eLearning has become the “new normal” since the pandemic, as the number of course creators has increased and the demand for online learning has expanded.
Compared to one-on-one tutoring, which has an 8-10% retention rate, eLearning has an exceptional retention rate of 25-60%. A significant reason behind this is the control and flexibility it offers people over where, when, how, and what they want to learn.
If you’re someone who owns an eLearning website, one thing that can make you significantly stand out, get more customers, and drive referrals is – offering the best learning experience to your audience.
However, it’s not that easy. From building effective courses, and updating modules and lessons to ensuring an excellent and user-friendly interface with round-the-clock customer support – handling everything manually is challenging.
Enter WooCommerce Learning Management System (LMS) plugins.
These plugins help you design courses professionally and improve the learning experience through advanced features, functionalities, and customizations that best suit your course and your audience’s needs.
We’ve done the legwork for you and compiled a list of the top four WooCommerce LMS plugins that will help you build and manage your online courses seamlessly, offering a truly immersive learning experience to your audience. But first, let’s quickly understand what WooCommerce LMS plugins are and how they work.
Why use a WooCommerce LMS plugin?
WooCommerce LMS plugins are website add-ons that help you add learning-focused features like quizzes, assessments, and certificates into your WooCommerce website and easily host, create, and manage online courses and training programs.
Through these plugins, you can design and deliver engaging online courses with a host of content formats and exciting features like videos, text-based study material, Q&A sessions, interesting quizzes, and customer support.
They will also help you track, document, and report back to your students as they move forward with the course. This will help you keep a record of how many people finish your courses, what problems they’re facing, and how you can deliver a better learning experience to them. From a single, convenient location (administration dashboard), you can enroll students, update information, track progress, configure payment options, and manage other admin tasks – making course creation and management easier than you can ever imagine.
Besides ease of management, WooCommerce plugins also make eLearning convenient for your audience. All they need to do to access your course is log in to their accounts and consume your content anytime, anywhere – making learning for them, and making money and teaching for you as easy as a breeze.
Now that you know what LMS plugins are and how they can help you deliver a great content and learning experience to your audience – let’s look at the top four WooCommerce LMS plugins that can help you replicate these results for your website.
Top WooCommerce LMS plugins
LearnDash
LearnDash is one of the most popular WooCommerce LMS plugins used by many major universities, entrepreneurs, and Fortune 500 companies.
It offers an exhaustive suite of tools and features for selling courses, content dripping, and rewarding learners – allowing you to turn your WooCommerce website into a fully-functioning online learning platform. With its drip-feed content feature, you can deliver courses to your learners in the allocated schedules – to provide periodic content access and give them enough time to soak in the previous concept before moving on to the next.
Using this plugin, you can track courses, offer certification, and create interactive quizzes and assignments to provide a holistic learning opportunity to your audience. You can also create specific discussion forums – allowing learners to interact with each other, build a sense of accountability, resolve their doubts, seek support and share their wins.
Thus, this plugin not only helps you deliver the course but also helps build a value-driven community of learners.
Further, this plugin’s multimedia support also lets you use varying content types like images, videos, and audio, to create impactful lessons.
Another exciting aspect about this LMS plugin is its gamification element, where – after completion of a certain number of courses – your learners can earn points and unlock free content and courses once they collect enough points. Besides this, LearnDash also offers seamless integration with WooCommerce for an easy payment gateway.
Top feature: Using LearnDash’s easy drag-and-drop feature, you can put together your online course in a logical hierarchy – including all the quizzes and course materials. This will allow your students to unlock course levels as they proceed.
Pricing: The basic package starts from $199/year with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Sensei PRO (WooCommerce Paid Courses)
WooCommerce Paid Courses, built and designed by Automattic, is an excellent plugin if you’re a beginner with a budget and need to build a professional eLearning course.
Building a course is almost exactly similar to creating a WordPress post or page – suitable for beginners and super easy to navigate with an intuitive interface. You can easily create lessons and courses without coding.
An interesting aspect of this plugin is that it allows you to restrict the content of your course to paying members only. Its powerful quiz functionality permits manual or automatic quiz grading settings. Plus, it also comes with a reporting system that helps you keep track of the grading, courses, and registered users – making it a one-stop solution to all your course needs.
You can also charge your customers a recurring payment for continued course access.
Top feature: WooCommerce Paid Courses comes with a seamless WooCommerce integration – making it effortless for you to add courses and receive payments on your WordPress website. Plus, its high compatibility with all WordPress themes.
Pricing: The single site subscription of Sensei PRO / WooCommerce paid courses is $149 with 1-year support, 1-year extension updates, and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
LearnPress
LearnPress LMS is easy to install and configure plugin that comes with an intuitive and beginner-friendly user interface. You can seamlessly manage coursework details and improve course content from the backend.
Like LearnDash, you can effortlessly create courses, quizzes, and lessons with LearnPress’s drag-and-drop builder. It also supports 23 languages and allows you to build a highly-functional online course website without requiring prior coding knowledge.
Although this plugin is free, you can purchase premium add-ons to use additional features like content drip-feed, rewarding learners with certificates, and co-instructor support. However, you can first begin with their free add-ons, which offer pre-requisite courses, wishlists, and course reviews to enhance your course’s functionality.
The plugin also includes a landing page template to link ads, talk about your curriculums or course descriptions. You can also gamify your courses by adding a point or a badge system to make things interesting for your students.
Plus, with the plugin’s WooCommerce integration, handling payments and coupons is truly hassle-free.
Top feature: This plugin allows for multiple instructors, where two to three instructors can handle one course. So, you can also create an appealing landing page using the template to attract and market your course to people who might be interested in becoming instructors.
Pricing: Offers a free plan. There are single premium add-ons, for example the WooCommerce integration is $49.99. There is also the PRO Bundle where you get 20 premium Add-Ons for $249.99.
LifterLMS
LifterLMS is another flexible and powerful WordPress LMS plugin that offers seamless WooCommerce integration, a simple setup, and better control and customization options.
What’s fascinating about this plugin is that you can create your courses based on different pricing models that best suit your business strategies. For example, you can create a beginner, intermediary, and advanced course around the same topic – charging for them differently and serving a tailor-made learning experience for audiences of varying skill and knowledge levels.
Its built-in drag-and-drop course builder eliminates a lot of manual work, saves time, and makes course management overtly easy and efficient. Plus, to make your courses more interesting, you can design multi-tier courses and add assessments and homework assignments for your learners to complete – increasing participation and enhancing the overall learning experience.
Again, adding lessons, modules, and multi-media course elements like image, audio, video, and text is easy. Other cool features include offering downloadable study materials for offline learning and setting up timers on the quizzes while testing your course takers’ knowledge.
Like LearnPress, even this plugin lets you assign multiple instructors to each course to allow learners to learn from and interact with many professionals via forums, timelines, and lesson comments. This way, you can promote active and effective engagement with social learning, personalized emails, and even private coaching.
Moreover, to protect your course content, you can provide access to only registered users through password management.
Lastly, the plugin includes content-drip tools, extensive reporting, certificates, badges, gamification elements, marketing tools, and educational giveaways. You can also use features like email marketing, affiliate marketing, eCommerce elements, and other functionalities through extra plugins to inform interested learners about your course, build a strong community around your platform, and drive more sales.
Top feature: Ability to monetize your online course platform in multiple ways. For example, you can sell a comprehensive site-wide membership – providing access to all the courses, permit individual course purchases by implementing a members-only pricing structure or create course bundles to boost revenue.
Pricing: The LifterLMS WooCommerce add-on is priced at $120, but you can also go with various online course bundles, which start at $360 per year. It also offers a 30-day demo for $1.
Conclusion
Technavio anticipates the total LMS market worth to reach over $12 billion by 2024 due to the increasing demand for Learning Management Systems (LMS). WooCommerce LMS plugins offer advanced tools and functionalities to turn your WooCommerce website into a high-functioning, interactive online course platform.
Whether you wish to create a professional look and feel for your course, make your course navigation smooth, or include gamification elements for an excellent learning experience – WooCommerce LMS plugins make it simple and easy.
These four plugins are some of the best LMS plugins for your WooCommerce website. However, make your pick based on your course and audience requirement, business needs, and budget. Good luck
