How to Migrate from s2Member to Paid Memberships Pro

Migrating from one membership platform to another can be intimidating—even for the most tech savvy among us. We created a streamlined step-by-step guide to help you move membership date and successfully migrate from s2Member to Paid Memberships Pro.

Note: This guide is specifically written to support someone migrating active subscriptions and members from s2Member to Paid Memberships Pro.

How to Migrate from s2Member to Paid Memberships Pro

Due to the nature of eCommerce, your live site will continue to bring in new data—new orders, new members, new comments and posts in your forum, for example. 

The goal is to interrupt your live money-making site as little as possible.

That said, if you are operating a small membership site and you can afford it, take your site down for a day or two. This process can be infinitely simpler if you just close your site to the public.

There are two important parts to completely migrate from s2Member to Paid Memberships Pro:

1. Migrating your members and their subscriptions
2. Migrating the content protections from the previous system to the new system

We’ll cover both of these processes. If you follow all of the advice and instructions in this guide, you’ll end up with:

• A WordPress membership site powered by Paid Memberships Pro.
• A clean uninstall of s2Member (no lingering data in your database or settings).
• Seamless ongoing payments from past customers (if recurring)
• New member payments powered by Paid Memberships Pro.

Part 1: Migrating Members and Subscriptions

1. Backup Your WordPress Website

In our post Backup Your WordPress Site: The Complete Guide to Site Backups, we talk about the importance of regular site backups and how to create your own site backup. This is especially important for membership sites, since they deal with customer accounts and sensitive information

Create a backup of your site before continuing the migration process.

2. Pause Your Live Website

Data can get out of sync very quickly during a migration. You don’t want any new member data to be created or altered while you complete the process, so we recommend temporarily pausing your live website.

This means:

• Disconnecting your s2Member payment gateway
• Turning off all new membership signups
• Putting your main website in “Coming Soon” or “Maintenance” mode

You can use a plugin like WP Maintenance Mode & Coming Soon to add a maintenance post to your blog, or a coming soon page to your website.

3. Install and Set Up Paid Memberships Pro

The next step is to install Paid Memberships Pro onto your website or staging site.

Note: If you can’t turn off your main website, or you just want to test out PMPro to see how it works, we strongly recommend using a staging site or even a local development site.

However, when you create a staging site, your live site and development site become out of sync. If you go this route, note that there will be some data on your new site that you will need to migrate immediately before it goes live.

If You’re Installing PMPro on Your Main Website

In our Initial Setup guide, we talk about how to install Paid Memberships Pro.

Once you have PMPro installed, you’ll need to replicate your s2Member memberships as membership levels in Paid Memberships Pro.

To do this, navigate to Memberships > Settings > Membership Levels in the WordPress admin. You can refer to the Initial Setup guide linked above for more information.

Be sure to save your membership level IDs for later. Don’t connect your payment gateway just yet.

If You’re Installing PMPro on a Staging Site

Once you have your staging site up and running, make sure that it’s not connected to your payment gateway in both s2Member and Paid Memberships Pro.

Note: It’s possible that certain actions you take on your staging site could trigger a system email from WordPress, s2Member, or Paid Memberships Pro while you are going through the migration process. Our Developer’s Toolkit Add On has a feature to redirect all site emails to a specific address. You can also use a third-party plugin like Disable Emails to protect yourself from mistakenly sending messages from your staging site.

4. Set Up User Fields (If Applicable)

Does your membership have custom user fields configured in s2Member? Do you want to add new user fields?

Paid Memberships Pro includes custom User Fields to collect additional checkout fields and user profile information for members and admins.

Navigate to Memberships > Settings > User Fields to configure your custom fields. You can use the same Field Name as any custom field you had created in s2Member so that the data is seamlessly converted and used in the PMPro members list, exports, and frontend user profile forms.

5. Prepare Your Data For Import

Export Your Members List From s2Member

1. Navigate to s2Member > Import/Export in the WordPress admin.
2. Click “Export to CSV”.

You now have the full export of your s2Member data that you can use to build the import spreadsheet for Paid Memberships Pro.

You will need the PMPro Import Members From CSV Add On.

The plugin includes a starter import template file. Navigate to Users > Import Members in your WordPress admin. You’ll see a link to download the example CSV file from this page.

The table below shows the s2Member data fields you should map to the required PMPro Import fields:

Export the file to CSV and Test the Import

We recommend testing the import with a subset of your data (the first 10 records) to ensure that everything works as expected.

1. First, export the first few rows CSV file With your exported .csv file, adjust the rows to only include the first 5 or 10 records.
2. Run that import by following the directions on the Import Users from CSV Add On documentation page.
3. Double check the data to be sure everything looks correct. You can check your Members List under Memberships > Members.

If everything looks correct, you are ready to do the full and final import. To do this, repeat the process from your test above using the full set of data (minus those test members already imported).

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6. Backup Your Database

If you didn’t backup before beginning this process, now is the critical time to do so. 

In our post Backup Your WordPress Site: The Complete Guide to Site Backups, we talk about the importance of regular site backups and how to create your own site backup. This is especially important for membership sites, since they deal with customer accounts and sensitive information.

If your host provides access to phpMyAdmin, you can download a full “dump” of your site’s database through this interface. 

1. Log in to your WordPress dashboard.
2. Go to Plugins > Add New
3. Search for Database Backup for WordPress by Delicious Brains
4. Click Install Now. Enter your FTP credentials if needed.
5. Activate the plugin.

Please don’t forget to create a backup of your site before continuing the migration process.

7. Complete Your Member Import

Navigate to Users > Import From CSV in the WordPress admin.

• CSV File: Select the new CSV import file you prepared based on the s2Member® export.
• Notification: Leave this unchecked; This functionality allows you to send notification to newly created members. Since you are only updating meta information for existing WordPress Users you do not need any notification.
• Password nag: Leave this unchecked; This functionality is used when new users are added via import and a random password is assigned to their account. It would then prompt any new user to set a new password during their initial sign on.  
• Users update: Check this box! This will apply your new meta information per the CSV file being uploaded to existing users.

A Note About Importing Large Member Lists

The limits of this CSV import method depend on your server power. On a mid-range VPS server, you can typically process 250-500 members at a time. This means breaking your import file into chunks. If you have a beefier server, test progressively larger lists until you hit the limit for your server.

It’s also good to test a smaller CSV of just 1-3 rows before tackling a full import to make sure everything is updating as intended.

After importing this test group of 1-3 members, navigate to Memberships > Members in the WordPress admin to verify your newly migrated members.

8. Resume Your Live Website

You’re almost done! Now it’s time to delete s2Member and connect your payment gateway in PMPro.

Remove s2Member Roles

For a totally clean uninstall, you need to remove the custom s2Member roles from your WordPress site. If you only deactivate and and delete s2Member, these custom roles will remain active in your WordPress site.

There are two methods to delete the custom roles created by s2Member:

• Use the User Role Editor plugin to delete custom roles.
• Run the script in the code snippet below in your WordPress admin.

Delete Custom Roles With User Role Editor Plugin

1. Install and activate User Role Editor (free plugin available in the WordPress.org plugin repository).
2. Navigate to Users > User Role Editor in the WordPress admin.
3. Click the Delete Role button in the right column. This action brings up a modal window with a dropdown field.
4. Select the role you would like to delete.
5. Click Delete Role.
6. Any user with the custom role is now reset to your WordPress site’s default role (set on the Settings > General screen in the WordPress admin).

Delete Custom Roles With a Custom Script in the WordPress Admin

To use a custom script in your WordPress site, refer to our guide on making customizations to your membership site. This tutorial explains two methods for adding custom code to adjust your membership site functionality: creating a custom plugin or using the Code Snippets plugin available for free in the WordPress repository.

1. Set up this code gist using your preferred method to make customizations to your membership site:
   • Code Recipe: Remove s2Member roles from WordPress: https://gist.github.com/strangerstudios/fc455c86697c213c83f6
2. Log in to your WordPress dashboard as administrator then navigate to https://YOURDOMAIN.com/?s2cleanup=1. This will update users with s2member_level1 role to subscriber role.
3. You must repeat this process for all used roles:
   • https://YOURDOMAIN.com/?s2cleanup=2 updates users with s2member_level2 role
   • https://YOURDOMAIN.com/?s2cleanup=3 updates users with s2member_level3 role
   • https://YOURDOMAIN.com/?s2cleanup=4 updates users with s2member_level4 role
4. Then, navigate t https://YOURDOMAIN.com/?s2cleanup=removeroles to delete the roles.

Remove the script from your WordPress site after you complete the role removal process.

Deactivate and Delete s2Member

Once you are sure everything is working properly, you can now safely deactivate and delete s2Member, as well as any s2Member plugins from your site’s /wp-content/plugins/ folder.

9. Activate Payments in Paid Memberships Pro

PMPro has only one settings page to configure the payment gateway for all memberships. Just navigate to Memberships > Settings > Payment Settings. The process of setting up a payment gateway is also outlined in the Initial Setup guide.

Your subscription site relies on messages from the payment gateway to confirm that recurring payments have been received. Stripe refers to this as a “Webhook.” PayPal calls it an “IPN.”

As part of the gateway setup, be sure to update your Stripe Webhook or PayPal IPN within your merchant account. Instructions on how to configure this are available for both gateways in the documentation area: Stripe Webhook Setup and PayPal IPN Setup.

If you need more help with webhooks or IPN, please open a ticket in our members support area so that our team can make sure you’re properly set up to receive the recurring payment messages from your connected gateways.

Redirect s2Member IPN Traffic

If your memberships were recurring, PayPal will continue to send information via IPN to the s2Member handler.

We have written a custom function to redirects this IPN (Instant Payment Notification) message to the correct location for Paid Memberships Pro to process.

Code Recipe: Redirect the s2Member IPN URL to the PMPro IPN URL:
https://gist.github.com/strangerstudios/cccf8144ca2f2a1e41d2

To use the custom function in your WordPress site, refer to our guide on making customizations to your membership site. This tutorial explains two methods for adding custom code to adjust your membership site functionality: creating a custom plugin or using the Code Snippets plugin available for free in the WordPress repository.

Part 2: Configuring Content Protection

Every membership plugin handles content restrictions in a different way. With Paid Memberships Pro, you can restrict individual pages, posts, or entire categories of posts.

Browse our documentation on restricting content to learn more about the various ways you can protect your content with PMPro.

This includes:

• Pages
• Posts and Categories
• Other content types including CPTs
• Courses
• Community features like bbPress and BuddyPress

It’s Time to Celebrate

You did it! You’ve successfully migrated from s2Member to Paid Memberships Pro. Your active subscriptions and members are in place and you’ve configured your content protection so that your membership site is officially ready for action.

If you’re still in need of additional help, be sure to check the Frequently Asked Questions section below, or contact our support team if you’re a premium member.

You have made a great choice by switching to Paid Memberships Pro, the most trusted membership platform that grows with you. We are here by your side as you take your membership business to new heights.

Frequently Asked Questions