LearnDash Tutorial - Build & Sell Courses with WordPress

We have been big fans of the LearnDash LMS system for a long time now. This is currently our favourite way of building online courses for WordPress.

So far, we have looked at building LearnDash courses using three methods

1) LearnDash with Astra Theme & Elementor – Video tutorial is here.

2) LearnDash with Kadence Theme & Gutenberg – Video tutorial is here.

3) LearnDash with Generate Press and Elementor – Video tutorial is here.

Astra LearnDash Academy Tutorial

While all of these methods have given us good results, our favourite method for beginners is Astra & Elementor. This gives a great user experience for students right out of the box, plus the ease of page editing with Elementor has a more friendly learning curve when compared with Gutenberg. The ‘LearnDash Academy’ template comes with WooCommerce already set up with Cartflows for a great checkout experience which is sure to convert sales effectively.

LearnDash WooCommerce Integration

By far our preferred method for adding a payment gateway to sell courses using LearnDash is by using WooCommerce. The LearnDash WooCommerce Integration is a free add-on that is included with LearnDash. Note that LearnDash does include a default PayPal gateway, and there is also a LearnDash stripe gateway. However, we have found the WooCommerce integration method has given us the best results in terms of user experience.

The main things we like about using WooCommerce are:

Keeps all payment processing done on your site, rather than diverting the user to Paypal.
Provides a familiar checkout process that most users are familiar with (Most online shoppers have probably used a WooCommerce checkout at some point in their lives, whether they know it or not!)
Integrates very well with other WordPress plugins. Most other e-commerce plugins have been designed to integrate with WooCommerce.

For example, in our Astra LearnDash academy tutorial, we combine WooCommerce with the free CartFlows plugin. This gives us some really cool options, like 1-page checkout directly on the course page and a customized thank you page.

Kadence LearnDash Course Starter Template

Using a Kandece Starter Template with Learndash is another great way of building an online course. The starter template is built using the native WordPress Editor (Gutenberg) so you can expect great page speed and low latency. However, we found the design experience is not as beginner friendly as using an Elementor based solution. Gutenberg is still improving rapidly though, so in a few months the question of which is easier to use might not be so clear.
We’d recommend this option for more experienced web designers and developers where speed is of the highest importance.

LearnDash with GeneratePress and Elementor

This was the first tutorial we made on LearnPress. In this case we didn’t even use a specific LMS starter template. Simply using an Elementor template and combining it with LearnDash still gave a very nice looking result: