I’ve heard from a bunch of creators that they’d like to have an easy way to link from their creator pages to an easily-updated page that lists that tier’s links, discount codes, etc and is accessible only for active patrons. This is something that Patreon is actively interested in helping creators with natively on patreon.com, but there’s a pretty great solution to this if you have a Wordpress blog that allows plugins (it’s $25/mo on wordpress.com for the business plan, but you can also install it on your own server (via wordpress.org), or any other hosting option that are likely much cheaper than that).
Here are the steps I took to create a companion site on Wordpress that lets patrons log in with their Patreon account and see pages that you’ve set up to link to specific reward tiers.
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Create a Wordpress blog that allows plugins. Here’s my example site’s homepage. It’s using the “Independent Publisher 2” theme in case you just wanted to do this exactly like I have.
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Install the free Wordpress plugin. Side note: wordpress.com (if that’s your host) has a new admin panel which doesn’t have all of the same functionality as the current one most other hosts use. I recommend going to “WP Admin” for all of the remaining steps here if you’re using that new admin interface, the old one will work better.
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From WP Admin: I created a Post (which is different from a Page in Wordpress terminology) that explained that this was a companion site for patrons, and linked it to Patreon. I don’t expect many people to come here directly, but just in case.
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Then I created another Page to serve as my patron-only zone. I only have 1 tier but the idea would be to create one of these pages for each of the tiers that you wanted to host specific tier-related content on. The way you set the homepage and blog post index is in Themes > Customize > Homepage Settings. Wordpress is a bit weird to navigate around so it may take some clicking around to find the right settings when setting things up the first time.
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I created a Post that serves as the landing page for people in my tier, with some high-level information about where to find things. If the Patreon Wordpress plugin is installed, you’ll see a “Patron level” widget in the post editor’s sidebar, which you can set to the tier that you want to restrict this post to. This means that people visiting this page will need to log in with their Patreon account to see the post. For non-patrons, the title will still show up along with an explanation that this is locked to patrons and a button to “become a patron” that links back to the pledge flow. (After looking into the data on this flow, we’ve found that people who go through this flow are very likely to complete the pledge flow because the value is obvious.)
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Finally, I link from my reward tier description directly to the “patron-only zone” in my Wordpress blog. People who aren’t patrons yet will see that it’s locked, and patrons will be able to log in to unlock those pages! This means that your patrons will now be able to find your rewards, discount codes, files, and all that jazz super easily whenever they want (just go to your creator page and click on the link from the reward tier). You can see how I’ve set it up in my $1 tier on my page as an example.
That’s it! Now I have a companion site that patrons can access and which I can update in a super-flexible way whenever I want. I can use patron-only posts on Patreon, as well as messages, to let people know when major updates happen… but I don’t have to if I just expect patrons to come by my page and click through as needed. If you have any questions about the above or thoughts on how to improve the experience, let’s talk about it! If you set this up I’d also love to hear how you like it and if it makes your life easier.
Side note: I’m a product manager on the platform team here at Patreon, and am working directly with the developer who builds the Wordpress plugin and we’re actively improving it to work for this use case… so feedback you give here could be acted on quickly if you try this and have ideas for making it better. I hope this has been helpful.
