If you upgrade through my link, Wealthy Affiliate pays me a referral commission, and it recurs for as long as you stay subscribed. You should know that before you read anything else here, because it gives me a reason to want a yes from you.
Here is how I’d like you to use this page. The decision should rest on a list you write yourself, from your own days on a Starter account, and not on my opinion or on how enthusiastic a features page sounds. If the list says wait, waiting is the right answer, and you will have lost nothing by finding that out.
Before anything else: how I earn if you upgrade, and why that shouldn’t decide this for you
A recurring commission means I benefit most when a referral stays subscribed for a long time. A person who upgrades too early, gets little from it and cancels after a month is a poor outcome for them and a poor one for me. So the commission is a reason for me to explain this carefully.
It is still a financial interest, and you are entitled to weigh what I say with that in mind. That is why this article does not tell you what Premium includes. Plans change, and a list I wrote today could be out of date by the time you read it. The current Wealthy Affiliate membership page is the only source you should trust for what is included, so I will keep sending you back to it.
What I can offer is a method for deciding. It takes two weeks, a notebook and a little honesty.
What a Starter account already lets you do, so you can feel the real edges
The most common mistake with a Starter account is to leave it half explored and then decide it is not enough. If you have not used something, you cannot know whether you need more of it.
Before you start the friction list, open every area your Starter account lets you into and use it for real. Read the lessons, even the ones that look beyond you. Look around the community. Try the first tasks the way you would if nobody were checking.
A limit only counts if you ran into it while trying to do something. “I haven’t looked at that yet” is not a wall. “I tried to do this and could not” is one. The two feel similar when you are new, but they lead to opposite decisions.
If you want a picture of what an unhurried start can look like, your first week at Wealthy Affiliate is mostly about getting your bearings, and that is a good frame for these two weeks too.
Keep a friction list for two weeks: what to write down each time you get stuck
A friction list is a plain note of every moment you hit a wall. You can keep it in a notebook, a phone note or a spreadsheet. What matters is writing the entry at the moment it happens, because by the evening you will have forgotten most of them or inflated the ones that annoyed you.
For each entry, write down five things:
- What you were trying to do. Be specific: “change how my homepage looks” is better than “work on my site”.
- What stopped you. Write the actual message, missing option or confusing screen.
- How long you were stuck. Ten minutes and two evenings are very different walls.
- What you did next. Did you search, ask someone, skip it or give up for the day?
- Whether it got solved. If it did, note how.
Two more habits make the list useful. First, write down the walls that were solved quickly too. They tell you which parts of Starter are working for you. Second, do not edit as you go. Wait until the end of the two weeks before you decide which entries matter.
Some entries will turn out to be learning curve. You were new, the screen was unfamiliar, and an hour later you understood it. Those do not need a paid feature. They need time, and they are normal for anyone starting out.
The entries that matter are the ones that repeat, or the ones where you stopped working because of the wall and not because you were tired.
Matching each wall to a feature: building, hosting, live help and community access
At the end of two weeks, sort your entries into four groups. Each group matches a kind of feature you can look for on the membership page.
Walls about building
These are entries like “I couldn’t make the site look the way I wanted” or “I didn’t know where to put this page”. Ask whether the wall came from not knowing how, or from the tool not letting you. If you did not know how, a tutorial may solve it, and you may already have access to one. If the tool did not allow it, look on the membership page for what Premium offers in building and design, and check whether it names the thing you were trying to do.
The piece on turning lessons into a real website covers the first case. Many building walls turn out to be a lesson watched but not yet practiced.
Walls about hosting
These are entries about your site being live, reachable and stable: “I wasn’t sure where my site would actually live” or “I couldn’t publish what I’d made”. Hosting walls are easy to confuse with technical panic. A scary error message is not automatically a missing feature. The technical snags that make beginners panic are worth reading first, because several of them have calm fixes that cost nothing.
If the wall is that you have nowhere to publish at all, check what the membership page says about hosting and at which level it is included.
Walls about live help
These are entries where you needed an answer from a person and could not get one: you were stuck for a long time, you asked a question and nothing came back, or you did not know what to ask. Count them carefully. If you were stuck for hours on several different things, that is a strong sign. If you were stuck once for an afternoon, it probably is not.
On the membership page, look for how live help and live classes are described and which membership level includes them. Do not assume. Read the wording, because “access to” and “included with” can mean different things.
Walls about community access
These are entries about feeling alone with a problem: “I didn’t know whether this was normal”, “I wanted someone to look at my page” or “I couldn’t tell if I was on the right track”. Starting online is lonelier than most people expect, and the lonelier side of starting out is a real factor, not a soft one. People who feel supported tend to keep going, and keeping going is most of what this work asks.
Check what the current membership page says about community access at each level. What you can do in the community on Starter, compared with Premium, is a detail to confirm there and not to take from me.
If an entry fits none of the four groups, leave it as its own group. Not every wall needs a feature.
The features a beginner can safely ignore for now
Here is the rule I would use: a feature that solves a problem you have not had is a feature you can skip for now.
On a long features page, nearly everything sounds useful. It is easy to read a list and feel that you would be foolish to go without any of it. But a total beginner at the start of the first few weeks has a short set of real problems, and most of the page speaks to problems that come later.
Some examples of what to be relaxed about, if the page lists them:
- Anything built for running many sites. If you are still choosing your first niche, a second site is a problem for another season. The piece on how to choose a niche is a better use of your time than any feature that multiplies sites.
- Anything aimed at handling large audiences. If you have no visitors yet, a tool for managing many of them solves nothing today.
- Anything about advanced optimization. Polishing something that has not been published or read is early work on the wrong part of the Hub.
- Anything you cannot connect to an entry on your friction list. This is the simplest test. If you cannot point to a line in your notebook and say “this would have fixed that”, it can wait.
None of this says those features are poor. It says they are not yet yours. You can come back to them in a later stage, and the stage-by-stage look at Starter and Premium shows how the picture shifts as a site grows.
Reading the current membership page together: what to check before you pay anything
Open the current Wealthy Affiliate membership page in one window and your friction list in another. Then go through it in this order.
- Find each wall on your list and look for a matching feature. Write the feature’s name next to the entry. If you cannot find one, mark the entry “no match”.
- Read the exact wording. Note what is included, at which level, and any limits stated.
- Check the price and the billing terms. Look at what you would pay, how often, and what the page says about cancelling. I do not quote prices here because they can change, and the page is the authority.
- Count the matches. How many of your repeated walls have a named feature that addresses them?
- Note anything you are unsure about. If a point is unclear, ask before you pay, not after.
Do not let a feature you like but never needed push you toward upgrading. Your list is the reason to upgrade, and the page is only where you confirm what the upgrade covers.
The question of cost deserves its own honest look, and the real cost of starting online counts it in money, hours and patience, which is a fuller picture than the price alone.
If your list is short, wait; if it’s long, here’s what committing looks like
If your list is short, with a few entries that were solved within the hour, stay on Starter and keep going. Use the extra weeks to make progress on your first pages. Check the list again in a month. Nothing is lost by waiting, and a site with real pages gives you a clearer sense of what you would actually need.
If your list is long, with the same walls repeating and several of them matched to named features on the membership page, you have a reason to upgrade that belongs to you. Committing then looks like this:
- Decide what the upgrade is for. Pick the two or three walls from your list that you expect Premium to remove. Write them at the top of a page.
- Set a review date. After a month on Premium, look at the same list. Did those walls come down? If they did, you have your answer. If they did not, you know something worth knowing.
- Plan your hours. A feature you do not have time to use does not help you. Check the thirty-minute time plan if your days are tight.
- Keep the same notebook. The friction list stays useful after you upgrade, because new walls will appear and the same method sorts them.
Either result is a good one. A short list saves you money and a long list gives you a reason you can explain to yourself.
Start your list this week
Open your Starter account this week and start a friction list. If the same walls keep showing up after two weeks, come back to this page and compare your list with the current Premium features. You can read how I answered the question of worth in is Wealthy Affiliate worth it for a total beginner.