Paid Memberships Pro: worth it for serious member migrations

Paid Memberships Pro’s Import Members From CSV add-on is a specialist migration tool, not a polished all-purpose CSV importer. It creates WordPress users, assigns or updates PMPro membership levels, imports custom user fields and metadata, and can bring across subscription information. That makes it valuable when the destination site already runs Paid Memberships Pro and the alternative is manually rebuilding hundreds or thousands of member records.

Its strongest feature is the way it understands PMPro’s data model. A normal WordPress importer may create accounts and populate user meta, but this add-on can write membership records, billing details, start and end dates, discounts, and gateway information. It also supports multiple memberships per user when the relevant PMPro level group allows them. For a migration, that PMPro-specific handling is the main reason to choose it over Import Users from CSV, Import and Export Users and Customers, or a generic importer.

The subscription support is useful but easy to misunderstand. To continue an existing recurring subscription, the CSV must include both membership_subscription_transaction_id and membership_gateway; Stripe imports also require the Stripe customer ID field. Without those values, PMPro’s gateway integrations cannot reliably connect later payment events to the imported member. In other words, this add-on can preserve subscription relationships in the right migration, but it cannot magically transfer billing arrangements that your old platform or gateway does not expose.

The weak point is the import workflow itself. You must prepare the CSV, use PMPro’s numerical membership_id rather than a membership name, map columns, and test on a small sample. The documentation specifically warns that repeat imports can create orphaned data or accidentally cancel subscriptions. A value of “0” in the membership_id column cancels all existing memberships for that user, which is a concrete reason to treat the process as a database migration rather than a casual spreadsheet upload. Public WordPress.org support threads for the older free importer also show recurring confusion around membership_id and updating existing members.

Compared with WP All Import, PMPro’s add-on offers less sophisticated general-purpose mapping, filtering, scheduling, and rerun control. WP All Import is the better choice when you are importing varied user data from complex CSV or XML files and need a visual mapping interface. Import and Export Users and Customers is a more sensible low-cost option for ordinary users, roles, passwords, and metadata, especially when PMPro membership records are not involved. Neither alternative is as directly aligned with PMPro’s membership and subscription fields.

Verdict: buy it for a real PMPro migration or a large, structured onboarding project, preferably on staging with a full backup. Skip it for occasional user imports; the premium dependency, manual CSV preparation, and consequences of bad membership data make simpler import tools better value.