Remove Trial Periods for Existing Members

If you offer a membership that has a trial period, you may want to remove it for your existing members, whether you have trials set up on the membership level itself or using the Subscription Delays Add On.

This tutorial offers two code recipes to remove trial periods for existing members and reserve them exclusively for non-members.

About the Code Recipes

Offering a trial period is a fantastic way to attract more users and encourage signups. However, you may want to prevent already signed-up members from accessing these trials. This can be especially true if you have an existing member who wants to change over to a different membership level.

If an existing member changes their membership level and moves over to one that offers a trial period. They will have the luxury of experiencing your membership for free. That is, until the trial period expires. This might just be what you are going for and if that’s the case then great.

But, if you want your existing members to skip the trial period altogether and start paying you immediately for your membership level, the Remove Custom Trial Period code recipe is what you’ll need. In many cases, removing trial periods for existing members makes a lot of sense. Especially, when considering that your current members, probably have a very good idea of what it’s like to be a member of your membership site, and what kind of content to expect from you.

This code recipe will remove custom trial periods for existing members when the member is found to have an active membership level. If an active membership level is present, the code gist will bypass the default Paid Memberships Pro trial period altogether. Exclusively reserving trial periods for any non-members.

Alternatively, if you are using the Subscription Delays Add On to add a trial period to your level, there is a second recipe to remove that trial. This method allows you set up a trial that requires credit card and delay when the member is next billed.

Code Recipe #1: Remove Custom Trial Period

Code Recipe #2: Remove Subscription Delay

Adding the Recipe to Your Website

You can add this recipe to your site by creating a custom plugin or using the Code Snippets plugin available for free in the WordPress repository. Read this companion article for step-by-step directions on either method.