Did you know that you can generate income by offering online courses and coaching services from your WordPress website using the best WordPress LMS plugins of 2024?

It’s true! You can create a passive income stream by starting an online school on your WordPress site and offering both free and premium online courses to your community or audience.

According to Guru99’s recent global online learning statistics, the demand for creating and selling online courses is constantly on the rise. These days, several offline communities and institutions are coming online to start teaching their students and members quality educational information.

Today, you have the opportunity to share your knowledge exclusively with your members and also earn money by using the best WordPress LMS plugins listed in this post.

In this article, I will present some of the best online course creation software that you can use on your new or existing WordPress sites to create engaging courses, offer fun quizzes, certifications, and more.

Let’s dive in!

What Are WordPress LMS Plugins?

WordPress LMS plugins are learning management system software tools built for creating, managing, and monetizing information by offering interactive online courses and masterclasses. You can use these WordPress plugins to build rich educational websites.

As an online tutor or a coach, you can award online certificates to members after taking your online courses. Also, you can sell exclusive memberships, eBooks, and much more on your WordPress website.

Who Should Use A WordPress LMS Plugin?

Creators and businesses of all sizes should use WordPress LMS tools on their WordPress sites. To use a WordPress LMS plugin, you must already have either a WordPress website or a WordPress blog.

The category of individuals and entities with WordPress sites can include;

• Small business owners rendering services
• Marketing agencies and freelancers
• eCommerce businesses
• Schools and other institutions
• Audio, video, content creators, and Publishers
• NGOs and private sectors

The Benefits Of Using A WordPress LMS Plugin

WordPress site owners can turn their sites into thriving e-learning businesses. Businesses are beginning to see the need to start offering profitable online courses.

With a WordPress LMS plugin installed on your website, you can create, manage, administer and monetize your knowledge in significant fields.

For instance, you can:

• Set up an online coaching website and offer free and paid online courses
• Create an eLearning marketplace and team up with multiple teachers or instructors
• Turn your WordPress site into an online course marketplace
• Award certificates to students or members
• Sell digital downloads such as eBooks, podcasts, etc
• Sell VIPs and exclusive memberships
• Create fun quizzes and lots more.

Types of Online Courses You Can Create With WordPress LMS Plugins

Smart creators and other creative entrepreneurs use online course creation software with WordPress sites to offer:

• Music business and production classes
• Fashion and design training courses
• Food and nutrition Masterclasses
• Fitness training exercises and lots more!

Best WordPress LMS Plugins To Create and Sell Online Courses In 2024

1. LearnDash

Based on user experience, LearnDash is one of the best WordPress LMS plugins used by the biggest brands in online education. The widely used learning management system tool provides you with all the resources you need to help you get started and be the next Udemy or Coursera.

See our detailed LearnDash review.

As a startup or an enterprise that is looking to embark on an eLearning business, you can use LearnDash to create impressive online training programs for your students or community. With LearnDash, you can create both free, paid and time-limited courses.

The four major key features LearnDash provides are;

1. A learning experience with automated notifications, badges & certificates, discussion forums, assignments, and more.
2. Marketing & Sales which includes one-time purchases, subscriptions, memberships, course bundles, shopping cart, and bulk access.
3. Seamless Integrations with over 300+ payment gateways, email marketing apps, and more.
4. Management features that cover group management, detailed data reporting, and so on.

Other LearnDash features Include:

• Content delivery structure to help you easily create and maximize course completion rates.
• Drip-feed content enables you to deliver your online course content based on your exact time schedules with email notifications.
• Engagement triggers enable you to interact with learners based on any action they take.
• A robust user management tool that helps you create groups and subgroups, add learners to membership levels, and more.
• Pro-panel enhanced data reporting back-end tool that helps you monitor and manage your LearnDash activities.
• Quiz options such as Q&A and assessments to help engage students with any form of media support, graduation levels, and more.
• Reward members with certificates, points, and badges immediately after the completion of courses and quizzes.
• Enhanced growth features like gamification and more to help grow your online school.

Why Marketers Use LearnDash

Using LearnDash as a WordPress-powered LMS plugin or LearnDash Cloud for creating and selling online courses has plenty of benefits.

The advantages include:

• One of the most affordable learning management tools.
• Highly rated and easiest-to-use LMS plugin for both individual and corporate WordPress users.
• Innovative features and capabilities will skyrocket the growth of your e-learning business.
• A vibrant community of experts in the creation of add-ons, videos, and tutorials for business success.
• A responsive help desk with timely support whenever you need it.
• Seamless integrations with the most widely used tools and apps. For instance, Zoom webinars and meetings.
• Multiple course facilitators or instructors.
• Individual student dashboards & user accounts.
• Multisite enabled.
• Compatibility with all WordPress themes and page builders.
• 24/7 customer support availability.

How To Use LearnDash

Getting started with LearnDash is easy and can be done in four steps;

1. Install WordPress with one click using budget-friendly and mid-tier hosts. Or better still, consider setting up a self-hosted and optimized e-learning site using LearnDash Cloud, which starts from $29/month.
2. Skip step 1 if you already have a WordPress website and move on to step 3.
3. Purchase the LearnDash WordPress plugin and simply upload the LearnDash Zip file into your WordPress admin dashboard and activate.
4. Import the LearnDash demo for free into your WordPress site for a quick start.
5. Get access to LearnDash Bootcamp where you will learn exactly how to create, sell and manage your courses.

2. MemberPress

MemberPress is also one of the accredited WordPress Membership and LMS plugins for creating and selling online courses.

Apart from using MemberPress for creating membership sites, you can also create, sell and manage world-class online courses from your WordPress dashboard with no technical code or expertise required.

MemberPress currently powers thousands of membership sites that are also leveraging its course creation tools and add-ons to provide quality courses for their communities.

Features of MemberPress LMS Include:

• Content access dripping
• Content paywalling
• Subscription billing
• Shopping cart
• Discussion forums and communities
• Seamless integrations with online payment gateways and other mostly-used apps over 2000+ with Zapier.
• Member Management dashboard
• Podcast protection
• Discount Coupons
• Automatic VAT Tax Handling
• 24/7 customer support and lots more!

Worth reading: MemberPress Vs. Teachable: Which platform is best for course creators? (All you need to know)

How to use MemberPress LMS Plugin

MemberPress runs on WordPress hosting and WordPress.com Business accounts. You will need to have the following in place;

• One-click WordPress installation from recommended hosts.
• Purchase and download the MemberPress plugin’s zip file from your account page.
• Install and activate the plugin on your WordPress admin dashboard.
• Configure necessary settings and pages.

3. LifterLMS

LifterLMS makes the shortlist of our recommendations because of its feature-packed resources. It’s a very popular WordPress learning management tool used by coaches, entrepreneurs, teachers, higher institutions, internal corporate training, and so on.

With LifterLSMS, you can create both free and paid courses, limit access to members, and have other fantastic features. Without having to hire a developer, you can customize your courses and other settings with LifterLMS on your WordPress website.

LifterLMS WordPress Plugin Features

LifterLMS offers a complete set of features to start a new eLearning platform. These features can help you build a seasoned educational WordPress website. They include;

• Premium WordPress LMS theme for free
• Setup wizard tool
• Course builder tool with an intuitive drag-and-drop feature
• Multimedia lessons with either audio, video, texts, or images for better learning
• Drip content
• Quizzes and quiz timer
• Front-end student dashboard management
• Course import and export tool
• A multi-instructor platform for teams
• Discussion forums for members
• Course bundles, content protection, reviews, and testimonials
• Subscriptions and shopping cart
• One-time and recurring payments
• Seamless Integrations with popular apps
• Affiliate-ready
• Compatible with the Astra WordPress theme
• Detailed reporting
• 24/7 customer support

LifterLMS Pricing Plans

LifterLMS is a flexible learning management system software for WordPress sites. One major aspect to consider is LifterLMS pricing plans, which don’t come that cheap. Except you want to go for the Earth bundle plan for $199 only.

Apart from its core plugin, LifterLMS offers premium add-ons to help you get the best out of your WordPress e-learning business.

For instance, each of the important add-ons costs $120. And there are other plans that include both the necessary and important add-ons.

The interesting part is that LifterLMS allows you to try its demo site for 30 days which includes all tools for $1 before finally deciding whether to buy and use or not.

Once you are through with the demo suite trial, the next will be to choose a plan.

At this juncture, It’ll be more economical if you purchase the whole add-on bundle to save BIG over buying add-ons individually! Though, you can choose any of these plans depending on what you need.

When choosing a plan, we advise you to take out time to check out LifterLMS’s detailed pricing options and feature comparison before you finally decide which one to go for.

Hint: If you are looking to build a full-fledged, world-class e-learning website like those of Coursera, Udemy, Kajabi, and so on, we recommend you opt-in for the highest plan (Infinity bundle) which costs $1200 per year.

4. TutorLMS

TutorLMS is an extensive course builder plugin with rich features for freelancers, coaches, and other small business owners. With TutorLMS, you can create amazing learning platforms as either a private teacher, operate it as a marketplace, or convert it into a hybrid institution.

Selling online courses with TutorLMS is a breeze. The plugin is fully equipped with other notable apps to help you attract more members and monetize your courses easily.

Features of TutorLMS

TutorLMS is built with rich features to help create a desirable online learning platform on your WordPress site. With no technical code required, you can:

• Easily set up TutorLMS with a few clicks
• Content drip
• Create courses, quizzes, assessments, and more with ease using an intuitive drag-drop builder
• Sell courses with multiple online payment gateways and shopping carts
• Manage members with an intuitive dashboard
• Analytic report dashboard to monitor insights and activities
• Earning and commission allocation management for multi-instructor sites
• Zoom integration for instructors to host live classes
• Sync with popular email and CRM apps
• Compatible with all eLearning WordPress themes
• Translation-ready with up to 20 languages
• 24/7 customer support

TutuorLMS Pricing Plans

TutorLMS works with both new and existing WordPress sites and annual plans start from $199 as seen in the screenshot above. As an existing website owner, you can begin offering online courses to your audience by purchasing, installing, and activating the TutorLMS Pro version.

5. MasterStudy

MasterStudy is one of the most flexible and innovative learning management tools for creating and selling online courses. The full-featured LMS plugin for WordPress is currently being used by tens of thousands of users which include popular universities, coaches, and independent marketers.

With MasterStudy, you can;

• Create unlimited online courses with rich front-end course builder and content drip features
• Manage and group courses in bundles and more
• Easily sell your products and other digital downloads online
• Create award certificates and badges
• Conduct lectures and seminars in real-time
• Engage multiple instructors
• Earn and distribute commissions
• Offer assignments, quizzes, and course ratings
• Create various forms of lessons in text, video, Zoom meetings, and slide presentations

Other features of MasterStudy

MasterStudy is built to translate your WordPress site into any language your users prefer, also with quality user experience for navigational purposes, and has both students’ and teachers’ profile pages, which helps them have direct access to other stuff.

For Udemy affiliates, you can effortlessly import Udemy courses into your WordPress course site and get a commission for each sale.

Online course creators can also monetize their courses and get paid with popular payment gateways such as PayPal, Authorize.Net, and Stripe.

MasterStudy Pricing Plans

WordPress website owners can purchase the MaterStudy LMS plugin for $79 and above. MasterSudy offers various pricing plans as seen in the screenshot below.

MasterStudy is undoubtedly loaded with amazing features for an affordable price. With the MasterStudy LMS plugin, you can start selling courses on your WordPress site in no time. Care to give it a trial?

Recommended WordPress LMS Themes For Creating & Selling Online Courses in 2024

Here are some of the best WordPress LMS themes we recommend for creating and selling online courses. They are perfect for creating full-fledged e-learning websites. Their features include:

• Compatibility with all WordPress plugins and add-ons
• Premium plugins
• Widget ready
• SEO-ready
• High resolutions
• Well documented
• Regular updates
• Mobile responsive
• Compatible with popular WordPress page builders
• Blazing fast user experience
• And lots more!

Sign up for a WP Engine plan to receive the Genesis Framework and select StudioPress Themes free!

Recommended WordPress Web Hosting Companies For Creating Online Courses

Setting up an effective eLearning website requires using the best-managed WordPress hosting servers that will help you achieve unending success.

These hosting companies all offer various plans. As your membership site grows, you might want to consider upgrading to other hosting plans for scalability purposes.

Below are our top recommendations:

For fresh starters and small business owners with few or limited courses – we recommend you go for budget-friendly managed WordPress hosts like;

• BlueHost
• DreamHost
• Kinsta

For schools, higher institutions, and large international bodies, we recommend you go for enterprise-managed hosts like:

• Pressidium
• WPEngine

FAQs on Best WordPress LMS Plugins For Online Courses