A Complete Guide: How to Create Your First Online Course with WordPress

An online course is a form of education that is typically used to teach students a new skill or information using digital technology.

There are a bunch of benefits to creating and selling online courses — among other things, they’re flexible, cost-efficient, and engaging.

The most common incentive for an entrepreneur to create online courses is to make money.

With that $450+ billion market cap, who wouldn’t want to sell online courses?

Some other reasons for creating and selling courses online are:

Best of all, anyone can create and sell an online course.

All you need is a basic understanding of a subject and the ability to speak passionately about it.

Having a large plugin library might sound like an advantage until you join WordPress Free and find out that in order for you to install any of these LMS plugins, you need to upgrade to a paid plan — and that’s not all!

You’ll also be paying extra for web hosting, a custom domain name, and an SSL certificate to accept any online payments.

Additionally, if you want access to all of the must-have tools for creating and selling online courses, it’s recommended that you install the WooCommerce Paid Courses (Sensei Pro) plugin, which costs a whopping $164 per year!

That’s on top of all the other costs of online course development.

Alternatively, you could search for other online course platforms to get most of the essentials for free.

For example, with systeme.io’s Free plan you’ll get

That said, if you still want to use WordPress for your online courses, don’t worry — we’ll show you exactly how to get started.

The course creation process is not a short one — Before you can get started, there are a few things you need to do to create your online course.

Additionally, these questions help the customer to become aware of their problem and also visualize how beneficial your solution can be.

Deciding on your course topic and finding your target audience go hand-in-hand.

You need to know who you’re connecting with and how you can help them solve their problems.

Not only is it important to choose a niche you’re interested in, but it should also be profitable.

A piece of advice: only launch a business when there’s a market for your online course idea — if there’s no competition, there’s no money to be made.

Once you've found your niche, you should create a course outline where you organize the different sections and highlight all the topics you want to cover.

With your outline done, you can begin writing, gathering, and preparing the course content.

Another thing to consider is your method of distribution.

For example,

Knowing the answers to these questions will speed up the course creation process.

Purchasing your own domain name and web hosting is non-negotiable if you want your website to remain protected 24/7.

Cloudflare and Google Domains are great domain name registrars, while A2 Hosting and Hostinger will host your website for a fair price and will let you install WordPress for free.

Keep in mind, that most web hosting services have limited file storage and those with unlimited space tend to be expensive (unlike systeme.io, which offers it for free).

We recommend downloading a suitable WordPress theme for designing your online course website.

For this reason, we’ll use Zakra, one of the most popular multipurpose WordPress themes.

Furthermore, you’ll need a learning management system (LMS) plugin — This will help you create and manage your lectures and students.

Choosing the LMS technology you’re going to be using is another key aspect of creating your online course.

There are a lot of premium LMS solutions out there, however, since we’re focusing on low budget methods in this post, we’ll be using the WordPress LMS plugin, LearnPress, as it’s free.

LearnPress is a free WordPress LMS plugin — It lets you create online courses, accept payments, and communicate with your enrolled students.

You can also choose from a number of free and paid add-ons to enhance the functionality of the LMS.

After you’re done setting up the equipment, recording the videos, and editing the content, you can move on to creating an online course with WordPress.

Before we get started, you should know about some common issues WordPress beginners face:

This is why all-in-one platforms, like systeme.io, are great WordPress alternatives.

Our integrated features work seamlessly with each other, and you only pay a monthly fee for a single tool that houses everything you need.

Systeme.io makes the online course creation process easier and cheaper than it would’ve been with WordPress.

If these issues aren’t a deal-breaker for you, we’ll still help you get started in WordPress.

In this case, a LMS is a WordPress plugin created specifically for course creators to build and sell their content.

As mentioned above, we’ll be using the WordPress plugin LearnPress.

LearnPress offers advanced features such as:

To install this plugin, just:

Next, we’ll build the content outline.

The outline is the learning path your students will follow throughout the course, which needs realistic and achievable goals to make the experience more pleasant for them.

To build the outline on LearnPress, follow these steps:

The next step is to configure the course settings according to your needs and teaching goals.

Follow these steps to configure it:

The next step is to create lessons and quizzes to upload to your course content.

Your course outline is composed of lessons (where you place the course content) and quizzes (tests to verify students' progress and understanding of the subject).

We already created the lessons, but now it’s time to add some content.

To do it, follow these steps:

If you want to set a duration or a preview video for the lessons, head to “Lesson Settings” at the bottom of the page and make the changes you want.

To create quizzes, do the following:

Now, you need to integrate the lessons and quizzes into your course or they’ll just remain in the LearnPress plugin, but unassigned to any course.

To add them, just:

Repeat the process as many times as needed to add as many lessons and quizzes as you want.

All that’s left is to preview and publish the course:

To help you create successful online courses that potential students will want to buy, we’ll give you 2 useful tips that’ll make them stand out.

This way, you can make the course more valuable for your students and motivate them to put their new knowledge into practice.

You can make these gaming activities as simple or complex as you like.

Their purpose is still the same, to attract and maintain learners’ attention and motivate them to complete the course.

Now you know some ways to optimize your course content to make it more appealing and discoverable to future students, but how do you get students to actually find out about your online courses?

Once you’ve created and optimized your online course, the next step is to begin marketing it.

This is especially important if your goal is to generate an income with these courses.

Fortunately, there are a few great ways to promote your online courses—so we stepped up and compiled a list of 5 popular methods for you to consider.

Another way to successfully market your online course is by creating a Facebook community that your students can join to connect and network.

If you already have an email list, don’t forget to incorporate your offer into the messages — On the other hand, if you’re still new to the online course game and are looking to grow your email list, check out our post on how to do it.

Email marketing is a powerful tool in your marketing toolbox:

Unlike WordPress, you don’t need any third-party tools or add-ons to get access to all of our features, because they come together in a single package without being heavy on your budget.

Let us show you.

We offer a forever Free plan (not a Free trial), so you can take your time with our features to see if we’re the right platform for your business.

For any questions, our 24/7 email support will answer you in approximately 2 hours.

Sign up, test our tools, and migrate to us once you’re ready to upgrade.

We’ll be waiting for you!

WordPress is great for creating all kinds of websites, even for selling online courses, but it heavily depends on what free and paid plugins and add-ons are available.

With WordPress, it’s impossible to create an online course for absolutely no cost at all.

Everything has a price, unless...

You use systeme.io, a powerful all-in-one alternative to WordPress where you can manage every element of your website, online courses, and students from one place and for a single price.

You don’t even have to pay to get started with us. Our free plan offers everything you need.

Sign up, and skyrocket your business with us!