WordPress is a powerful platform with the flexibility and functionality you need to create online courses.
Creating an online course is a big undertaking, whether you have experience teaching in person or online.
Unless you’re a developer, you might be wondering how to set your course up so that it is both professional and functional.
Fortunately, there are a number of established WordPress LMS themes and plugins available to do the heavy lifting for you. These can turn your hopes of “someday” creating an online course into a realistic possibility.
Whether you’re creating a single course or a multi-course membership program, WordPress is a great foundation.
The robust membership plugins available on WordPress give you the flexibility you need to start as small or complex as you would like.
Let’s take a look at the foundation you’ll want to build for this “flexibility” to work for you.
Online Course Creation Checklist
When exploring how to create an online course powered by WordPress, you’ll need the following core components:
- A quality website hosting provider
- Self-hosted WordPress.org software (not the .com version)
- A course content plan
- A WordPress theme so you can get the proper design and layout
- WordPress LMS plugins, shopping carts, and email sequences all give you the functionality you need to deliver your content effectively
Let’s take a moment and look through each one component.
1. Quality Website Hosting
First and foremost, you’ll need a high-quality and established hosting provider for your website. This hosting company will deliver the site security, speed, and reliability needed for creating a successful online course.
Think of your website hosting packages as your school building. Imagine a school building that is run-down with doors that don’t always open, a roof that leaks, and a floor that’s rotted through. No good.
Now assume the school uses a road that is only accessible part of the time. You won’t be able to get students in the door, and they won’t be happy once they finally do arrive. That dilapidated school represents the same type of issue with poor website hosting.
We explore this topic further and provide a list of recommended hosting providers in our article: How to Pick the Best LMS Hosting Service.
2. WordPress.org Software
Fun fact: there are two ways to utilize the WordPress platform:
- WordPress.org, which is a free, open-source tool that you can install on your hosting account.
- WordPress.com, which is a paid tool (although it does have a limited free plan) that is hosted and maintained by Automattic.
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.
If your website hosting plan is the building you’ll be teaching in, using WordPress as your CMS is like having a contractor on call.
What if you want to add a couple of classrooms? Cool, he’s on it. What if you want to add a second story and a kitchen? He’ll make it happen!
That is the beauty of WordPress.org. You have total control to create awesome online courses any way you’d like.
3. Your Course Content Plan
Before you even start thinking about your course design and functionality it’s important to stay focused on the course content and how to develop an online course. Your website design should match your course content and you should not be forced into matching your course content to the constraints of the website design.
Ask yourself these questions:
- What information and value will you deliver to your students via your online courses?
- In what format will you deliver content? Are you going to deliver the material through pre-recorded or live videos, written content, slides, audio recordings, or a combination of these mediums?
- Are you going to teach them one skill or many?
- Will you offer one course or many courses?
Learn how to design an online training course, then take time to plan out your content and create an outline before diving into course website design and development.
This part of our analogy is pretty straightforward. A good teacher with meaningful content can make a difference no matter where they teach from. It could be on a street corner, in a one-room shack, or at your own kitchen table.
On the other hand, you can have the prettiest building, but if you are unprepared as an educator your efforts will fall flat.
4. A WordPress Theme
What makes a WordPress website look pretty? The theme and customization behind it.
So those fancy, attractive course websites that you see usually have a flexible (or custom-coded) theme and a team of designers and developers behind it.
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.
So when it’s time for you to start thinking about your online course page layouts, colors, and typography, check out our theme recommendations below to get started.
Your WordPress theme is the paint, flooring, and decor for your online classroom. You’re the one who gets to pick out and implement the theme design.
Take note: unless you’re skilled at web design and theme implementation, you might want to hire a designer who can put the pieces together for you!
5. WordPress Plugins
Now we come down to the real functionality pieces and we get to explore things like plumbing and hooking up the electricity. So far you’ve got the building set up, designed your digital classroom, and created an outline for your course content. You’re still missing an extremely important component, which is the WordPress plugin that will power your online course.
WordPress’s core software offers the ability to create pages, add basic written content, and upload media files. 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.
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.
To charge for your online course, you’ll need a WordPress plugin to serve as your shopping cart, checkout forms, and payment processor.
If your goals include enhancing the learning experience through the use of checklists, progress tracking, or even quizzes, you’ll need a learning management system plugin.
As you might imagine, things can get overwhelming fairly fast. You might easily find yourself installing dozens of plugins to try and accomplish each specific goal, only to realize that they were all made by different companies and don’t actually work together.
You Might Change Your Mind About What Features You Want, so You Need a Platform That’s Flexible.
Get your own free demo sandbox account so you can experience the flexibility AccessAlly has to offer.
What to consider in a WordPress learning plugin
The best way to decide which plugins you need is to ask yourself the following questions:
- What functionality do I absolutely need starting out? You’ll use this as your pass/fail criteria. Keep it simple. It’s better to start small with a strong foundation than to try and do it all at once, which is a total recipe for burnout.
- What functionality might I need down the road as I grow? This is your tie-breaker criteria as you compare your top options.
- Do any of the plugins on my list cover multiple needs? All-in-one solutions reduce the chance of technical conflicts on your site, although they often have an increased learning curve.
- Is there good documentation available to help me with the setup? Look for a knowledge base of support articles, set-up guides, and Facebook groups dedicated to the plugin.
- Is there a support team available for the plugins on my list to help out if I get stuck? There will be questions and hurdles that you run into. It’s great to have an active, competent support team on call to help you through those.
With your list in hand, it’s time to start looking at your options for the perfect online course plugin.
WordPress Tools For Creating Online Course Websites
We have a recommended suite of products that we personally use for our online courses, and we’re happy to share that with you.
WordPress Theme: Beaver Builder Theme
This is the theme we use for our websites and confidently recommend it to others!
Beaver Builder is a theme plus plugin duo. It is designed to give you ultimate flexibility in terms of layout, colors, and typography. It also offers the option to add multiple menus to a page, which is a very important element for online courses. Multiple menus allow students to navigate between the top-level site (homepage, account, etc.) and the course itself (lesson 1, lesson 2, etc.).
Beaver Builder is pre-loaded with a variety of attractive templates, and when you use AccessAlly as your online course plugin, you’ll receive access to an additional suite of Beaver Builder templates designed specifically for AccessAlly users.
Other theme options: Elementor, Divi, Thrive Architect, and Astra are all themes that online course creators love.
WordPress LMS Plugin: AccessAlly Pro
This is the LMS plugin we use for our online courses. It’s also the plugin that handles all of our e-commerce needs, membership subscriptions, and affiliate program as well.
We’ve tried many WordPress plugins for our own membership site and online courses, but couldn’t find one that met all our needs. We finally got tired of settling and built AccessAlly, our own custom solution.
It’s a more comprehensive, all-in-one plugin solution that covers course creation, selling courses, content delivery, and LMS functionality. It also offers other business-enhancing features so we have less moving pieces to have to manage separately.
Our customers loved their experience with our membership site so much, we released the plugin to the world at large. We continue to develop new features and are now solely committed to sharing it with other businesses.
It’s hard to find an online course solution that is going to flex and work with you and your business, without limiting your functionality.
AccessAlly does all of the heavy lifting for you and doesn’t limit your creativity when it comes to building a membership site or creating online course that you can be truly proud of.
See what AccessAlly can do for you and your business here:
You Might Change Your Mind About What Features You Want, so You Need a Platform That’s Flexible.
Get your own free demo sandbox account so you can experience the flexibility AccessAlly has to offer.
Are there other options? Absolutely.
You can check out our list of the best LMS plugins and membership site plugin reviews if you’re wondering what else is available.
Other Recommended WordPress Plugins
There’s always room to grow and shopping for WordPress plugins can be fun and totally addictive. You can take a peek at our list of the top WordPress plugins we love for our own websites here: Top 25 WordPress Plugins to Get You More Traffic and Social Shares.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, you might prefer keeping it basic at first: Online Business Tools Checklist: Do You Really Need to Pay For That New Tool?
How to Build an Online Course on WordPress
What does it look like to actually build out an online course on WordPress? Here’s a quick peek into the visual process:
Your process might differ depending on how you like to teach and create course content. But here are the steps you will surely go through as you develop you online course:
- Get clear on who your online course is intended for. This will help you narrow down the scope of your teaching. This way you won’t get overwhelmed trying to teach everything you know about your topic.
- Mind map or outline your course curriculum. Having a set of sub-topics or ideas for content will help you organize your content.
- Organize your lessons into modules. Estimate how much time each module may take a student to go through.
- Record or write your first module. Once you’ve done your first one, you will be better able to estimate how much work is left.
- Set up your course website. Depending on the course plugin you chose, you will follow the prompts to create placeholders for your modules and lessons.
- Upload and import your course materials into the e-learning website. You may not have finished creating all of your content yet, but it’s okay to start welcoming students if your course is running live.
- Set up the payment system and run a test order. Whenever you plan to open enrollment, it’s a good idea to test and make sure that everything works well.
- Write any welcome emails that will accompany your course as students sign up.
- Make any other style or theme updates to your course website. These can be small color changes, or updating your company logo.
- Finally, take a pass through the course site as though you were a new student signing up. Make sure that everything works from end to end!
Ready To Start Creating Your Online Courses?
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.
