Do you have knowledge you want to share with the world and get paid for it? Then it’s time to create and sell online courses with WordPress. It’s one of the easiest ways to break into e-learning: the upfront cost is low, and you don’t need any technical knowledge to succeed.
Online courses have been booming for years. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably taken a course on Udemy or Coursera. People use online courses to learn coding, photography, cooking, marketing, and almost anything else you can think of.
WordPress is the best place to build your own course website. It powers a huge share of the web; it’s flexible, and it’s friendly to complete beginners. Best of all, you own your platform, your students, and your revenue.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to create and sell online courses in WordPress with one plugin: ProfilePress. ProfilePress now includes a full course builder, so you can create courses, lessons, and quizzes, sell them with one-time or subscription plans, and award certificates without stitching together a separate LMS plugin and a membership plugin.
Why Sell Online Courses With WordPress?
There are plenty of platforms for creating and selling online courses. We recommend WordPress because it gives you everything you need in one place: content creation, payment processing, user management, and content marketing.
Here are the key reasons to sell online courses with WordPress.
WordPress is Flexible and Highly Customizable
Whether you want to sell simple text lessons or fully featured video courses, WordPress can handle it. You get access to thousands of themes, plugins, and tools to give your students a polished learning experience.
WordPress also supports custom code, so if you know HTML and PHP, you can add almost any feature to your course site, or hire a WordPress developer to do it. ProfilePress Courses even ships with developer hooks for developers who want to extend how courses work.
You Get Several Automation Options
Running an online course involves many moving parts: registration, payment, enrollment, progress tracking, reminders, and support. For easy management and maximum profit, you want most of that to run on its own.
With ProfilePress, buying a plan automatically enrolls the student in the right courses. Students get emails when they enroll, when a new lesson unlocks, and when they finish a course. When a subscription is canceled or refunded, access ends on its own. You don’t have to handle any of it manually.
You Have 100% Control Over Your Content
Unlike hosted course platforms, WordPress gives you full control over your content and your students’ data. You can build courses, lessons, and sales pages from scratch, and use video, text, images, downloadable files, and quizzes.
WordPress is also SEO-friendly. You can optimize your course pages and catalog for search engines, helping your courses rank on Google and bring in students for free.
It’s Cost-Effective and Scalable
WordPress is free to download and use, and so is the ProfilePress course builder. You only pay for what you need, which makes it ideal for solopreneurs and small businesses on a tight budget.
WordPress also scales with you. Start with a small hosting plan, then add more resources as your student numbers and traffic grow.
It Supports Third-Party Integrations and Payment Options
Let students pay the way they prefer. ProfilePress supports Stripe, PayPal, and Mollie out of the box, and you can add more gateways such as Razorpay and Paystack with addons. It also connects to email marketing tools like Mailchimp and MailerLite.
Now, let’s look at the steps to create and sell online courses with WordPress.
How to Create and Sell Online Courses With WordPress
Ready to build your course website? Here’s what you’ll need:
- A WordPress site
- The ProfilePress plugin. Its course builder, quizzes, certificates, and selling through membership plans are all included.
That’s it. Let’s go through the steps.
Step 1: Get a Domain Name, Hosting, and Set Up Your WordPress Site
To get started, choose a domain name that fits your brand and is easy for learners to remember. “.com” should be your go-to domain extension, except in special cases.
You can register your domain with any popular registrar like Domain.com, Namecheap, or GoDaddy. Many WordPress hosts also include a free domain for the first year when you buy a hosting plan.
Next, choose a WordPress host. If you’re new to WordPress, consider managed WordPress hosting. It’s better than regular shared hosting because you usually get automatic backups, updates, and priority support. You can check out WordPress hosting plans from Kinsta, SiteGround, and Hostinger.
Once you’ve signed up, most hosts let you install WordPress from your hosting dashboard in one click.
After installing WordPress, log in to your dashboard and install a theme such as Astra. Congratulations, you now have a WordPress site!
Step 2: Install and Activate ProfilePress
Next, install ProfilePress. It’s the only plugin you need to create your courses, sell them, register students, and protect your content.
In your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins > Add New, search for ProfilePress, then click Install Now and Activate. If you’ve bought ProfilePress Pro, go to Plugins > Add New > Upload Plugin instead and upload the ZIP file from your purchase email.
The course builder is part of ProfilePress, so there’s nothing extra to install or switch on. Go to ProfilePress » Courses, and you’ll find tabs for your courses, reports, categories, and course settings.
For a quick tour of how courses work, see Getting Started with ProfilePress Courses for WordPress.
Step 3: Create and Structure Your First Course
To sell online courses with WordPress, you first need a course. Go to ProfilePress » Courses and click Add New Course. A draft course opens in the course builder.
Click “Untitled course” at the top and type your course title. The builder has four tabs: Curriculum, Details, Pricing & Access, and Students.
On the Curriculum tab, organize your course into sections, such as “Week 1” or “The basics”, then add lessons to each section. Students see sections as chapters in the course outline, along with their progress in each one. The curriculum saves automatically as you work.
Have your course outline ready? Click Bulk add lessons and paste it in, one lesson per line. Start a line with # to begin a new section, or with ? to add a quiz.
On the Details tab, add your course description, image or promo video, and the other information shown on the course page. See How to Create a Course in WordPress with ProfilePress for every option in the builder.
Already have courses on another ProfilePress site? You can export and import them. See How to Duplicate, Export and Import Courses.
Step 4: Add Lessons and Quizzes
Click a lesson’s title to open the lesson editor. Each lesson can be one of three types:
- Video: paste a YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia, Loom, or Bunny Stream link, or upload a video. You can add notes or a transcript below it.
- Text: written content, images,s and embeds.
- Quiz: questions students answer to check what they’ve learned.
You can also attach downloadable files to a lesson and mark lessons as free previews to give visitors a taste of your course. See Course Lessons in ProfilePress: Video, Text and Quizzes.
Quizzes support single-choice, multiple-choice, true/false, and fill-in-the-blank questions. They’re graded straight away, and a passing score completes the lesson. See How to Add Quizzes to a WordPress Course.
Students take lessons in focus mode, a distraction-free page with the course outline in a sidebar and their progress at the top. ProfilePress remembers where each student left off, so videos resume, and the Continue course button takes them straight to the next lesson.
Step 5: Set Up Your Payment Options
To accept payments, set up a payment gateway. Go to ProfilePress > Settings > Payments > Payment Methods. You can choose from Stripe, PayPal, and Mollie, and activate addons to use more payment gateways.
Turn on test mode to try checkout with a sandbox account while you set things up. Turn it off once everything works.
Also check your pages under ProfilePress > Settings > Pages. Make sure the Checkout, Registration, My Account, and payment pages are assigned.
Step 6: Choose Who Can Take Your Course and Set a Price
Open your course and go to the Pricing & Access tab. Under Who can take this course?, choose one of three access types:
- Paid: students buy one of the membership plans you select.
- Free for members: anyone with an account on your site. Great for lead magnets.
- Free & open: anyone, even without an account.
To sell the course, choose Paid, then tick an existing plan under Plans that unlocks this course. Don’t have a plan yet? Open Create a plan for this course, enter a plan name and price, and choose a one-time payment or a subscription. Click Create plan, and it’s created and attached to your course straight away.
You can attach several plans to one course, for example, a one-time price and a monthly subscription. Free trials, signup fees, and coupons are available under ProfilePress » Membership Plans.
When you’re ready, click Publish. Visitors now see an Enroll now button on your course page that takes them to checkout. Once the order is complete, they’re enrolled and can start learning right away. If they cancel, they keep access until the end of the period they paid for. If you refund the order, their access ends.
Learn more in How to Sell Courses in WordPress with ProfilePress. You can also enroll students manually from the course’s Students tab, and track their progress there. See How to Manage Course Students and Progress.
Step 7: Sell Course Bundles and All-Access Memberships
Want to sell several courses together for one price? In ProfilePress, a bundle is simply a membership plan that unlocks two or more courses. Assign the same plan to each course, and when students buy it, they’re enrolled in all of them at once.
Attach one plan to every course to create an all-access membership. You can also add a bundle page that shows the bundle price, how much students save, and the courses it includes.
See How to Sell Course Bundles in WordPress with ProfilePress.
Step 8: Control When Students Can Access Lessons
In the Access rules card on the Pricing & Access tab, you can:
- Require students to complete another course first (prerequisites).
- Limit how many days students keep access.
- Set a start date to run your course as a cohort.
- Drip lessons, so they unlock a set number of days after a student enrolls.
- Require students to complete lessons in order.
See Course Access Rules: Prerequisites, Drip and Start Dates. You can also use ProfilePress content protection to give course students access to bonus pages, posts,s or downloads. See How to Use Content Protection with Your WordPress Courses.
Step 9: Reward and Engage Your Students
Keeping students motivated is key to selling more courses. ProfilePress helps in a few ways:
- Certificates of completion. Students get a printable, shareable certificate when they finish a course. It also serves as a verification page, so employers can confirm it’s genuine. See How to Award Course Certificates of Completion.
- Course emails. Students are emailed when they enroll, when a dripped lesson unlocks, and when they complete a course. You can also remind students who haven’t returned in a while. See Course Emails: Enrollment, Drip and Reminder Notifications.
- Reviews and lesson Q&A. Let students rate your course and ask questions on each lesson. See Course Reviews and Lesson Q&A.
Step 10: Showcase Your Courses
ProfilePress creates a course catalog for you at yoursite.com/courses/, with search, category filters, and a card for each course. Students also get a My Courses tab in their account that lists the courses they’re enrolled in and their progress.
Want the catalog, an enroll button, or a progress bar on your homepage or a sales page? Use the ProfilePress shortcodes, Gutenberg blocks, or Elementor widgets. See Course Catalog, My Courses, Shortcodes and Blocks Guide, and ProfilePress Course Settings: A Complete Reference to change the URLs, colors, and focus mode.
Step 11: Track Student Progress
Go to ProfilePress » Courses and click the Reports tab to see how many students you have, who’s active, who finishes,s and how they score on quizzes. Use it to spot where students give up, check on a student, or export a course’s students to a spreadsheet.
See Course Reports: Track Student Progress and Quiz Results.
Grow Further: Sell to Teams and Run Your Courses Like a School
Once your first course is selling, ProfilePress Pro addons help you reach bigger customers and run a bigger academy.
Sell Courses to Companies and Teams
With the Team Memberships addon, you can sell seat-based plans to companies, schools, and groups. One person buys the plan, invites colleagues, and every team member gets access to the courses the plan unlocks. You can charge a fixed price for a set number of seats, or let buyers choose how many seats they need and pay per seat.
Team owners invite, manage, and remove members themselves from their account, so you don’t have to. See How to Sell Team Memberships in WordPress and How to Manage a Team Membership: Invites, Seats and Members.
Add Instructors, Assignments and More
The Advanced Courses addon adds the tools you need to run your courses like a school:
- Instructors, so other people can create and teach courses, with a front-end instructor dashboard.
- Assignments where students submit text or files for you to grade.
- Written-answer quiz questions that you grade by hand.
- Completion actions, such as enrolling students in the next course or adding them to an email list when they finish.
- Announcements you post on a course page and email to your students.
Already Using LearnDash?
If you already sell courses with LearnDash, you don’t have to switch. ProfilePress integrates with LearnDash, so buying a membership plan enrolls students in your LearnDash courses and groups, and canceling removes their access. See how to set up the ProfilePress LearnDash addon, and our guide to custom LearnDash login and registration forms.
ProfilePress Courses won’t clash with LearnDash, Tutor LMS, or other course plugins. When one is active, ProfilePress uses different course addresses so your existing course pages keep working.
Selling Online Courses With WordPress the Easy Way
Creating and selling online courses is a great way to share your expertise and build a new income stream. In this guide, you’ve seen how to create and sell online courses in WordPress with ProfilePress: build your course, add lessons and quizzes, sell it with one-time or subscription plans, and keep students engaged with certificates, emails, and reports.
Because the course builder, payments, registration, memberships, and content protection all live in one plugin, you don’t need to juggle separate LMS and membership plugins. So why wait? Get ProfilePress and start building your online course today.