Squarespace Member Sites (Member Areas) Explained
A Squarespace Member Site (Squarespace's own name for what most people call a "member area") is a set of pages hidden behind a paywall that only people who sign up for a pricing plan can see. Building one is free. Selling access to it needs a paid website plan, and the pricing plan itself can be free (email signup only), a one-time fixed amount, or a recurring subscription. Here's how the pieces fit together and where the real limits are, sourced from Squarespace's own help center (checked September 2026).
What is a Squarespace Member Site?
Squarespace's own description: "You can build an online community and curate content with Member Sites. Pages you add to a member site are automatically hidden behind a paywall. Only members who sign up for a pricing plan can access your content. You can offer free or paid memberships to your member site" (Squarespace, "Member Sites", checked September 2026). It's built for gated content specifically - a course, a video library, a private community space - not for turning your entire site into a login-only property.
How much does a member site cost to build and run?
Squarespace states this directly: "It's free to build a member site, but you need a website plan to sell memberships" (same source). That's the plan gate: creating the member site, adding pages, and setting up a pricing plan structure costs nothing extra, but a visitor can't actually pay you (or sign up for a free plan) until your site itself is on a paid Squarespace plan.
Paid membership access is billed as a Digital Product, and it shares the same tiered Digital Product fee schedule that applies to Squarespace's other paywalled content - courses, downloads, and subscriptions. Our Squarespace ecommerce guide covers that fee table by plan in full, and our Squarespace pricing guide covers what each Basic-through-Advanced plan costs before you add commerce into the picture. Squarespace also runs a separate, legacy-only Digital Products plan for accounts that subscribed to Personal, Business, or Commerce plans before July 23, 2026; if you're on a current plan, you don't need it.
What's the difference between free and paid membership access?
A member site's pricing plan uses one of three structures, per Squarespace's own description (same source):
| Structure | How it works | Best fit |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Visitors sign up with an email address and create a customer account - no payment | Growing a mailing list or gating light content |
| Fixed amount | A single payment (or installments) for permanent access | One-time courses or archives |
| Subscription | Recurring weekly, monthly, or annual payments; cancel anytime | Ongoing content you keep adding to |
Even the free tier requires a customer account, not just an email opt-in box - that's what lets Squarespace enforce the paywall on the gated pages rather than just tracking who subscribed to a newsletter.
What can I actually put behind the paywall?
Squarespace's guidance points to classes, workshops, and video libraries as typical member-site content, and you can bundle up to 10 other blog pages, course pages, member sites, or videos pages into a single pricing plan under its "Included products" setting. You're not limited to text pages: Squarespace specifically suggests pairing Acuity Scheduling, course pages, or service products with a member site for scheduled classes or workshops, rather than trying to run a live class purely off a static gated page.
What are Member Sites' documented limits?
A few real constraints worth knowing before you build a large gated site:
- No page-count limit, but a real navigation limit. Squarespace states "there's no official limit to the number of pages you can add to a member site," but also warns that a long list of pages under one member site's name in the navigation bar "could overwhelm your visitors" - its own suggested fix is turning off automatic member navigation and building a custom one on the member site's homepage instead.
- No dropdown navigation. Squarespace states plainly: "Member sites don't support dropdowns."
- Gated pages lose SEO and sitemap presence. "Pages in a member site don't have SEO options and aren't indexed in your site map" - by design, since the content is meant to stay behind the paywall, but it also means you can't optimize a gated page's title or description the way you would a public one.
- No guaranteed content protection. Squarespace is direct about this: "we can't guarantee the security of content in your members-only pages after members have access to them. It's not possible to completely prevent someone from copying members-only text, images, audio, or file URLs from your site and sharing them with non-members."
- No course infrastructure beyond pages. Squarespace's own Member Sites documentation describes pages, pricing plans, and navigation - it doesn't document course completion tracking, quizzes, certificates, or discussion forums as Member Sites features. If any of those are central to what you're building, that's a gap to plan around rather than something to expect Squarespace to add to a page for you.
How do I set one up?
Squarespace's own checklist breaks the build into three stages (Squarespace, "Member Sites checklist", checked September 2026):
- Create the gated content. Add a member site from the Pages panel, then add pages beneath it - the first page you add automatically becomes that member site's homepage. You need Administrator or Website editor permissions on the site to create a new member site.
- Finish the commerce setup. Confirm your billing plan supports selling (upgrade if you're still on a trial or an incompatible plan), and connect a payment processor if you're charging a fixed amount or running a subscription.
- Get people to sign up. Add pricing plan blocks to your public pages so visitors can see what's on offer, and build a dedicated sign-up page - Squarespace notes that visitors can only purchase access to a member site through pricing plan blocks, not through the gated homepage directly.
Example (hypothetical): A yoga instructor creates a member site for a video library, sets it to a $15/month subscription structure, and adds a public landing page with a pricing plan block explaining what members get. A first-time visitor who isn't signed in and clicks through to the gated homepage sees a paywall rather than the videos; after subscribing, they get access to every video page nested under that member site. This is illustrative only, not a build Figment ran.
What happens if I delete a member site, or a visitor hits a broken paywall?
Two recovery details worth knowing. First, if a member site's pricing plan setup gets out of sync (for example, a member site that was never added to a pricing plan), a visitor who tries to log in sees the exact error: "This product is unavailable. Contact the site owner if you need access." The fix, per Squarespace's own guidance, is to add that member site to a pricing plan - the content isn't broken, it's just unreachable until it's linked to something sellable.
Second, deleting a member site doesn't delete its pricing plan or its pages outright: "Deleting a member site doesn't delete its pricing plan. The pricing plan still exists, but it no longer includes the member site," and the pages that were inside it "become unrestricted and move into the Not linked section" - visible to search engines and to anyone who saved a direct link. If you're winding a member site down, Squarespace's own advice is to email members first, since a deleted member site and its memberships "can't be restored."
Where does Figment fit in?
Nowhere for this decision. Figment publishes a website from a Figma design through its Figma plugin; it has no paywall, customer accounts, or pricing-plan system of its own to gate content with. If the site you're publishing needs a public marketing front end in front of a member area that lives on Squarespace, Figment can be the front door - the member content and payment handling still need to run on Squarespace's own Member Sites tools.
Bottom line: A Squarespace Member Site is free to build and gates pages behind free, fixed-price, or subscription access once your site is on a paid plan. The real planning work is elsewhere: no dropdown navigation, no SEO on gated pages, no built-in course tracking or certificates, and no guarantee against a member copying and sharing gated content. Check Squarespace's Member Sites checklist directly before committing a paid course or community to it.
