Dumb Mistakes That Screw Members and How To Avoid Them

Running a membership site means you have a lot of different plates spinning. Regardless of the groundwork you have already put in, there will still be times where you feel like you’re losing control.

Maybe you’re losing members or failing to reach your membership targets; hitting security problems; dealing with payment issues; or facing complaints about your site’s loading speed.

As your site matures and grows, you’re bound to face a few problems.

Thankfully, there are lots of ways to improve your site’s functionality – as well as identify weak spots in your processes.

If you want a quick reference guide to troubleshooting the top 5 membership site operating issues, then you’re in the right place.

This guide breaks down the most common mistakes that hurt membership sites and shows you how to fix them using proven benchmarks and processes.

The “Techie Stuff”

This section is all about the things that you can improve within your site’s functionality to make it work more smoothly and securely. It might be about the plugins you are (or aren’t) using, dealing with failed payments, or leveraging a content delivery network.

Payment Difficulties

Failed payments are one of the most common and most overlooked causes of involuntary churn in subscription and membership businesses. 

Across the subscription economy, companies lose an average of about 9% of revenue to failed payments when no recovery strategy is in place.

What’s striking is not just how often payments fail, but how much recoverable revenue sits on the table. 

Research shows that top-performing subscription businesses recover roughly 60% of failed payments through strategic retries and recovery workflows.

Stripe (one of the largest recurring billing platforms) reports that for every $1 spent on Stripe Billing tools, its users recovered about $9 in otherwise lost revenue by using automated payment recovery features. 

In 2023 alone, Stripe’s recovery tools helped merchants recover over $5.3 billion in failed subscription payments.

Slow Loading Speeds

As membership sites grow, performance often degrades due to video content, downloads, plugins, and logged-in user complexity. Speed issues don’t just frustrate users, they directly reduce engagement and increase cancellations.

An example comes from the BBC, which publicly reported that it lost around 10% of users for every additional second its pages took to load. For membership sites, where users log in frequently, even small delays can compound into long-term disengagement.

Falling outside these benchmarks is often an early indicator that infrastructure is no longer keeping pace with growth.

A real-world example comes from the BBC, which publicly reported that it lost around 10% of users for every additional second its pages took to load. For membership sites, where users log in frequently, even small delays can compound into long-term disengagement.

What to do: To address slow loading speeds, start by running quarterly performance audits using tools like GTmetrix or WebPageTest to pinpoint bottlenecks. 

If server response times exceed performance benchmarks, especially as concurrent logged-in users increase, consider upgrading your hosting. 

Implementing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) ensures large assets are served from locations closest to your members, while offloading video hosting to dedicated platforms prevents media files from overwhelming your server. 

Additionally, caching should be used aggressively, including object caching for logged-in users, particularly on WordPress-based membership sites, to maintain smooth performance as your site grows.

Security Issues

If your site is built on WordPress, then you have lots of reasons to feel secure. However, if you’re not keeping your software updated, then you inevitably reveal vulnerabilities.

When a widely used plugin called Post SMTP was installed on more than 400,000 sites, it  was found to contain a critical vulnerability that could allow attackers to hijack admin access and view email logs. 

Although a patched version was released quickly, roughly 160,000 websites remained unpatched and vulnerable weeks later because site owners hadn’t updated the plugin.

The common threats you’ll see on unmaintained WordPress sites include brute‑force attacks that guess passwords repeatedly, malware injection through plugin weaknesses, and cross‑site scripting (XSS) that tricks your site into executing harmful code.

The good news is that many of these risks are entirely preventable.

What to do: Religiously updating your WordPress core,  themes, and plugins ensures you receive the latest security patches as soon as they’re released. 

While you’re at it, strengthen login security by enforcing strong passwords and enabling two‑factor authentication to make brute‑force attacks virtually impossible. 

Finally, setting up a regular backup schedule ideally off‑site is essential: in the event something does go wrong, a recent backup lets you restore clean versions without prolonged downtime, reputational damage, or loss of member trust.

Want to know more? Refresh yourself with our five tips on building a secure membership site.

The Operational “stuff”

You’re bound to find that, as your site grows, the processes around it need to adapt. You might have unanticipated consequences to the way you are creating content, or you may have underestimated the planning involved in promotions.

Losing Members

Subscriber retention should be a top priority: retaining an existing member is far cheaper than acquiring a new one. 

Research from Recurly shows that involuntary churn alone accounts for roughly 20–40% of total churn in subscription businesses, highlighting the importance of active retention strategies. 

For content-driven membership sites, a healthy monthly churn rate is typically 3–7%; if churn exceeds 8% for two consecutive months, it’s a signal that onboarding, engagement, or perceived value needs attention.

What to do: To track and improve retention, run monthly cohort analyses to identify when members disengage, for example during the first 30 days versus month three. 

Use this data to trigger re-engagement emails after 14–21 days of inactivity, and guide new members through a structured 30-day onboarding sequence that delivers early “quick wins.” 

For instance, a site might send a welcome email on Day 1, highlight key features on Day 7, provide usage tips on Day 14, and check in on Day 21.

Missing Targets

Whatever targets you had in place at launch, you may be finding that you’re falling short somewhere. If not, then you should be sharing your experiences in your own blog!

Whatever your issue – be it not enough traffic or not enough new members – you are probably in need of a strategy around your content and promotions.

MasterClass, a high‑profile subscription education platform that faced stagnating growth in its early years. 

MasterClass didn’t just publish more content but redesigned its SEO strategy, created high‑profile thematic campaigns tied to celebrity instructors, and aligned content launches with promotional bursts. 

Within a year of these changes, the company reported double‑digit increases in organic search traffic and stronger user acquisition growth, which helped drive membership numbers from the low six figures into the millions. 

This illustrates how coordinated SEO, content, and promotional planning can move the needle even for sites with strong content already in place.

What to do: It’s a big one, this. There are three key areas to address:

SEO:- If traffic to your site is causing concern, then you should focus on Search Engine Optimisation. You might have thought that this doesn’t apply to membership sites: wrong. At a minimum: your blog needs to be optimised for search engines; your site structure needs to be clear; and you need to be focusing on keywords. There is a lot more detail in our SEO Practices blog.

Promotions:- A solid plan for marketing your site is essential. You should be running three promotions per quarter: two minor and one major. Promotions can include offers, content, events, themes and buzz builders. Promotions are the source of ongoing membership. Just be wary about what you are offering for free, and what value paid members receive.

Content strategy:- Content marketing is all about how to distribute content to market your site. It helps to project a certain authority to your expertise and helps to provide visibility to the great content on your site. Every site owner needs a good content strategy. Learn how to build one here.

Now That You Know All That

Now that you know what to look out for, remember this: struggling with your site doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It’s something almost every growing community and business faces.

Performance issues, scaling problems, and messy workflows don’t fix themselves but they can be fixed. And they don’t have to cost a fortune or wait until things break.

If you spotted gaps in your setup while reading this, now is the best time to address them. A few small changes today can save you major headaches tomorrow.

And if you want a platform that’s built to scale with your community and not fight against it, BuddyBoss gives you full ownership, flexibility, and the tools you need to grow without limits.

👉 Explore BuddyBoss and see how it can support your community long-term.

Author Jason Broderick