When it comes to build your own adult website, you have a few options.

The options

1. Modelcentro

Modelcentro is a good option. It’s very easy to set up. They take care of all the processing, hosting etc…and you get a revshare. You can have your own domain if you have one and the list of features covers it all: photo galleries, videos, blog…even your cam shows. The only part that you might not like is that all the Modelcentro sites look pretty much the same. So if you want something a little more personal and custom, that might not be the solution you choose.

2. ElevatedX

ElevatedX is THE platform that pretty much everybody in the industry uses. All the big sites are ElevatedX sites. ElevatedX is filled with all the features you might need to run ANY adult website and the content management system is pretty good. You don’t need to know a whole lot about anything. ElevatedX does it for you. You just drop your videos and photos in a folder and ElevatedX does all the work. It’s great if you have lots of content or plan to update very regularly and don’t want to go with the hassle of doing the tidious work like watermarking your photos, encoding your videos , etc. The only issue with ElevatedX is that if the admin section is very user friendly, everything else is not. The code is locked so there’s nothing you can do if you want to customize something. The templating system is not for beginners and everything is optional and has a cost. ElevatedX is not cheap either and you might need help if you want to install it yourself. Starting at $199 for the non hosted version, it might seems cheap but make sure you have the hosting that can support all their requirements.

3. Other CMS

There’s a lot of solutions out there, either based off WordPress or custom CMS solution. I haven’t tested them myself so there’s nothing I can say about it. But there’s a reason why everybody goes with either solution 1 or 2. It’s because they are the best so far. Fill free to test them yourself and let me know if you have any positive or negative feedback.

4. Hire a professional

One of the main reason I started helping people is because of all the girls I know in this industry who were ripped off one day by a “designer” that took their money and never delivered, or took their money and did a bad job, or were fans that needed a way to get close with a model and I can imagine how awkward the process must have been.

If you have the budget to go with a real professional, please do. There’s a lot of web designers and we developers, specialized or not in the adult industry, that can and will do a great job. Although, I would highly suggest a company already working in the industry as they are used to the market, the material and know exactly what are the best practices when it comes to build you a website. It’s not just about the way it looks, it’s how the user experience is, how the content is delivered, how fast your site can run, how to implement the best payment processing, etc.

Of course, hiring a professional can be an investment but it’s a peace of mind to know that you only have to worry about how you want your site to look and not how it’s gonna work, what features you should have, what payment processing and how it’s gonna work…and also get advise on what you might not have though about.

When it comes to find a freelancer or an adult web agency, do your research. Browse their portfolio, ask around, look at reviews if any…so you know where you’re getting yourself into.

5. DIY

Last solution is do it yourself. If you have a little bit of knowledge of html/css but even if you don’t, that might be a viable solution and you can control every aspect of your website AND it might be fun experience and an interesting project. For that, WordPress might just be the best solution. Why? Because WordPress is easy. It’s very user friendly. You won’t have to search too long to find where are your pages, how to update them, how to create new content etc. It’s definitely not as easy as running ElevatedX for example but with the right process you’ll see that it’s not that complicated to build your membership site for just sweat and tears and a tiny investment.

Build your own adult website

I’m gonna try to explain the process to create your membership WordPress site. I’m not pretending that this is the best solution or the best practice but this is pretty much how I do it.

1. Domain Name

First thing first, you’ll need a domain name. Godaddy is the easiest solution. Search for your name.com and see if it’s available. If it’s not, I don’t suggest to go try absolutely your name and try .net or .org. Everybody is used to .com, try to stick to that. You can try .xxx which is specific to adult but those domains are not as cheap as a simple .com which sales for about $10/year. Try adding – like you-name.com. You can also try younamexxx.com or even be more creative with your name as long as it makes sense. I’m not gonna spend too much time on that but feel free to message me if you need some advise on picking a good domain name.

2. Hosting

Another must have, is a hosting where your site will be hosted. For that, there’s plenty of options. If you go with a shared hosting, which is the cheapest solution, you can go with godaddy or hostgator. I prefer the latter as godaddy has limitations when it comes to running WordPress site and especially if you have lots of content which might make your site run pretty slow. Of course, a dedicated server is the best solution but this is not a $10/month investment but more like $100/month investment. Still the best solution to run a fast, smooth website.

3. Membership plugin

To run a membership site, you will need…well a membership plugin. I’ve personally try all of them and so far Magic Member is the best that you can use. It starts at $97 for a year of updates. Magic Members allows you to protect certain part or all of your content, create specific memberships, different levels of memberships, email automatically your members when a membership is about to run out, and plug into most of the main adult payment options. It’s pretty easy to set up. Once you install it, you have to fill a few options but you can also run it out of the box with the options that are set. Most payment processors integrated with Magic Members have a page to show you how to set them up so you just have to follow the steps.

4. Photo Galleries

One of the most used features is the ability to show photos and have different albums and galleries. The best plugin for that, again after trying pretty much everything on the market, is Imagely formerly known as Nextgen Gallery. It’s absolutely free. There’s no need to go with the professional version. Imagely let you create albums, galleries. You can upload directly within WordPress or even drop your pictures on a folder and let Imagely create the galleries for you.

5. Videos

That’s where it gets a little more complicated. Unlike something like Elevatedx which is fully automated, there’s no automatic way, unless you get a custom plugin built, to just drop a video and let WordPress encode it for you. You can rely on WordPress to display the video but it might not work on every device. There’s a lot of video player plugins but they might not be easy to customize. In my experience, I found that VideoJs is the best Html5 player out there that let you upload a mp4 with webm and ogg fallback so it covers all the platforms and devices.

6. Blog

That’s one part you don’t have to worry about since WordPress was originally a blog platform. There’s a section for posts. You just have to create one, every time you want to post on your “diary”.

7. Store

You might want to sell products on your website. You have the options to use a third party to sell your Snapchat, your Skype shows, your panties or anything else but at this point, you already built a full membership site with a payment option, might as well do it yourself too. The best ecommerce plugin for that is Woocommerce. You can now build a full, robust ecommerce platform. It’s very easy to use. Creating products, handling shipping options and payment options are pretty straight forward. And it works very well withing WordPress so you can fully customize it to your design.

8. Other Features

whatever feature you might want to integrate there’s a plugin for that! Whether it’s displaying your Twitter feed, your Instagram feed, if you want to have a schedule or manage an event calendar, if you want to integrate a CDN for fast delivery of your content, if you want to secure your site, etc…you WILL find a plugin that will do exactly that and more. Feel free to contact me if you need advise on what plugin is the best. Sometimes adding too many plugins might slow down your site at best and break it at worse.

9. Design

Last but not least, you might want to NOT use WordPress default themes. Or you might not know how to customize them if you don’t have any knowledge of CSS and HTML. There’s a solution for that too. Themeforest is probably the best resource for WordPress themes. At about $40 for a theme, you can find the design you like or a theme that has lots of customizations.

Voila. This is pretty much the few things you will need in order to build your own membership model site. It might seems a little complicated but it’s not that hard and remember Google and Youtube are your friends! You will find the solution to pretty much every problem you will have in the process of building your site.

Of course, if you need help, let us know. We’d be happy to help. Just drop us a line.