Install with Member Import

Migrating an existing membership site to Meta Membership requires some preparation. This guide walks through the process step by step. Working on a staging site first is strongly recommended — do not attempt a live migration without testing first.

If you are setting up a new site with no existing members, see [Fresh Install] instead.

Take stock of your existing setup before touching anything: 

• What membership types do you have, and what are their renewal rules?
• What custom member data do you collect beyond name and email?
• What membership notifications do you currently send, and when?
• Are there pages with access control rules that will need to be reconfigured?
• Do you have a staging environment available?

Clone your live site to a staging environment before making any changes. Most hosts provide a one-click staging tool, or you can use a plugin such as WP Staging or Duplicator.

Immediately disable outgoing email on the staging site to prevent members from receiving duplicate or confusing notifications during testing. You can do this with a plugin such as WP Mail SMTP set to “do nothing”, or simply by installing Disable Emails from WordPress.org.

In your current membership plugin, export your member list to CSV. Most plugins support this — look for an Export function under the membership admin menu.
The export will likely include more columns than you need. That is fine — you will map and trim it in the next step.

Meta Membership’s CSV import requires these columns at minimum:

Note: All fields in the CSV import are case-insensitive

Any additional columns are treated as member meta fields — the column header must match the field slug exactly as defined in Meta Membership Settings > Member Meta Fields.

Review your export file and massage the data as needed:

• Rename columns to match MM’s expected headers
• Convert expiry dates to YYYY-MM-DD format if needed
• Check membership type names match what you will create in MM
• Remove columns you don’t need
• Check for and resolve any duplicate email addresses

👉 Tip: Do this work in a spreadsheet application. Save the final file as CSV (UTF-8 encoded) before importing.

Before deactivating your current plugin, take a copy of any membership notification emails you want to keep — subject lines, body text, and send timing.

You will recreate these in Meta Membership’s notification system later.

Screenshots or a simple text document work fine for this.

With your staging site ready and email disabled, install and activate Meta Membership. Also install [Minimal Stripe Wrapper] if you are using Stripe payments.

Do not deactivate your existing membership plugin yet.

Go to Meta Membership Settings > General and configure your system-wide defaults:

• Renewal Mode — Anniversary or Fixed Expiry, to match your organisation’s membership year
• Fixed Expiry Date — if applicable (e.g. 1 April)
• Grace Period — how many days after expiry members retain access
• Registration Policy — open, admin approval, or admin-only
• Currency
• Admin Recipients — email address(es) for admin notifications

Go to Meta Membership Settings > Payments and enable your payment gateways.

Go to Meta Membership Settings > Member Meta Fields and create fields for any custom member data you collect — address, phone, professional registration number, or whatever your organisation needs.

Critical: The field slug assigned to each field must match the column headers in your import CSV. Define all fields before importing.

Available field types: Text, Text Area, Select, Multi Select, Checkbox Group, Radio Button Group, Phone, URL, Date.

Go to Memberships > Membership Types and create your membership types.

Critical: The membership type Name must match the membership name values in your import CSV (case insensitive).

For each type configure renewal mode, fees, grace period, registration policy, payment gateways, and assign your meta fields to the profile and registration forms.

Go to Membership > Import/Export and upload your prepared CSV file. The import screen includes a CSV Format Guide for reference.

Meta Membership is designed to work with existing WordPress users — if a member’s email address matches an existing WP user account, their WordPress account is preserved and linked to the new membership record. This means your members can log in with their existing credentials after migration without needing to reset their passwords. New WP user accounts are only created for email addresses not already in the system.

Note: The importer will flag duplicate Meta Membership records — if a member has already been imported, a second import of the same email will raise an error. This is distinct from existing WordPress users, which are handled gracefully.

Review the import results carefully:

• Any rows with errors will be reported — fix the source data and re-import if needed
• Check that membership types have been assigned correctly
• Check that expiry dates look right
• Check that meta field data has come through

Common issues:

• Membership type not found — the name in the CSV doesn’t match any existing membership type
• Meta field not populated — the column header doesn’t match the field slug
• Duplicate MM member — this email address has already been imported into Meta Membership

Go to Meta Membership Settings > Notifications to review and update the pre-configured system notifications — edit subject lines and body text to match your existing communications.

Go to Settings > Notifications and recreate your time-based reminders — expiry warnings, post-expiry notices, and any other scheduled communications. Use the Variable Inserter to personalise content with member name, site name, expiry date, and other dynamic values.

Go through your site pages and posts and configure access control rules under Meta Membership. Restrict content to the appropriate membership status as needed.

If you are using menu visibility control, configure that too — menu items can be shown or hidden by membership status.

Before going anywhere near the live site, test the full member journey on staging:

• Register as a new member for each membership type
• Complete a test payment for each gateway you are using (Use sandbox mode for Stripe)
• Check the member dashboard displays correctly
• Verify access control is working — test as a logged-out user, a member, and an expired member
• Trigger notifications manually where possible and check the content
• Check the imported member records look correct
• Test the renewal flow

Re-enable email temporarily on staging to test notification delivery if needed — but use a mail-catching tool like Mailhog or Mailtrap rather than sending to real addresses.

Once you are satisfied with staging, repeat the process on your live site:

1. Put the live site in maintenance mode
2. Install and configure Meta Membership on live (repeat steps 5–13)
3. Do a final member export from your existing plugin — this captures any new registrations since your staging export
4. Import to the live Meta Membership installation
5. Deactivate your previous membership plugin
6. Remove maintenance mode
7. Monitor closely for the first few days — check member logins, payment completions, and notification delivery

Note: If your previous membership plugin created WordPress user roles, check that existing members can still log in after deactivation. Meta Membership manages access independently of WP roles, but Role Sync Rules can be configured if compatibility with other plugins requires it.

Your membership site is now running on Meta Membership. Keep an eye on the support forum and the plugins.webworkz.nz documentation for updates.