As mentioned in previous blogs having your online courses on your website can improve your SEO, be a lot easier to set up (as you don’t need to learn yet another system), can be much easier for your clients/students to remain in one place and can be far more budget friendly.
And if you have a WordPress website it’s quite simple to do.
So how do you create an online course with WordPress?
There are quite a few options actually. WordPress doesn’t have any built in feature for online courses as it’s just open source software, so every bit of functionality is added through plugins.
And, there are quite a few online course plugins for WordPress (often called LMS plugins), such as Lifter LMS, Memberspress (which has memebrships sites and it’s newer online course function) and Learndash.
There are loads of others but I find these to be the most popular ones.
With Learndash being my favourite.
Why?
I find it is the simplest with the most features.
It’s that easy!
With any of these plugins once installed they require a bit of setting up then it’s setting up the courses. I find Memberpress courses a bit more of a faff to set up protection, with each course page needing rules.
With Learndash, once set up, it’s just adding your lesson and topic titles then creating the content on those the same way that you would all the other pages on your website. Protection to all those pages are automatic on registration to the course.
You can use the inbuilt payment suystem or an alternative ecommerce system such as Woocommerce or Studiocart.
There is also extra features, such as quizzes and assignements to test your students knowledge, gamification to encourage students to learn like leaderboards and the ability to track their progress, as well as certificates you can create for their course completion.
These are all easy to set up as well and add extra interaction for your students.
You can also use various medias to teach your content , such as video, text, audio and downloadable PDFs.
As I mentioned, creating an onling course with WordPress also helps push you up the rankings in the search engines, as when students are logging in and spending time on your site the search engines can see an increase in traffic as well as time spent on your website.
I always try and keep as much as I can on my website, including online courses and purchases etc. so that visitors remain on my website for as long as possible and get the whole flow of not having to leave.
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If you like the sound of how to create an online course with WordPress and Learndash then I have the perfect solution for you!
My Learndash course teaches you how to do everything from installing the plugin and setting it up to creating your courses, lessons and topics, using video and adding extra features.
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