Out of these three, the plugin that I recommend for creating a course in WordPress is LifterLMS.
As a course creator, you have quite a few options available when it comes to online course platforms. One such platform is WordPress which is both powerful and flexible and allows you to build a feature-rich course website.
First, download the add-on .zip file from your account dashboard and then you can upload it to your WordPress site by going to Plugins -> Add New.
Once you download the LifterLMS plugin, you can go to Plugins -> Add new and upload the plugin to your WordPress site.
If you want to just add a video in your lesson, simply copy the URL of the video hosted on Youtube, Vimeo or Wistia and paste it. If you want to add text or some other content types to your lesson, click on the WordPress icon and you can then add further content to it using the WordPress editor.
While there are many shared hosting options in the market, the one that I recommend is SiteGround . SiteGround is a premium shared hosting provider that offers fast speed, free SSL certificates, daily backup and great technical support.
You can do that by going to Engagements -> Certificates and clicking on the Add Certificate button. This will open the WordPress editor where you can design and publish your certificate.
Drag-and-drop your way through building a course with WP Courseware (starts at $99 for a two site license). This full-featured online course solution integrates with all major e-commerce plugins.
The brain child of Derek Halpern, founder of Social Triggers, Zippy Courses is a premium all-in-one online course platform (available for $199) which includes built-in integration with email marketing, payment gateways, and detailed analytics.
WP Engine is an industry leader in managed WordPress hosting. Bluehost’s regular hosting is a cheaper option from $2.95 per month. Even though the promo price is for their shared plan Bluehost has a quick install option for WordPress that helps you get WordPress ready in minutes.
Course Cats is an all-in-one WordPress theme designed to help you create an online course, integrate with the necessary plugins, and build your course sales website.
LearnDash is a feature packed, premium LMS (starting at $199 for a single site), which actually has industry standard LMS integrations, such as the Tin Can API. If you need true LMS integration, this is an obvious choice.
Outline of the course. This is perhaps the single most important step of planning your course. If you don’t know how you want to structure the material for your course (sections and lessons, subtopics etc.), it will be difficult to get the course set up properly to meet your needs, and you may choose the wrong solution.
WPLMS is a social learning management system built on BuddyPress, for course, instructor, and student management. It is an all-in-one solution for creating an online learning platform.
To get your online course set up in WordPress you'll need to buy a domain for around $10, get a web host for about $100 per year, and buy a license for an LMS plugin like LearnDash for around $150 per year.
So in total, you can get a new WordPress course set up for around $260 per year. If you wanted to host your online course on a platform like Teachable, it would cost you a minimum of $360 for the most basic plan. Most likely, you'd actually need the professional plan which costs $948 per year.
Making a lesson in LearnDash is basically the same as making a course. But to change your lesson settings, you'll need to go to LearnDash > Lesson > Settings. Here you can set an associated course, which is the course that the lesson is a part of.
Installing LearnDash is just like any other WordPress plugin. Go to Plugins, and then Add New. Then simply upload the .zip folder containing your plugin and activate it. This should create a LearnDash LMS menu item in WordPress. The menu is where you'll create all of your course lessons, quizzes, and everything else.
#N#If you don't know how to code or program, then a page builder is an extremely useful feature to have in a theme. Page builders allow you to simply drag and drop text, videos, and images to create a wonderful looking website.
Most people expect a website to load within 3 seconds and will click away if it doesn't load within that amount of time.
A common mistake that new website creators make is to create a website that is too complicated. Resist the urge to cover your website with complicated layouts, fancy animations, and too much color. It might feel cool to experiment with all of the features at your disposal, but a simple website often performs the best.
As we mentioned before, creating an online course is a great way to monetize your blog.
You might be wondering, how do I create an online course for my website? Doesn’t that take a lot of work?
Before you actually start building your online course, you need to do some planning—starting with picking the perfect course topic.
A WordPress website (blog) An email marketing platform (for list building) A brandable, done-for-you course. In this tutorial, I'll show you exactly how you can quickly create an online course with WordPress, without any fancy software, expensive subscriptions, or complicated tech skills.
Since you don't want just anyone to access your course, you need to set your post to ‘Password Protected'. You'll then get prompted to create a password. Use the same password for each post, so that it's easy for people to access each one in the course. They'll get prompted to enter the password when you give them the link to the post in your emails.
Obviously, the first lesson won't have a ‘previous' link.
3rd party sites, such as Udemy, Skillshare, and LinkedIn Learning, make it easy and tempting to go with them instead of WordPress.
This can vary, depending on whether you WANT your course to sell. There might be a situation where you have a specific course that you need to implement for your employees or a small group of people, and you plan on offering it for free. Or, maybe it’s included in your membership (e.g., integrated video tutorials on WordPress ).
This one seems obvious, but yes, it’s part of the essentials to launching a course.
Considering this will be an online course, you’ll want managed WordPress hosting that’s reliable, safe, and can handle an ample amount of visitors. It’s not recommended to use shared hosting or anything that might affect your security or speed.
We’ll be going over this more with detailed information on themes and plugins you can use for your courses. There are many good options when it comes to how your courses look visually, how your courses function, and much more.
You’ll need a good computer to set up a course for WordPress. That’s a given. However, when creating the courses themselves, bring the quality of your classes up a few notches with some good equipment.
Marketing is the final ingredient to ensuring your course success. We’ll get into this a lot more later in this article. Marketing is essential to getting your course out to the right audience.
To add a quiz, go to the “Quiz” option and then select “add new.” Afterward, provide a title, descriptions, and other details you want.
After activating LearnDash go to the settings page, click on the LMS license menu, and enter your email address and your license key.
You can add assignments by going to the “lesson option” menu to edit your lesson, check the “Assignments Uploads” option . When users upload assignments you can view them when you visit the “assignments” page.
After successfully creating your course, it is now time to add lessons to your online-course. You can add very interactive lessons to your course. With LearnDash, there are two ways you can do this:
In the left sidebar of your WordPress dashboard, go to LearnPress > Lessons.
1. In the left sidebar, go to Plugins > Add New. Find LearnPress, then install and activate it.
If you’re looking for quality shared hosting for your WordPress website, we highly recommend A2 Hosting. They offer unlimited SSD space, free automatic site backups, hosting optimized for speed and 24/7/365 guru technical support.
1. Enter the name of your course, as well as a description for it. You can also create a course category if you plan on having multiple courses on a given topic. 2. Scroll down until you get to Curriculum, where you can add both sections and lessons to your online course. Enter a name for your section.
LearnPress is widely considered the best free LMS plugin for WordPress. As an all-in-one solution, it has built-in course management, quizzes, lesson plans, assignments, course progress and much more.
This is an online course plugin where you can set up a regular or a video course as well. You can select if you want to host your videos on YouTube, Vistia or Vimeo.
Now I am going to show you how easy it is to build a course with the Thrive Apprentice WordPress course plugin.
We have used Thrive Apprentice to set the course up. However, this plugin doesn’t itself have a feature to sell your course and doesn’t include the membership registration, etc. functions of your site. To do that, you will need a membership plugin.
You can easily create a purchasing process for your courses if you create a link between Thrive Apprentice and SendOwl and this is their officially recommended solution.
The above is really neat, however, I was looking for a solution that doesn’t require a monthly fee.
If you want to see how an actual WordPress online course looks like, you can check out the demo course I built with the Thrive Apprentice plugin. (I will be releasing my actual course soon.)