Looking out of a tunnel with an open gate

Why Your Membership Site Should Allow Public Access for Premium Content

Originally published Sept 24, 2019. Updated Dec 11, 2023.

If you run a premium content site, then you know that it can be very difficult to communicate the value of your content to your customers. You can try and address this issue by making some articles free but you run the risk of giving away too much or making your product feel cheap.

In addition to this, Google and other search engines are locked out of your premium content by the same mechanism that keeps out the public. That means that every single article that you worked hard to create is completely ignored in search engine results and does not help your ranking at all.

There are a couple of different solutions to this problem as outlined by Search Engine Journal (SEJ). You can either follow the example set by the Times of London, ignoring the hit to your Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), and create a total paywall for your premium content, or you can follow the New York Times’ example and provide a certain number of views for free.

You may not think that this has a substantial impact on your SERPs, but SEJ found that the New York Times had more organic search visibility than the Times of London… in the UK! And not just a little more visibility, they outpaced the Times of London 4 to 1!

The unfortunate news is that there hasn’t been a great option for WordPress users to allow limited access to site visitors. Not until now at least…

This is why we built the View Limit add-on for Restrict Content Pro (now part of the official add-ons). It allow you to set view limits on your premium content. Setting a view limit adds a tracking cookie to the visitors browser so they can view a certain number of premium content pages before receiving the restricted access message. Since bots don’t use cookies, this means that Google and other search engines have free reign to index all of that content that you worked so hard to create. Cookies are managed via Javascript ensuring that the plugin will work with even the most aggressive website caching setup.

Let me show you how it works.

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