Add User Profile Fields to Your Membership Site

Are you looking for a simple way to add user profile fields to your membership site? Profile fields and user taxonomies make it possible for you to:

• Learn more about your customers
• Find out how customers discovered your website
• Organize members by type or interest
• Help members to connect with each other

In this post, we will show you how to add additional fields to your membership site—whether you want to add them to a checkout form, on user profiles, or keep them for admin use only.

The Value of User Profile Fields

There are a variety of ways you can capture user fields to improve your membership site. For example, you might collect additional information about your users, such as their:

• Location
• Demographic information
• Preferences
• Goals

These things can help you understand your users better, optimize your sales process, personalize the user experience, and make the most of your marketing efforts.

For example, you can use the information you collect to personalize your email marketing, which can lead to better relationships with your customers—and more sales.

Here are a few more examples of additional fields that give you useful information:

• Finding out customer income levels can help you price your products and services.
• User locations can help you personalize their content with local resources and information.
• Preferences help you optimize just about everything, from your marketing to the content you display to users.
• Fields that ask questions like “How did you hear about us?” help you identify your best marketing channels.

Even if your website is not related to ecommerce, additional fields can help you identify opportunities for expanding your audience and creating content that will attract people to your site.

How to Add User Profile Fields to Your Membership Site

One of the simplest ways to add additional profile fields is to use the User Fields feature in our plugin, Paid Memberships Pro (PMPro).

With PMPro, you can collect user fields at membership checkout, on the user’s profile, or for administrative view-only.

Steps to Add User Fields

After you have installed, activated and set up Paid Memberships Pro, you can add User Fields to your membership site.

Navigate to Memberships > Settings > User Fields to create field groups and individual fields. You can use the default More Information field group, or create a new field group.

Common User Field Types

There are many other field types in PMPro’s User Fields feature. You can add fields like radio buttons, file uploads, multi-select and autocomplete fields—just about any field you could need, we have it covered.

Video: How to Add User Profile Fields

Capture User Fields in Frontend Forms

User Fields are shown in a lot of places—giving you the ultimate membership customization you need to capture user profile information in forms on your site.

There are three primary places that profile forms show in your membership site:

• On the one-page Membership Checkout form.
• On the frontend User Profile Edit screen.
• In the admin (for admins only) on the Edit Member and WordPress User Edit screen.

Remember to choose whether or not you want to show the field on the user profile in the “Field Group” settings. You can also choose whether or not you want to show the field on the checkout page in these settings.

Where User Fields Are Stored

If you do not enjoy geeking out on data structures, skip to the next part.

WordPress user data is stored in two places: the wp_users table and the wp_usermeta table. If you are collecting user profile fields in a taxonomy, that data is also stored in the wp_terms table.

Why am I talking about this? It is important that you know where your membership site data is stored. With WordPress and PMPro, all the data is your data. You own and manage everything within your WordPress site.

You can use this data in so many ways throughout WordPress. More importantly, though, you can use this data in combination with loads of integrations.

Paid Memberships Pro does not store user information in custom tables. Storing information in custom tables would make it difficult to move data around or use it for advanced techniques like…

• Sending additional user profile fields to your email marketing tool like Kit or Mailchimp.
• Creating Zapier automations to send user data to other third-party connected platforms.
• Designing custom public or members-only user directories and profile pages.

User Registrations and Paid Memberships Pro

Once you set up Paid Memberships Pro, the platform handles all of your user registrations for you. This helps you make sure that all people are registering with the correct access and collected profile fields that you setup through this guide.

If you need to allow default WordPress user registration, or have another plugin that handles user registration that has to play nice with PMPro, check out this guide for a simple code snippet to change PMPro’s default behavior when controlling the registration process.

Disabling Public User Registration

Want to make all user registration private and completely hidden? PMPro handles that too.

In this guide we walked through how to create a free membership level and set up custom user fields. Some sites want to only allow admins to generate new user accounts—and you can do that with PMPro, too.

1. Navigate back to Memberships > Settings in the WordPress admin.
2. Edit that single free level you set up earlier in this guide.
3. In the “Other Settings” section, select “Check to hide this level from the membership levels page and disable registration”.
4. Now, edit your site’s Membership Levels page and remove the default levels page shortcode or block.
5. You can custom craft this page with any content you need for your project, such as a contact form with a membership inquiry request, or other details about joining your closed community.

User Profile Fields: Sitewide Personalization Ideas

PMPro comes bundled with a no-code way to show a logged-in user’s profile field anywhere in your site. This feature is called the pmpro_member shortcode—and it is super fun to use to create a more personalized member experience.

You can use this shortcode to add the logged in user’s display name or a social media profile link right inside your post content or in a widget.

We use the shortcode here at Paid Memberships Pro to show a welcome message and user avatar on the Membership Account page. Here is the code for that section of our editor.

<h2>Welcome, [pmpro_member field="display_name"]</h2>

Frequently Asked Questions About WordPress User Fields