Making login process easier for imported free tier members in Ghost

Memberships & subscriptions
1

Hi everyone,

Sorry if this has been already asked, I couldn’t find anything simlar in the forum.

I’ve set up a free tier for my subscribers, and I currently have about 7,000 members. However, most of these members were imported from an external list from my old website, and they aren’t aware that they already have access to members-only content. When they come across the “members-only” sign, they’re confused, thinking they need to sign up again or aren’t aware they only need to log in.

Is there a way in Ghost to make the login process more seamless for these users? Specifically, I’d love to know if there’s a method to bypass the login screen by appending the user’s email to the URL or if there are any other best practices for handling this situation, such as using magic links or redirects, to make the process clearer and easier for them.

How do you handle similar situations with your subscribers? Any tips or ideas would be much appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

2

That would definitely not be a best practice, since then anyone who could guess a user’s email could get logged in as them.

A few options, from easy to hard:

  1. Email your users. Tell them they have access, and they can get signed in by clicking the sign in link (which you could also include in the email).
  2. Update your CTA (call to action - the members only sign) to make the sign in part more obvious. If your theme already has a file at (themename)/partials/content-cta.hbs, that’s the thing you want to edit. If it doesn’t, you can grab the default, put it at that location, and edit it. Default: Ghost/ghost/core/core/frontend/helpers/tpl/content-cta.hbs at main · TryGhost/Ghost · GitHub. If you’re comfortable with html, you can probably accomplish that yourself - see Tutorials if you get stuck. Or it should be a <1 hour job for a developer.
  3. Send each user (via automation of course!) a customized email with a link that includes their magic link. (But magic links expire after 24 hours, so you’ll want to include some text about how to get a new one by clicking the sign in if needed.) I would call this ~1-1.5 hours of developer time (although my answer may be biased by having some similar code already), plus access to an outbound email service such as Mailgun – which you probably already have if you’re self hosting.
  4. Stand up a cloud function that creates and uses longer-lived single-use tokens and gets your users logged in to Ghost with them. Send your users an email like in #3, but with these longer tokens. ~3ish hours?
3 Likes
3

Thanks Cathy, I finally went with option 2, updating the CTA. I did that right after publishing the question here. And I will continue improving the design of the CTA to increase awareness. Besides on each newsletter I will add clear instructions. I was just wondering if there was a more direct way.

Your blog is awesome BTW.

Thanks!

1 Like