Recipes: guided setup, one step at a time

Setting up a membership site is a series of decisions in a sensible order, and most people don’t know the order until they’ve done it once. A recipe is that order, written down: a guided, multi-step setup MemberPress.ai walks through with you, one step at a time. The recipe knows the steps; you keep every decision.

What a recipe is

Each recipe is a short sequence of steps. Every step has a question or a task, one line on why it matters, and — where there is something on your site to look at — a check MemberPress.ai runs on its own before moving on. Steps come in four kinds, so you always know who is acting:

• Ask — you decide. The assistant offers concrete options and a skip, never a blank box.
• Build — the assistant does the work, with the answers you already gave.
• Checkpoint — a confirmation step. The recipe continues once you confirm.
• Live — something is now on your site, and the step tells you what.

The four recipes

Recipe	What you end up with
Set up your first membership	Who it’s for, what tiers, what price — and the levels live on your site, with content protected behind them.
Take your first payment	A payment gateway connected, a real checkout confirmed end to end, and a signup link you can send someone today.
Publish your first course	Your notes, transcript or outline turned into a structured course, written to your site as a draft course for you to publish.
Monthly health check	Once a month: read what the numbers say, pick one thing to change, and change it. This one recurs — each completed month schedules the next.

Finishing one recipe offers the natural next one: membership leads to payments, payments lead to a course, and the course leads into the monthly loop.

Starting a recipe

Recipes run from your own AI client — Claude, ChatGPT, or any client you’ve connected to MemberPress.ai. Ask it what setup flows are available, or just say what you want to do (“set up my first membership”). The assistant lists every recipe with a one-line why, marks which ones fit your site right now, and shows anything you already have in progress.

Every recipe is offered on every site. “Recommended” only changes the order of the list — it never hides a recipe, because a second membership or another course is a real thing to want.

Some steps need you in wp-admin — authorising a payment gateway, for example, is something only you can do on your own account. The assistant walks you through those parts and then checks the result on your site.

What “advance” means

Moving from one step to the next is called advancing. Your assistant advances a step when it’s done, skips it if you’d rather move on, or abandons the whole recipe if you want to stop. Each time, MemberPress.ai records your answers first, so a step that doesn’t advance never loses what you said.

What gets verified, and what gets confirmed

Two different things keep a recipe honest.

Changes are gated. Steps that would change your site are gated in different ways: a dry-run preview confirmed before the write runs, a draft that stays unpublished until you publish it, or a single confirmation before something publishes — see Which changes ask you to confirm. A recipe never adds a way around that.

MemberPress.ai verifies. Most build steps are checked against your site. For steps that build something observable — a membership level, a price, a payment gateway, a course — MemberPress.ai checks its own copy of your site’s data before it lets the step advance. Those steps do not advance on the assistant’s say-so. A step with nothing observable to check (a decision, a review) advances once your answer is recorded. Four build steps also advance on the assistant’s report, because there is nothing on the site to check yet: protecting content, drafting a course, and reading the numbers and making the change in month two.

Every check has three possible answers, not two: the thing is there, the thing is not there, or MemberPress.ai can’t tell. That third answer is deliberate. Treating “can’t tell” as “not there” would have the assistant insist your brand-new membership doesn’t exist.

When a step can’t be verified

MemberPress.ai reads a synced copy of your site, not the live site. If that copy is stale — it hasn’t synced within your site’s usual cadence — a “not there” answer is downgraded to “can’t tell”, because the thing you just created may simply not have arrived yet. What the assistant already found on your site still counts.

When a step can’t be verified, the recipe stays where it is and the assistant tells you why, including when your site last synced or that it hasn’t synced yet. You can wait for the next sync and try again, or tell the assistant to skip the step, so a recipe can never trap you on a step it can’t see. Skipping moves to the next step on some steps. Many steps end the recipe when skipped, so ask the assistant first if you’re not sure.

Retiring and resuming

Resuming. Every recipe is resumable. A run remembers the step you were on and the answers you gave, and asking for the same recipe again picks up where you left off. Your assistant is told it’s a resume, so it won’t walk you back through decisions you already made.

Retiring. Recipes are versioned. If MemberPress.ai improves a recipe, runs already in progress keep following the version they started on, so the steps don’t shift under you. If a recipe is withdrawn altogether, it stops being offered to new starts — but a run you’re already standing inside still resumes and finishes.

Recipes are part of the paid tier’s “does the work” side — see Plans: free reads, paid does the work. For the overview, see What is MemberPress.ai?.