Member sign-in lets a visitor prove, on your WordPress site, that they are a member of your memberarea. It is what makes locked pages, My Courses and Course Progress work. Setting it up is described in Connecting WordPress to memberarea; this article is about what it does once it runs.
What the member sees
They press Sign in, land on your memberarea, approve the connection once, and come back to the page they started on, signed in. If they are already signed in to your memberarea, the whole trip takes a second and asks nothing.
From then on the Member Login block shows their name, their picture and a sign-out link. Nothing else on your site changes: they see the same theme, the same menus, and the pages you unlocked for them.
Their password never reaches WordPress. Your site receives a one-time code and exchanges it for a session on the server, which is why sign-in needs HTTPS and a permalink structure other than "Plain".
No WordPress account is created
Members do not become WordPress users. They never appear under Users, they
have no role, no dashboard access and no author page, and your existing
WordPress accounts are untouched. Your editors keep signing in the usual way at
/wp-login.php.
That separation is deliberate: your member list stays in one place, your memberarea, and cancelling a membership there closes the door here without any cleanup in WordPress.
How long a session lasts
A session ends by itself after a day without a visit, and after thirty days at the latest. Membership itself is re-checked far more often: access answers are cached for two minutes, course lists for one minute.
So when somebody buys, upgrades or loses access in your memberarea, WordPress follows within about two minutes. If you want to see it immediately, press Clear cached responses on the settings screen.
Signing out
Signing out on WordPress always ends the WordPress session. What happens in your memberarea depends on one switch on the settings screen: Signing out here also signs the member out of the memberarea, off by default.
- Off: the member is signed out of your WordPress site and stays signed in to your memberarea.
- On: they are taken to the memberarea to finish signing out, and they stay there.
Leave it off if your WordPress site is one of several places a member uses.
The email address
When you set member login up, you decide once whether your site receives the member's email address. Leave it off unless something on your site really needs it: a newsletter form you fill in for them, or a plugin that matches people by address.
The setting is read-only afterwards. To change it, switch member login off and set it up again. Members stay members either way, they just have to sign in again.
When it stops working
Sign-in breaks in exactly three ways, and the Status panel names each of them: the site address changed after setup, the memberarea no longer knows this website, or this server's clock drifted more than a minute. The first two are fixed by setting member login up again; the third is a job for your host.
Details and the full list are in Troubleshooting the WordPress connection.