Protect MemberPress Courses

In MemberPress, you sell your courses by having users register for the required membership. This means that enrollment to MemberPress Courses is based on the user's active subscription to a required membership.

When you create courses in MemberPress, they will be publicly available to any user, without Rules protecting each of them.

This document will show you how to protect courses with MemberPress rules to make them available only for authorized members. This way, only users who properly registered for your memberships will be able to enroll in your courses.

Protect a Single MemberPress Course

To protect a single Course, head to MemberPress > Rules > Add New page, and select the “Single Course” type from the drop-down. Then search for your Course by title and select it. Last, select which Membership(s) will provide access to this Course when purchased. Your Rule should then look something like this:

Your course is now protected from unauthorized views by guests or members who are not subscribed to one of the Membership(s) you selected in the Rule's Access Conditions.

Protect All MemberPress Courses

Protecting all Courses is very similar to protecting a single Course. Head to MemberPress > Rules > Add New and select the “All Courses” type from the drop-down. Then add your Membership(s) in the Access Conditions. This will make it so that a user must purchase that Membership if they'd like to gain access to all the Courses. For example, you might create a Platinum Membership which provides members access to all of your Courses. (NOTE: For more information about creating Memberships, see this page. To learn more about MemberPress Rules, visit this page.)

Your Rule should look something like this:

Protecting Courses Based on Tags or Categories

In some cases, you may want to provide access to more than one Course, but not all Courses, when a Member purchases a specific Membership. The best way to do this is to use a Category or a Tag.

Categorizing and Tagging Courses

Categorizing or Tagging courses is beneficial if you need to provide access to groups of individual courses based on the membership purchased.

Back on the MemberPress > Courses page, you'll see buttons at the top for Categories and Tags.

Click on either Categories or Tags to add your Categories and Tags. For the most part, you'll likely want to use just Categories unless you have a specific reason to use both Categories and Tags.

After clicking Categories, you'll be taken to a page where you can create new or edit existing Categories.

For the purposes of this tutorial, we'll create a new category called “Membership Courses”. We'll use this category to associate all of our Membership-related courses together. This will be important when we get to the Protection piece in the next step.

Creating Rules Based on Categories and Tags

Visit MemberPress > Rules > Add New, and select either the “Courses with Course Categories” or the “Courses with Course Tag” type from the drop-down.

Next, search for the category or tag you need and select it. Last, add the Membership(s) that should provide access to the Courses in the selected category, or courses tagged with the selected tag. Like with other rule types, you should add the required membership(s) to the Access Conditions section of the rule.

If done correctly, your Rule should look something like this:

Protecting Sections

Each course section within a course can be protected with MemberPress rules using the Course Section rule type.

Protecting All Lessons in Section

Sometimes you may want to protect all lessons in the specific section. For example, in the screenshot below I have 4 sections.

If you want to protect all lessons from the Intro section, you could create a Single Lesson rule for each lesson in the section. However, the easiest way is to use the Course Section rule.

Head to MemberPress > Rules > Add New, and select the “Course Section” type from the drop-down. Next, search for the section you want to protect and select it. Last, add the Membership(s) that should provide access to all lessons in this section by adding them to your Access Conditions.

Your Rule should look something like this: