3 ways to sell online courses from your WordPress site

Are you looking for the best and most affordable ways to sell online courses from your website?

Selling online courses is a great way to help your audience with a common problem they’re facing and, at the same time, add another income stream to your business.

But before you get started it’s a good idea to research the best options for adding online courses to your website.

When I created my first online course, I looked into all the different course platforms and their pros and cons, and through trial and error I found a solution that I’m very happy with.

So let’s have a look at the 3 options I tried for creating & selling online courses from your own website.

Option 1: Online Course Platform

Online course platforms are the most common way to sell online courses because they are super easy to use and offer tons of functionality.

But all this ease-of-use comes with a price tag and some platforms have high monthly fees and even charge transaction fees when you make a sale.

Let’s have a look at the prices for some of the most popular course platforms:

Thinkific – $49 p/mo for unlimited courses & students & affiliates

Podia – $75 p/mo for unlimited courses & students & affiliates)

Teachable – $119 p/mo for unlimited courses & students & affiliates

When you’re a new course creator it can be scary signing up for a platform that locks you into high monthly payments. After all, you don’t know how well your course will sell, so this was the reason for me to have a look at what other options were available.

My verdict: Online course platforms are user-friendly and ideal for beginners who are willing to accept high monthly fees for an extended period. However, it’s worth exploring alternative platforms to these popular tools such as Thinkific, which offer similar features at more moderate prices.

Option 2: LMS WordPress Plugin

Another way to sell online courses is by setting up your courses on your own website.

The advantage of this is that your courses are hosted on your own site and therefore you have full control over everything.

The disadvantage is that it takes a lot more effort to set this up.

If you want to sell online courses from your own website you can achieve this by installing a LMS (Learning Management System) plugin on your WordPress site.

Using a WordPress plugin is a more affordable way to sell online courses compared to hosted course platforms.

Some popular WordPress Course Plugins are:

• LearnDash (from $199 per year)
• Thrive Apprentice ($299 per year)
• MemberPress (from $179.50 per year)

I decided to try this method and installed the MemberPress plugin. After spending a bit of time finding my way around the MemberPress dashboard I started to add my course material.

It was fairly easy to create course modules and lessons and add my content but when I had to create the checkout pages I was struggling to make it look the way I wanted.

My verdict: MemberPress is fairly easy to use if you have solid WordPress and some CSS skills but it will be challenging for beginners.

Option 3: ThriveCart

While I was building my online course with MemberPress, another blogger told me that ThriveCart had added a course platform to its (already fantastic) functionality.

I was very excited to hear this because I had already been thinking of investing in ThriveCart for my sales and checkout pages because I didn’t like how they looked in MemberPress.

So after learning this information I decided to leave MemberPress and start building my course with ThriveCart. This was definitely one of the best business decisions I’ve made.

I love using ThriveCart because it’s very intuitive to use and it’s easy to make your course dashboard and checkout pages look beautiful and on brand.

ThriveCart has tons of functionality, here are some of the things you can do with ThriveCart:

• Create online courses & memberships
• Sell digital & physical products
• Create sales pages & checkout pages
• Offer upsells, downsells & bump offers
• Create your own affiliate platform
• So much more

It also integrates seamlessly with many email marketing platforms, payment gateways and other third party apps,

and the best part…

ThriveCart is available for a one-time payment and doesn’t charge any transaction fees!

ThriveCart has an incredible lifetime deal that is available for a limited time, so if you want to create online courses without high ongoing monthly fees this could be the tool for you!

To find out all the details about ThriveCart, get my BONUS sales page templates and to see how I create an online course in ThriveCart Learn, make sure to read:

ThriveCart Learn – The Best Online Course Platform With No Ongoing Monthly Payments