How important is the signup date or start date for a membership?

It depends…

Mostly on whether or not you have a content drip feed linked to that membership, or not.

When dripping content, the timing of the content to drip is often directly related to how long the user has been a member of the site.

Drip feeds normally comes in two flavors. Membership level specific content and content that is Member specific.

Sometimes a member is supposed to receive content drips for the duration of the time they have access to your site, regardless of the membership level they have (Member content).

Sometimes, the content drip feed is only accessible when they have a specific membership level (Membership level content).

In Paid Memberships Pro, the default behavior is to link the membership level and start date. This means that every time a user completes a checkout for a membership level, their start date changes to the current date.

This makes sense in most cases.

But not when you’re wanting to drip feed member content (option 1, above).

So for a drip feed of member content, you need to change the default behavior of Paid Memberships Pro. ,

The following recipe will keep/preserve the start date for your members to the day when they first signed up for a membership.