only ways in are indirect: an admin enrolling the student, a voucher, or a membership. Each course or membership can have up to six plans by default, displayed together as a pricing table. You manage them in the Access Plans box below the course or membership editor, described in the LifterLMS access plan overview.

Setting	What it controls
Free or paid	A free plan skips payment and shows a short enrollment form.
Price and frequency	One payment, or a recurring charge every one to six days, weeks, months or years.
Plan length	For recurring plans: bill until canceled, or stop after a set number of payments. The second option is a payment plan.
Access expiration	Lifetime access, a limited period after purchase, or a fixed calendar date.
Trial offer	An introductory price, including free, for a set period before regular billing starts. Recurring plans only.
Sale pricing	A temporary price with optional start and end dates.
Availability	Open to anyone, or members only: limited to people in the memberships you choose.
Visibility	Visible, featured (highlighted in the table) or hidden (reachable only by direct link).
Presentation	Plan title, button text, description, and where the buyer lands after checkout.

Two behaviors are worth knowing before you set prices. First, billing and access are separate settings. Six monthly payments with lifetime access is a payment plan. A monthly charge with no end date is a subscription, and access stops when billing stops.

Second, the access plan options documentation notes that on a recurring plan, someone who joins at the sale price keeps paying that price until the plan ends or the order is canceled. A sale on a subscription is a lasting discount for those buyers, not a cheaper first month. If you want a cheaper first period, use a trial.

What a membership is, and how it differs from a course

A course is content: sections, lessons, quizzes, a certificate at the end. A membership has no lessons. It is a container of access: it sells or grants entry to a mix of courses, pages and posts. People join it through one of its own access plans, exactly as they would buy a course.

A membership can do three things for its members:

• Enroll them in courses automatically.
• Make members-only access plans on courses available to them, free or at a different price.
• Open pages, posts and forums that are restricted to that membership.

Memberships are separate products, and a student can hold more than one at a time. That is what makes tiers and add-on passes possible.

How members get into courses

Auto-enrollment

On the membership's Auto Enrollment tab you list the courses that come with it. Anyone who joins is enrolled in all of them at once. When you add a course later, new members receive it automatically. For people who are already members, the Enroll All Members button enrolls them in the background in batches.

The link works in both directions. When a student's membership ends, LifterLMS also removes them from the courses they received through it, unless another membership they hold includes the same course. Courses they enrolled in through a separate purchase are left alone.

Members-only access plans

The alternative is to leave auto-enrollment empty and give each course an access plan with availability set to members only. Members see an enroll button, free or at their special price. Non-members see which membership they need, with a link to it.

Choose this route when members should opt in course by course instead of finding forty courses on their dashboard on day one, or when the membership gives a discount instead of free access.

Restricting pages, posts and the whole site

Ordinary pages and posts have a LifterLMS setting in the editor that restricts the content to one or more memberships. Each membership's Restrictions settings then decide what a non-member gets: a message on the page, or a redirect to the membership page, another page or a custom URL. With the bbPress integration in core, forums can be limited to a membership as well.

There is also a site-wide option under LifterLMS > Settings > Memberships that locks the entire site to a single membership. That membership's sales page, the Membership Catalog, the Checkout page and the Student Dashboard stay reachable so people can still join and log in. It suits a private training portal.

Lessons are a different case. They are protected by enrollment in their course, so the question there is always how the student gets enrolled.

Common structures

Structure	How to build it
Single course	One course with one or more plans, for example pay in full and a three-payment plan.
Bundle	A membership whose only job is to auto-enroll buyers in a fixed set of courses, sold with a one-time plan.
All-access pass	A membership with a recurring plan. Auto-enroll members in everything, or put a free members-only plan on each course.
Tiered memberships	One membership per tier. Higher tiers include more courses and more restricted content. Plan how a member moves from one tier to another.
Member discount	A public plan at full price and a members-only plan at a lower price on the same course.
Cohort	A course with an enrollment period, a start date, a seat capacity and lessons dripped by date. The Course Cohorts add-on is built for running groups through a course together.
Team or company seats	Vouchers in core for simple bulk access. The Groups add-on for seat-based sales with group leaders.

If you are still shaping the catalog, how to build a professional online academy with LifterLMS covers the wider design.

Drip, prerequisites and time limits

None of these settings grant access. They shape what an enrolled student can open, and when.

• Drip. Set per lesson: release it on a specific date, or a number of days after enrollment, after the course start date, or after the prerequisite lesson is completed. A course can also drip all of its lessons at one fixed interval from Course Options > Restrictions. There is no switch for a single section; you give each lesson in the section the same setting.
• Prerequisites. A lesson can require another lesson. A course can require another course or a whole track. The documentation notes that prerequisites still apply when a membership enrolls someone in several courses at once, which is how you build a learning path inside an all-access pass.
• Course time limits. An enrollment period controls when people may join, a course time period controls when content is open, and capacity limits seats and is checked at checkout.
• Access expiration. Set on the plan, as described above.

These interact. A twelve-week drip sold as a monthly subscription means a student who cancels after month one never reaches the later lessons, which may be exactly what you want or a refund request waiting to happen. Drip by date on an evergreen course gives late buyers everything at once. Test each combination with a test student, including a member who joined long before the course was added to the membership.

Common mistakes

• No access plan. The course is published, and there is no way to enroll.
• A membership for one course. If it gates nothing else, an access plan on the course is simpler to run and to explain.
• Mixing up plan length and access expiration. One is about billing, the other about access.
• A sale on a subscription. Those buyers keep the sale price.
• A trial on a one-time plan. Trials need a recurring plan.
• Stopping a subscription by editing enrollment. The documentation warns that changing a student's enrollment status by hand does not stop billing on a recurring order. Cancel the order.
• Treating hidden plans as private. Hidden only removes the plan from the pricing table. Anyone with the link can use it.
• Auto-enrolling into a huge catalog. Dashboards fill up and progress reports lose meaning. Use members-only plans.

What to do next

Sketch the offer on paper before you open WordPress: what people buy, what they get, and when it ends. Each thing they buy becomes an access plan. Each thing they get beyond a single course points to a membership. Then build it on a staging site and run a test purchase for every plan, following our tutorial on selling courses with LifterLMS.

Standard settings cover the structures above. When yours involves tier upgrades with credit for time already paid, company accounts, or access rules the settings cannot express, LifterLMS consulting will tell you whether configuration is enough or whether you need LifterLMS customization. Send us your pricing sketch and we will tell you how we would build it.