Building a Subscription Site with Webflow and Memberstack

Subscription sites have become a cornerstone of the digital economy, offering a sustainable revenue model for various types of content, communities, and services. Building a subscription site with Webflow is particularly advantageous due to its flexibility, ease of use, customization capabilities, and seamless integration with Memberstack. When building such a site, consider the nature of the content or services offered, the target audience's preferences, and how to best secure and manage user subscriptions.

Before the Build

The initial step involves selecting your niche and understanding the core features needed for a successful subscription site. Features like user account management, content gating, and payment processing are essential. Webflow, combined with Memberstack's functionalities, provides a robust platform for building diverse types of subscription sites:

1. Content Sites: These sites gate exclusive content behind a subscription, such as articles, tutorials, or videos. The design strategy should focus on highlighting the value of the content and encouraging user engagement and subscriptions.

2. Community Sites: Here, the value lies in gaining access to a community. These sites should clearly communicate the benefits of joining, like resource sharing or event hosting.

3. Service Sites: Offering services like web design, training, or consultations, these sites need to effectively showcase the services available and the advantages of subscribing.

Choosing a Platform

Webflow is a top choice for building subscription sites due to its design flexibility and user-friendly interface. Memberstack complements Webflow by providing the necessary infrastructure for managing subscriptions, user accounts, and payments.

Building a Subscription Site with Webflow

• If you’re starting without a template read on
• If you’re starting from a template skip to section 2

Without a Template

When crafting your subscription site, you'll need to pay attention to several fundamental features. Although constructing it from zero is feasible on the Webflow platform, opting for a template as your starting point is beneficial. This choice can accelerate the initial setup phases, ensuring that you have the flexibility to modify and adapt the site to suit your specific business needs.

If you’d like to build it from scratch, though, here are some critical elements to pay attention to: 

Setting up Webflow

Starting from scratch in Webflow involves establishing the site structure and design tailored to your subscription model. This process requires a deep understanding of Webflow’s capabilities to ensure that your site can handle the specific requirements of a subscription-based service. This is why figuring out your specific niche prior to building your site is so important. The design should try try to reflect what you are ho

Managing Subscriptions and Payments

The most essential part of a subscription site is, unsurprisingly, managing the subscribers. We recommend using third-party software (like Memberstack) to help expedite this process. In the case of Memberstack, things like security and visualization of total subscribers and income can be handled directly on-platform, meaning that you won’t need to build out the tools from scratch either. 

Getting paid subscribers on your site means that users will need a way to make payments. This is often complicated to set up without the help of third-party software. Again, Memberstack has a built in integration with Stripe, meaning that there is an out-of-the-box solution for payments that can be directly attached to your existing Webflow site. This means that you’ll be able to gather payments without needing to set up complicated processes or security systems, 

With a Template

Utilizing a Webflow subscription site template can significantly expedite the development process. These templates are pre-designed with subscription sites in mind, featuring elements and functionalities tailored to this purpose.

Our Template -

General Subscription Template 

This sleek, subscription template is perfect for any kind of subscription business looking for a compelling and easy-to-understand template option. We’ve tried to place all of the most important things directly on the landing page: testimonials, features highlights, multiple content types (photos, diagrams, and videos) and a strong call-to-action (CTA) at the end. 

Of course, the design is very customizable, but it has been designed with a logical visual hierarchy in mind. Each section illuminates a new aspect of the product (a subscription in this case) and makes clear why it should be attractive to a potential user. We recommend scrolling through the site to see what kinds of things are important to include in a complete site design. 

Subscription Site UI Kit 

We’ve built an extremely thorough UI kit that should provide you with all of the possible elements and features you’ll want to include on your subscription site. When using this template, each individual template links to a completely built template element which then allows you to customize its appearance and function for whatever your site is trying to do. 

We’d recommend going through the site and seeing which templates apply to the business you are trying to build, but it includes: 

• Landing Pages
• Modals
• Login/signup pages
• Onboarding flows
• Template dashboards
• Testimonial/use case page 
• And so much more… 

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Fintech Subscription Site Template  

If your subscription niche is finance (a popular choice for subscription sites), we’ve also create a use-case-specific template that’ll help you get that off the ground. Because money is often a sensitive issue for people, this template focuses on explaining features, clearly outlining pricing, and making space for user testimonials. 

This template can also be adapted for other purposes. The things that do well in a finance-focused subscription site have applications across a huge variety of site types. 

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Customizing the Design

The best way to use these templates is to establish your design and business model first, and then pull the elements (perhaps combining multiple templates) into a single cohesive project. Personalize the template to fit your brand identity and meet your functional needs. This may include adjusting the layout, color scheme, typography, and any specific features that align with your subscription model.

With Webflow's new “Variables” feature, customizing this design is easier than ever. You can set the colors and design you want in that tab, and do testing on how they’ll it will effect the overall design of your site in the stylesheet – which is a powerful designing flow for any dev project on Webflow. You can read about this new feature here. 

Payments

Once more, Memberstack has already built an easy integration with Stripe, meaning that there all of our templates are already perfectly set up for integration with your website. For information on how you can get these memberships and payments set up using Stripe and Memberstack, check out this tutorial here. For information on connecting with other payment providers (like Apple Pay or Google Pay), you can check out this tutorial – although this will require quite a bit of engineering on your part. 

Conclusion

In both approaches, the aim is to create a subscription site that not only meets the functional requirements but also provides a great user experience and aligns with your business goals. Whether starting from scratch or using a pre-designed template, Webflow and Memberstack together offer a powerful combination for building robust and engaging subscription sites.