Oct 02, 2021 · How to Create and Sell Online Courses with WordPress (Step by Step) Step 1. Setting up Your WordPress Website. There are plenty of website builders and online course platforms that you can... Step 2. Install and Setup MemberPress LMS Plugin. Now that your WordPress website is ready, the next step is ...
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.
Out of these three, the plugin that I recommend for creating a course in WordPress is LifterLMS.
In your cPanel, locate WordPress under AutoInstallers and click on that.
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.
To create a new course, you need to go to MemberPress » Courses and click on the Install & Activate MemberPress Courses Add-On button. When the addon is installed, you’ll be redirected to the Courses page. Click on the Add New button to create your first course. Now, the MemberPress builder will be launched.
For your online course website, you need WordPress.org that comes with unlimited custom options and a super-easy administration panel.
WordPress is the most popular website builder platform on the internet. Many top brands trust and use WordPress to build their site. You’ll find 2 kinds of WordPress sites. WordPress.com, which is a hosted solution, and WordPress.org, which is a self-hosted and highly flexible platform.
WordPress theme: A theme is a layout design or skin for your website that’ll make your content presentable and professional to your users.
To enable Classroom Mode, go to MemberPress » Settings and click on the Courses tab.
Web hosting: It’s the storage space on the internet where you’ll upload all your files, including images, audios, videos, etc. As users access your online course website, they’ll be directed to your web hosting server.
Here you can add a title and description for your course. MemberPress is built on the WordPress block editor, so you can also add images, videos, headers, and much more, with the click of a button. Get creative because this information will show up on the front-end as the course overview.
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.
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.
WordPress is made for blogging . Using SEO (search engine optimization) to drive extra free traffic to your online course website is a strategy that you'll definitely want to use. WordPress is specifically made for blogging.
Courses for Membership Add On is a free Add On for the Paid Memberships Pro plugin. It serves as a user-friendly LMS for WordPress.
You can also use the Courses for Membership Add On with other online learning management systems. The Add On will protect your LifterLMS or LearnDash courses and provide access to paid subscribers only.
Having discussed both Courses for Membership Add On and LMS for WordPress, you would be wondering about the better option for you.
You can easily create your course on your membership website with Courses for Memberships Add On .
WordPress is a powerful platform with the flexibility and functionality you need to create online courses.
WordPress.org, which is a free, open-source tool that you can install on your hosting account.
When we want to augment that functionality, we select and install plugins to make that happen. And with over 55,000 WordPress plugin available, we have lots and lots of functionality to use.
For online courses, WordPress.org continues to give the ultimate flexibility and stability. This is because WordPress.org offers maximum flexibility for selecting and installing themes, page builders, and plugins. Note: WordPress.com by Automattic states plainly that you can use plugins at the higher paid tiers.
Don’t let that worry you! There’s no shortage of resources when it comes to WordPress membership themes. We’ve even found a few WordPress themes that provide a custom look and feel for your online course but use a drag-and-drop visual builder. They are easy to use and require little or no coding skills to implement.
If you are planning on building an online training course with restricted access, you’ll need a plugin that’s developed specifically for this purpose.
You can explore all the possibilities available when you choose AccessAlly. Just request a live demo with a member of our team. We’ll show you how you can use AccessAlly to create great online courses and membership websites.
You can easily run an online course by creating a WordPress site and using an LMS plugin like the ones mentioned above. Once you have installed the plugin, you can use it to create a course with images, video, text, and other multimedia content.
WP Courseware is a popular plugin that makes it easy to create an LMS site. It has a drag-and-drop course builder, integrations with eCommerce plugins and email marketing services, assignments and course requirements. Basically, anything that relates to creating a powerful eLearning system.
Yoast is the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress, and Yoast Academy helps students learn how to use it. They used the LMS to create a variety of courses on SEO for thousands of users around the world.
Both WooCommerce and Sensei are free to use. However, if you want to use more advanced payment features, you’ll need WooCommerce Paid Courses, which is $129 per year.
As one of the few free options available, Tutor LMS is a powerful tool that can get the job done for most users.
Overall, LifterLMS is a powerful plugin that can work in almost any situation. However, it does seem to be optimized for businesses and training courses rather than individuals.
MemberPress is an extremely powerful plugin for anyone that wants to create a membership website. However, it might be a little too complex and too expensive if you only want to sell a handful of courses and/or don’t need a detailed website.
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.