A simple WP website for selling a video course (plugins + code)

Did you know that we can use free WordPress plugins to set up a basic website for selling videos, ebooks, PDFs, etc.?

It's a good option for those who are just starting to monetize their expertise and don't need a full-featured paid LMS plugin.

This is a real project I submitted a proposal for in April 2025. The client was from India and I found him in a Discord WordPress server.

His requirements were:

Three public pages that describe the course, sell it and capture leads.

A page with protected video course (a short one, with up to 10 videos).

User accounts on the site where that can manage their information, subscription.

$250.

However, after an interview with me (I've even sent him a screen recording of the solution concept!) he proceeded with a different freelancer.

I decided to take something valuable from that case and share the work I did as portfolio here.

After a quick research I found a free WordPress plugin for selling digital content—Paid Memberships Pro, installed and configured it. I used Kadence Gutenberg blocks to build pages as it's light-weight solution that doesn't significantly impact the loading time. Here's the page that I built, it contains the videos behind a paywall:

Once user who has purchased the course logs in, they see the full content of the page:

And this is the account management page that the plugin sets up:

Next, I added a custom code that controls access to the videos on the protected course page. The result:

Non-logged-in users and users without the necessary membership can’t watch the videos (even if they type their direct URLs in the browser address bar).

Users who have purchased the membership can watch videos but they can not easily download them (there no “download” button, “Save as” option). Even of they find the URL of a video, it’s not easy to download it.

Pasting video URL in the address bar will show an error:

💡 Note that there’s no way to completely protect a video from sharing. I’ve read even big companies like Netflix have issues with illegal video distribution. What else we can do to make downloading harder? Encrypt + stream in chunks. There are paid plugins for it. They implement HLS streaming with encryption. A user can only watch a video if they have a key. Even if they download it, they will only see a black screen. For example, FV Player Pro.