You extended the default WordPress registration form because two fields don’t run a membership site. Your sign-up form now asks for a bio, a photo, a phone number, whatever your directory depends on.
Then comes the tradeoff every custom form faces. Mark all of it required and you add friction at the exact moment people decide whether to sign up. Mark the extras optional and you get the signup, but half your profiles arrive with the added fields blank.
So, you require the essentials, leave the rest open, and count on members finishing later. They don’t. Nothing on the site tells them the profile is unfinished, so as far as they know, it’s done.
The Profile Completeness add-on for User Registration & Membership is that reminder.
Below, I’ll walk through installing it, enabling it on a form, weighting the fields your site depends on, and setting up the notice and congrats email for members who stopped halfway. No code in any step.
Let’s get started!
Our Setup
I tested this on a local WordPress installation with the following stack, verified September 7, 2026:
- WordPress 7.1, PHP 8.2.30
- Twenty Twenty-Five theme (default, v1.5)
- User Registration & Membership Pro v6.2.5
- Profile Completeness add-on v1.0.8
How Profile Completeness Works
Profile Completeness isn’t built into the core User Registration & Membership plugin. It’s a separate add-on that extends it.
Once active, it adds three things to any form you’ve built in User Registration: a completion meter, field weighting, and two optional messages, an incomplete-profile notice and a 100%-completion email.
It’s available on the Personal, Plus, and Professional plans.
Compare plans and pricing if you’re not sure which one you’re on.
What an Unfinished Profile Costs You
An incomplete profile isn’t just unfinished. It’s invisible to other members, and it breaks anything that depends on that data: directory filters, matching, personalization.
LinkedIn’s own data backs this up: a profile photo alone makes a profile 7x more likely to show up in search. Handshake sees a similar pattern; a complete profile gets messaged 5x more often.
The mechanism doesn’t change on a WordPress membership site. You’re just working at a smaller scale.
Step 1: Install and Activate the Profile Completeness Add-on
Profile Completeness ships as its own plugin file, separate from User Registration & Membership Pro.
Go to User Registration & Membership > Addons, search for Profile Completeness, then click Install and Activate.
Important: This add-on requires a Personal, Plus, or Professional license. The free plan won’t show an Install option for it.
Step 2: Enable Profile Completeness for Your Form
Once it’s active, open the form you want to track. Go to Form Editor > Form Settings > Profile Completeness, then turn on Enable Profile Completeness.
This alone adds the completion meter to that form’s Profile Details page. Everything past this point is optional refinement.
Step 3: Set Your Completion Percentage Target
By default, a profile counts as 100% complete only when every field is filled in.
If that’s too strict (say, you have an optional bio field most members will skip), lower the target in Completion Percentage (%).
Tip: Consider whether 100% is actually the right bar. If a handful of fields are genuinely optional, forcing every member toward 100% just to feel “done” can push them to abandon the profile instead of finishing it. An 80–90% target still signals real progress without penalizing fields most members will never fill in.
Step 4: Weight Specific Fields (Optional)
By default, every field counts equally toward the completion percentage.
Turn on Enable Custom Percentage for Each Field to change that. Pick a field from the dropdown, assign it a percentage, and use the + button to add as many weighted fields as you need.
The Remaining Percentage counter tracks how much allocation is left as you go.
Here, I have allocated 40% weight to WordPress Profile Picture and 20% to User Bio registration fields. The remaining 20% is allocated automatically to default fields: username, email, and password.
Pro Tip: Weight the fields your site actually depends on, not just the ones that are easiest to fill in. A course platform might put most of the weight on the bio field for instructor accounts, since that’s what students read before enrolling.
A directory or marketplace should probably weight phone number or business address heavily, since those are the fields visitors need in order to act. A “complete” profile that’s missing the one field visitors care about isn’t actually complete for your purposes.
Step 5: Add an Incomplete Profile Notice (Optional)
Turn on Enable Profile Incomplete Notice to remind members until they finish.
The default message reads: “Your profile is currently {{profile_completeness}}. Please complete your profile to get the most out of our website.”
The {{profile_completeness}} tag pulls in the live percentage, so you can rewrite the rest of the sentence without breaking that part.
Tip: Match the message to the actual reason you’re collecting the data. A generic “complete your profile” line is easy to ignore. Something like “Add your shipping address to check out faster next time” tells the member what’s actually in it for them.
Step 6: Send a Congrats Email at 100% (Optional)
Turn on Enable Profile Completion Congrats Email to send an automatic email the moment a member’s profile hits its target percentage.
The add-on ships with default wording, and the toggle alone is enough to make it work.
To change what it says, go to User Registration & Membership > Settings > Emails > To User > Profile Completion Success.
The template lives there, not in the form settings panel where you turned the email on.
It’s a small touch, but it closes the loop. The notice told them what was missing, and the email confirms they finished.
Step 7: See It Live on the Profile Details Page
Members only see the meter after they log in, on their Profile Details page under My Account. It doesn’t appear on the registration form itself.
It renders as a circular progress ring with the percentage in the center.
Frequently Asked Questions About Profile Completeness in WordPress
Is Profile Completeness available on the free version of User Registration? No. It’s included on the Personal, Plus, and Professional plans. The free version doesn’t include a way to add a completion meter.
Can I make some fields count more toward completion than others? Yes. Turning on Enable Custom Percentage for Each Field lets you assign a specific percentage to individual fields instead of splitting the total evenly across all of them.
Does the completion meter show up during registration, or only afterward? Only afterward. It appears on the Profile Details page under My Account once a member is logged in. It doesn’t appear on the registration form itself.
Can I customize the message shown to members with incomplete profiles? Yes. The Profile Incomplete Notice Message field is fully editable, and it supports a {{profile_completeness}} tag that inserts the member’s live percentage into your text.
Is there a way to reward members for finishing their profile? The add-on includes an optional Profile Completion Congrats Email that sends automatically once a member reaches their completion target.
Can I edit the wording of the congrats email? Yes. The template sits under User Registration & Membership > Settings > Emails > To User > Profile Completion Success. You enable the email in the form’s Profile Completeness settings, then edit its content there.
Do I need to write any code to set this up? No. Every setting here, enabling the meter, weighting fields, writing the notice message, turning on the congrats email, is a toggle or text field inside the form editor.
Key Takeaways
- Profile Completeness is a separate paid add-on (Personal, Plus, or Professional) for User Registration & Membership. It isn’t a built-in free feature.
- It’s enabled per form under Form Editor > Form Settings, not through a global settings page.
- You can weight individual fields instead of splitting completion evenly, plus set an incomplete-profile notice and a 100%-completion email.
- You can edit the Profile Completion Success email template from Settings > Emails > To User > Profile Completion Success.
- The completion indicator is a circular ring on the Profile Details page, visible only after login. It’s not a bar, and it isn’t part of the registration form itself.
- The value isn’t cosmetic: LinkedIn and Handshake both publish data showing complete profiles get found and messaged significantly more often, and the same visibility problem applies directly to membership directories and communities.
Conclusion
Now you know how to add a real completion meter to your WordPress profiles, not just a suggestion buried on a settings page nobody reads.
Set it up once, weight the fields that matter to your site, and you’ll be able to see exactly how complete your member base actually is instead of guessing.
If you’d also like to give members a clean way to close their account or manage their own data, see our guide on letting users delete their account on a WordPress membership site.