WordPress is one of the most popular tools in the world, over 40% of all websites use it, which represents more than 400 million sites running it.
If you want to create an online course, using WordPress to create a website to host your course can sound like an interesting idea, especially because you can get many plugins for different use cases! But it still has a lot of drawbacks.
In this article, I’ll show you how to create a course with WordPress, the pros and cons of using it, and also give you an alternative to make you more productive.
How to create a course with WordPress
Well, according to the WordPress team, if you want to create online courses and sell them, you have to do the following:
- Upgrade to WordPress Pro (at $33 per month for the business plan)
- Install the Sensei Pro LMS plugin (at $149 per year)
- Install the WooCommerce plugin (free by itself, but the price increases as you install paid add-ons)
This would allow you to have a simple and affordable course platform that allows you to publish gated content and sell it.
But the problem with this method is that it doesn’t really allow you to create great online courses.
What makes a great online course
Great online courses bring results, here’s why:
Lectures encourage students to memorize facts, but they are not great if the goal is to actually APPLY the information to reach a certain goal, the same goes for reading, watching a video, or a demonstration because these methods are too passive.
Great courses help your students learn actively.
If we look at the 3 Active Learning methods:
- Group learning through communities
- Learning by taking action through deliberate practice
- Mastering a topic by teaching to others
Then using the Sensei LMS by WordPress is not ideal because you would need to install even more paid plugins or hire developers to create a custom forum to create a community, track the progress of your students, help them focus on taking action, or encourage peer-to-peer learning.
This would lead you to spending hundreds of dollars every month for a bloated cluster of plugins that would be hard to manage for you, and your students.
And we’re speaking from experience, we used to do exactly this for the courses we were selling with the YouTube channel Marketing Mania, and it was so hard to manage that we had a part-employee taking care of this system, which took even more time and money.
Also, students had to log in multiple times for each plugin we had with different passwords, the designs of the different plugins were inconsistent, and our taped-up system was breaking often, which was a horrendous user experience for them.
The best course platform to bring results to your students
In 2020, we decided to create our own course platform SchoolMaker to solve all the issues we had with our WordPress courses:
- We added a built-in community
- We made lessons more actionable by adding checklists
- We added the ability to sell directly from our platform (no need for WooCommerce)
- We made it all visually consistent with great user experience
- Getting a dedicated subdomain for your school
- And many more things…
Here’s a comparison between Sensei LMS and SchoolMaker
Post video online courses with resources and comments for each lesson.
Learn more about SchoolMaker's online courses.
Sell as many courses as you want.
Create quizzes in your lessons, and check the results of your students.
Unlock content at predetermined times, based on each student’s purchase date.
Videos, PDFs, text, images, or embed anything: you can teach however you want.
Show your clients that they are on the path to success from the moment they buy.
Learn more about SchoolMaker's Steps & Milestones feature.
See what steps are hard to complete for your students and improve your course over time.
Get your own built-in community for your courses and get rid of distractions.
Learn more about SchoolMaker's Community feature.
Everything you need for a modern community.
Send in-app or email notifications for new posts, replies, and reactions.
You and students can chat live.
This is a great way to encourage peer-to-peer learning.
All you have to do is to show up, record your screen, and answer your student's questions.
Learn more about SchoolMaker's Consultations feature.
Coach your students in 1 on 1 calls or in groups to help them get great results.
Let your tool collect fantastic testimonials on your behalf.
Learn more about SchoolMaker's Testimonial Collection feature.
And the amazing thing is that you can set up SchoolMaker in a few hours, when it can take more than a week if you tape together a bunch of WordPress plugins.
(can change CTA here to "start free trial")
