The 4 Fatal Flaws in Your Online Course Project and How to Avoid Them

Discover how to avoid the all too common failure to launch or the website that crumbles when the first signs of success hit.

*Jonathan wanted to clarify that in his service he says, “We will migrate existing sites to our TurnKey solution and then set-up a main domain with sub-domain website solution, we also will transfer the data from existing LifterLMS into a new LifterLMS set-up sub-domain free of charge.”

BONUS: For a Limited Time get 40% of the WP-Tonic LMS Turnkey Solution with coupon code: LMSTurnKeyOffer2018

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Online Course Fatal Flaws Course Creators Keep Making

Chris Badgett and Jonathan Denwood of WP Tonic walk through the four mistakes they see sink online course and membership site projects again and again: building the course before building an audience, skipping a minimum viable course, ignoring site speed, and treating security as optional. Along the way they cover niche selection, podcasting and YouTube for audience building, hosting, CDNs, image compression, backups, and password security.

What You’ll Learn

• Why building an audience before building a course beats building the course first, and how long that audience-building work realistically takes
• How to find a niche narrow enough to stand out and wide enough to support a business
• What a minimum viable course is and why shipping one early beats building every feature up front
• Why cheap shared hosting, oversized images, and no CDN quietly kill course site speed
• Why most attacks on course sites are automated bots, not people, and what actually stops them

Key Takeaways

• Pick a niche and start building an audience through podcasting, YouTube, or Instagram before you build your first course
• Ship a small minimum viable course targeted at one specific problem, then use real student feedback to shape what you build next
• Budget for hosting built for WordPress membership and LMS sites, not the cheapest shared plan you can find
• Compress every image before it goes on your course site, especially photos uploaded straight from a phone
• Use a password manager, enforce strong student passwords, and keep backups stored away from your hosting account

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Meet Jonathan Denwood of WP Tonic

Chris Badgett: Welcome back to another LifterLMS training. We’ve got a special guest today, Jonathan Denwood from WP Tonic, over at wptonic.com. You’ve probably seen Jonathan before if you’re involved in the LifterLMS Facebook group. I frequently appear on his WordPress Round Table panel for the WP Tonic podcast, which happens on Fridays, and we share that in the LifterLMS Facebook group, where we talk about issues related to WordPress, course creation, LMS strategy, entrepreneurship, and the web in general. It’s a place for lively discussion, and I’m grateful to Jonathan for hosting and organizing that every week. He also has a great podcast, with interview shows, as part of WP Tonic, so you can find out more about that at wptonic.com.

Jonathan Denwood: Thanks, Chris. It’s a pleasure, and thank you for being such a regular panelist on our Friday round table. I thought we had a great discussion last Friday. We got into lots of philosophical issues, which was good.

Chris Badgett: This presentation comes out of a shared passion Jonathan and I have for serving the online course creation and LMS community, especially in and around WordPress. As people who run agencies and have helped clients with websites for a long time, after you do that for a while, especially in one particular niche, in this case online courses, membership sites, and LMS setups, you start seeing trends in what makes projects fail and what makes them succeed. You start trend spotting, and you can notice trouble before it happens, as it’s happening, or after it’s already happened. You see failure patterns forming right in front of you, working with clients and watching people try to launch courses.

The Four Fatal Flaws Course Creators Make

Jonathan Denwood: WP Tonic specializes in helping online entrepreneurs in the education and course space, and we see the same four main areas affect whether a course gets built, and whether it succeeds after it’s built: building a pre-launch audience, a minimum viable course, speed, and security. Security is boring until your course gets hacked.

Jonathan Denwood: We get that great idea, that itch, we’ve got expertise in one particular area, and let’s be honest, the online course and education space has gotten very hot over the past couple of years. A lot of people, for understandable reasons, concentrate on building the course before building an audience. We’ve all done that ourselves, I’m sure Chris has too, and you learn the hard way that spending a lot of money and time building a course and then trying to find an audience for it isn’t a great way to go about it. A much better way is to have an audience first, then market your course to it.

How to Find Your Niche Before You Build an Audience

Jonathan Denwood: Before you build an audience, finding a niche is all-important in a very crowded internet with a lot of people doing online educational courses. If you really want to be successful, you have to find that niche, look at the competition, figure out what your experience can offer that audience, and then build an audience in that niche before you build the course on top of it.

Chris Badgett: I think it’s all too common, and I’m myself guilty of it: build the course, then go looking for an audience. It’s so much harder to do it that way. It’s better to pick a niche and grow an audience from there first.

Jonathan Denwood: A bit of pre-planning really helps, because building a quality course is a lot of work. The more you can pre-identify a niche and do some of the audience-building work I’m about to suggest, the more success you can count on once you connect it to your course.

Why Podcasting Is a Low-Cost Way to Build an Audience

Jonathan Denwood: I’ve been podcasting for over three years now with WP Tonic, and we’re getting close to episode 310. As a guerrilla marketing tool that doesn’t have to be expensive, I think podcasting is a superb way to build an audience, though it’s gotten more competitive because the barrier to entry is more about time and resources than money. It’s very tied to your niche: find that niche audience, provide value to it, and you’ll build an audience that’s highly marketable once your course is targeted specifically to that audience.

Chris Badgett: I’m a huge fan of creating free content to start building an audience.

How to Get Booked on Other People’s Podcasts

An attendee raised the chicken-and-egg problem in the chat: when you start a podcast with no audience, how do you use podcasting to build one in the first place?

Jonathan Denwood: You go on other people’s podcasts. That’s how you build audience, and that’s why you need a niche large enough to be part of a bigger space but with its own distinct focus. There are businesses that help you get booked on other people’s podcasts, and you can pay for those services, or you can do outreach yourself: put together a nice-looking PDF with a photo of yourself, a write-up of what you want to talk about, your experience, and why people should listen, and send it to established podcasts. Getting good guests is a real time-resource issue for most podcast hosts, so people approaching them the right way is always welcome.

Why a Guest’s Own Following Matters Less Than Their Value

An attendee also asked whether podcasts only want guests who bring their own audience with them.

Chris Badgett: I’d disagree with that framing. I’m less concerned about a guest bringing their own audience, though it’s nice, than about whether the content that person presents is going to be of value to my niche audience. It’s not tit for tat. I’m happy to do episodes with great people who can serve my niche.

Jonathan Denwood: I’d totally agree. You try to get people with large audiences on your podcast, but you don’t invite them just because of the audience size. They have to add value to your target audience, so you mix it up: some guests with large followings, some without one but with real expertise in a specific area that helps your audience.

Chris Badgett: It’s not just a popularity contest. I love introducing someone who might be famous in my niche, or someone the audience has never heard of but who I know will bring great content. I’m happy to do both.

Building an Audience on YouTube Without One

Jonathan Denwood: On to YouTube. One of my panelists who regularly comes on the Friday show, Adam from WP Crafter, started two years ago with no audience and now has over 60,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel. He’s had to put a lot of work into it, and most of his videos are reviews or training videos on popular WordPress products and plugins. I’m not saying getting to 60,000 subscribers is easy or guaranteed, but if you’re in a niche, it doesn’t have to be expensive. The cost is similar to podcasting: it’s more a time and commitment issue. If you have a targeted niche, you can build a following you can later market your course to.

Chris Badgett: Absolutely, and that’s exactly what Adam does. People find him on YouTube, go to his website, and find courses powered by LifterLMS inside a membership there, with different ways to get access. The free YouTube videos are extremely popular, and he’s picked a good niche: non-techy website builders in the WordPress community, or aspiring website builders.

Why Audience Building Takes Nine to Twelve Months

Jonathan Denwood: You have to have a YouTube strategy, and I’m not talking about putting your course lessons on YouTube. I’m talking about building an audience and a name for yourself around a specific topic before you build that first course. I think you’re looking at nine to twelve months with podcasting or YouTube before you build a course, because you need a realistic strategy for how long that audience-building actually takes.

Chris Badgett: There are no shortcuts. Unless you have some epically popular viral video, which isn’t what happens to most people, it’s the long game. When you launch a podcast or a YouTube channel that nobody knows about yet, you’re not going to get a lot of views at first, and that’s okay. If you’ve done a good job selecting and targeting your niche, even a small view count means you’re attracting the right kind of people. It’s similar to email marketing: a four, five, or ten thousand person list that’s totally unfocused has some value, but a one to two thousand person list that’s truly focused on your target audience is worth a lot more in real financial terms.

Why a Small Targeted Email List Beats a Large Unfocused One

Chris Badgett: I’d rather have an email list of 200 people who are exactly my people than 20,000 who are just generally related. Someone in the chat is echoing that YouTube has been a good way to build an audience, but it’s a medium to long-term proposition, not a short game.

Jonathan Denwood: I don’t think paid ads down the road are a solution either. I see paid advertisement, whether AdWords or Facebook, as gasoline on a fire that’s already burning. It can’t start the fire. It can accelerate growth and the takeup of your course, but if you haven’t done the pre-building work and don’t have a recognized brand or voice in your target niche, you’re going to find it tough.

Using Instagram and IGTV to Reach Your Niche

Jonathan Denwood: On to Instagram, which is part of Facebook but has grown quite a lot on its own. You have to go where your audience is, so investigate whether your target niche audience is on Instagram. Instagram has also introduced IGTV, a new app I expect to become a major force in social media over the next six to twelve months. Like podcasting and YouTube, this is more of a time investment than something that has to cost you a lot of money.

Chris Badgett: It does take commitment to make videos or take photos for Instagram, or to record podcast episodes, but it’s not necessarily capital intensive.

Why You Should Build a Minimum Viable Course First

Jonathan Denwood: The next problem is that once people have built an audience, they get fixated on building a course with all the bells and whistles: twenty lessons, full videos, lesson plans, quizzes, everything included. But they haven’t gotten any feedback from their target audience about the course itself, so they’re working in a vacuum. Building an audience doesn’t mean your first course is actually going to land the way you think it will.

Jonathan Denwood: I run Facebook ad campaigns in a specific industry, and even with a couple of years of experience there are too many variables for every campaign to work. It’s the same with a course: you can have enormous experience and a real following and still have your first course miss. That’s why you should look at a minimum viable course, an idea borrowed and twisted from the startup world’s minimum viable product: a small course really targeted at a specific problem your audience has, so you can get it out and start getting feedback.

What Your Minimum Viable Course Actually Needs to Include

Chris Badgett: That’s a fatal flaw I see over and over: people try to build a giant course that either never launches, or launches only to find out that a smaller, streamlined version launched earlier, with feedback built in, would have let them focus the curriculum differently. Another way to think about it is to ask what’s the minimum you need to do in your course to get people the result you promised in your marketing. If your course helps people get leads for their business, it doesn’t have to be the sports car version of getting leads. It can start simple with a proven strategy, and you add more strategies and tools over time. It can also launch at a price that’s less of a barrier to entry, since you have to be realistic about resistance to signing up when you’re new to the market.

The Lean Startup Origins of the Minimum Viable Course

Jonathan Denwood: I took the minimum viable course idea from Eric Ries, who founded the minimum viable product methodology in the startup community, in his book The Lean Startup.

Chris Badgett: It’s an excellent book. I’ve read it and I’m actually reading it again right now.

Jonathan Denwood: I’ve tried and failed to get Eric Ries on my own podcast, but I keep trying. A lot of what’s in that book applies directly to building a course.

Chris Badgett: Absolutely, a minimum viable course is just a minimum viable product where the product happens to be a course.

Why Feedback on Your First Course Matters More Than Polish

Jonathan Denwood: The beauty of a minimum viable course is that you get feedback from your target audience on that first course, and that feedback loop is something that doesn’t get talked about enough in other courses about courses.

Chris Badgett: It’s absolutely critical. We ran another training recently on co-creation: making your course in combination with the feedback coming in. When you keep that feedback loop open, the course naturally fits better and becomes more effective. It applies to LifterLMS too. We can’t listen to every feature request we get, but having an ongoing discussion with our target audience is crucial to LifterLMS’s success. Just like we said at the start of this training, Jonathan and I have both been in this industry long enough to see the same trends emerge from that kind of feedback, and this training covers four of the biggest ones.

Turning Your Minimum Viable Course Into a Lead Magnet

Jonathan Denwood: The other beauty of a minimum viable course is that, further down the road, you can offer it as a free course, a strong lead magnet on your main sales funnel. It becomes a way to build your email list, then market to those people through automated email drip campaigns that move them toward your higher-priced courses.

Chris Badgett: I’ll add a bonus tip: you can also leverage other people’s audiences this way. Course, program, and product creators are often looking to add bonuses to make their offer more valuable and appealing, so you can arrange to have your course used as a bonus on whatever someone else is selling. That gets you exposure to someone else’s audience, and this thing can really have legs.

Why Building the Audience Has to Come Before the Course

Jonathan Denwood: To recap: build your audience, don’t build the course first. It’s a process. Building an audience will inform you about your audience’s pains and wants, which gives you a real roadmap for what your minimum viable course should be, rather than guessing. You might get lucky guessing, or you might be totally off and have wasted time on a course that you thought people wanted but your target audience doesn’t actually want.

Why a Slow Course Site Costs You Students

Jonathan Denwood: The other thing people forget when they’re building a course is that a course which takes forever to load, or is slow and clunky to use, isn’t a great experience, especially when people are paying money to join. This applies whether you have ten signups or hundreds, because with LifterLMS or any WordPress LMS setup, you’ve actually built a web application, and its resource needs are different from a small low-traffic website.

Jonathan Denwood: Hosting is the first thing to look at. A shared hosting account at three dollars a month will give you, and I’m basing this on running a company that supports these sites, a really bad experience for both the owner and everyone signing up for the course. Shared hosting has become a fuzzier term, because some shared plans are specifically built for WordPress and handle the unique demands of a membership and learning management site much better than others.

Hosting Providers Worth Considering for a Course Site

Jonathan Denwood: I wouldn’t look at three or ten dollar hosting. I’d be looking at twenty to thirty dollars a month, and some providers offer a special first-year deal. On the cheaper side, I’d look at SiteGround’s top WordPress hosting product, which for the first year runs around ten dollars a month at their introductory price. It’s very good value. I’d also look at Kinsta, though their basic plan only allows one domain, and the setup we recommend is a marketing site plus the course application on a separate subdomain, since that reduces plugin conflicts dramatically by keeping far fewer plugins on the subdomain than the marketing site needs.

Jonathan Denwood: Then there’s WP Engine, a direct competitor to Kinsta and a bit more expensive. Those three, hand on heart, I could recommend to somebody who wants to build a membership site, and all three have very good support in my experience. There are other providers whose support and hosting quality I’ve seen go up and down, and you do need a host that offers good technical support and actually knows what they’re talking about.

Why Course Creators Regret Waiting to Upgrade Hosting

Chris Badgett: Hosting is a critical piece of the stack, and one trend I see is people wishing they had gotten good hosting sooner. When you’re validating and building your MVC you want to keep costs low, but it’s not always easy to switch web hosts later, and quality and speed matter a lot, especially with an international audience. Course creators often work from home with a great internet connection on their laptop, while people taking the course may be on a mobile network where the site doesn’t perform nearly as well as it does for the creator.

Chris Badgett: I’ll echo what you said. I’ve heard people in the LifterLMS community recently talking about being satisfied with Kinsta, we have a lot of WP Engine fans, and I hear SiteGround praised a lot too. Hosting is a bit like politics, people get heated about it, but those are three quality recommendations I can back up.

Jonathan Denwood: The only other one I’d throw in the mix, based on some experience, is InMotion. Reasonable, but I’d put it below the three we’ve mentioned. There are some hosts I won’t name that I cringe at when clients come to us hosted with them. It’s a terrible experience for their users and a frustrating one for them, and you should be spending your energy on your course, not fighting bad hosting.

How to Move an Existing LifterLMS Course to a Subdomain

An attendee, using her raised hand, asked whether she could add a subdomain and clone an already-built LifterLMS course over to it to fix significant speed problems on her main site.

Jonathan Denwood: The beauty of LifterLMS is its JSON export functionality. You can export a JSON file from your existing course, install a clean copy of LifterLMS on the new subdomain, and import that file. You’re up and running in a couple of clicks.

Choosing a Lightweight Theme and a CDN for Speed

Jonathan Denwood: Another thing that helps with speed, beyond compressing JavaScript and CSS, is the theme you use. We’re a big fan of Astra, because it works really well with LifterLMS. We use the free Astra theme since it’s lightweight, has a number of free elements designed specifically for LifterLMS, and lets you customize colors quickly, without the bloat you often get from a commercial theme built for Theme Forest that takes a lot of work to strip down.

Jonathan Denwood: A CDN also helps a lot. If your website is hosted in America and someone in Australia visits your course, those calls between their browser and your server, especially with a membership learning management system, add up in latency even at the speed of light. A content delivery network keeps a copy of your site on a server network closer to that visitor, so the request doesn’t have to travel all the way to America. A lot of people use Cloudflare, and I have no problem with them, they’re a quality company, but you get what you pay for, which is part of why their basic product is free. At WP Tonic we use KeyCDN and have found their support and interface superb, and they also work well with Kinsta. I’ve used Amazon CloudFront too, which is a bit more technical.

How a CDN Speeds Up Course Delivery for International Students

Chris Badgett: I’m not a super technical person myself, which might surprise people, but I do think it’s important to work with hosts that have a CDN situation set up, because it’s part of what makes up overall speed. You don’t need to fully understand it, just know that if you’re going to serve high traffic internationally on a complex site, you’re going to want a CDN, and for what it costs, it makes a real difference at minimal ongoing technical cost.

Why Image Compression Matters for Course Sites

Jonathan Denwood: Another area people forget when building a membership or learning site is image compression, and it really does slow a site down, especially if you haven’t set up a subdomain and everything’s on one domain. We use ShortPixel, which has both lossless and lossy compression. Lossy compression shrinks images more, but ShortPixel keeps a copy of your original so you can always get back to it if you need to. We’ve found it compresses a lot of images by over fifty percent.

Jonathan Denwood: That makes a real difference in how sites load, because a lot of sites carry a lot of images.

Why Smartphone Photos Slow Down Course Pages

Chris Badgett: I notice it a lot on course sites specifically. If your course catalog page loads a bunch of featured images, or a single course page is slow, my first guess is almost always that somebody uploaded a giant image, something that should be sixty to a hundred kilobytes but is actually a couple of megabytes. This doesn’t apply as much to that specific problem, but one of the biggest culprits now is that we all have smartphones, and we upload photos straight to the website. An iPhone photo can be two thousand by three thousand pixels. You crop the image to the size you want for display, but you’re still uploading the original two thousand by three thousand pixel file, and that turns your page load time into a mess.

Jonathan Denwood: Being aware of that and doing some cropping helps. There are free online image editors on Mac and PC you can use to crop first, and then running the cropped image through something like ShortPixel makes an even bigger difference.

Why Mobile Site Speed Decides Whether Visitors Stay

Jonathan Denwood: Speed especially matters on the marketing site side, though if you have a subdomain for the course it applies less there. A lot of people view a marketing site on a mobile device, and speed is the number one reason people bail out on the possibility of joining your membership or course when the mobile experience is poor.

Chris Badgett: For me personally, if I’m on Twitter and somebody’s talking about their course and I click the link on my phone, if it doesn’t load in a second or two, I’m out of there.

Jonathan Denwood: That reaction is exacerbated on a phone. People are a bit more tolerant of a slightly laggy site on desktop or laptop, but less so when they’re moving around and looking at things on mobile. With cheap shared hosting, your marketing site or a combined marketing-and-course site will be slow.

Chris Badgett: I call it digital treacle, especially with big images in there.

Why Security Feels Boring Until Your Course Gets Hacked

Jonathan Denwood: Now, security. Security is like insurance, and let’s face it, it’s boring until you have a problem. Clients always tell me it’s only a small cost, hardly anybody knows about their site, nobody’s going to hack it. If a specific individual attacker who knows what they’re doing targets your site, you have a real problem, but you don’t usually face individual hackers. You face automatic scripts, bots, trying to hack your site to build spammy links to sites that wouldn’t otherwise get links, to mine Bitcoin or other digital wallets, or to use your hosting resources. The ways hackers try to make money off other people’s websites are quite breathtaking.

Chris Badgett: It is. There’s a whole industry relying on fraudulent and dicey ways of making money online using other people’s websites.

Why You Cannot Rely on Your Host’s Backups Alone

Jonathan Denwood: Avoiding a hacked site saves you resources, time, money, and pain. It’s so much easier to avoid getting hacked than to deal with the painful experience of a hacked site, especially one you don’t realize has been hacked for months. This is another area where cheap hosting shows up: you should never rely on your hosting company’s backups alone, even with a quality host like Kinsta or SiteGround. Hosting companies have occasionally been attacked and lost their own backups. On SiteGround’s medium and lower WordPress plans, and on most cheap hosting, they only keep thirty days of backups, and most hacked sites aren’t discovered for months, so by the time you notice, your hosting company’s backups are hacked too.

Jonathan Denwood: Having multiple backups stored away from your hosting server, not on it, is really important for security, because if your site does get hacked and you have an up-to-date, unhacked backup, you can restore it.

Why Strong Usernames and Passwords Stop Most Attacks

Jonathan Denwood: Weak usernames and passwords are also detrimental. Since attackers use automatic scripts, a weak password might take them an hour to crack, while a strong one takes months or years, at which point they’ll just move on to another target. A lot of people keep their passwords in an Excel file or a text document. I’d suggest 1Password if you’re on a Mac, or LastPass on PC. Both generate strong passwords and make them available right in your browser, which stops the temptation to reuse the same password across multiple sites and services.

Chris Badgett: I’ve had 1Password for years, and I use strong passwords. In LifterLMS there’s a feature to enforce strong passwords, so you can require your students to use one if you want, with a medium setting too if you want to meet in the middle on the friction that adds.

Enforcing Strong Passwords and Keeping Plugins Up to Date

Jonathan Denwood: That’s another factor: your students will be subscribers in the WordPress tables, so when you’re running a membership site, you need to make sure everyone is using strong passwords, not just admins.

Jonathan Denwood: Outdated WordPress plugins and themes are also a killer. You really need to stay on top of updates, ideally every week. This is another area where you need a staging site, because a plugin with no history of problems can still, out of nowhere, cause the white screen of death, or an update to one plugin can silently conflict with another and break a piece of key functionality you don’t notice right away. Updating on a staging site first, then checking that key things still work, that new signups and existing logins work and courses are still accessible, is really important.

Why an Untested Backup Is No Backup At All

Jonathan Denwood: Site backups matter here too. A lot of people tell us they have backups, and when we ask if they’ve ever actually done a live retrieval, tested one of those backups on a staging site to see if it actually works, they haven’t. That really means they have no backup at all, because a backup that’s never been tested in anger is no backup at all.

Chris Badgett: Security isn’t sexy, but once you deal with a problem, you’ll wish you’d spent more time setting up your systems, your team, or your processes around it. With LifterLMS, or whatever you’re using for your membership or LMS system on WordPress, you’ve built a full-on web application with users, not just a website with pages and content. If that’s generating meaningful money for you, whatever stage you’re at, it’s an important asset, and any important asset in the offline world gets insurance, security, locks on the doors. You invest in security around your assets, so having a solid security system in place matters if you want to take your project seriously.

Why Running the Latest Stable Version of PHP Matters

Jonathan Denwood: Better hosting usually also means access to a more current, stable version of PHP, not necessarily the bleeding-edge version, but something reasonably current. With cheap hosting, you’re often on a server with thousands of sites still running a legacy version of PHP, which will make LifterLMS generate more problems, more frustration, and a slower experience. LifterLMS’s codebase is designed to work with a modern version of PHP. Running an old version also means sending more support requests, and I’ve watched from the sidelines in the Facebook community where someone has an issue, thinks it’s LifterLMS, and it turns out to be their PHP version. Once they upgrade to the then-current 7.0, the problems go away. Some people would slightly disagree, but in my experience working with the most stable, current version of PHP helps with security as well as speed.

Recapping the Four Fatal Flaws

Chris Badgett: To recap the four fatal flaws: build an audience first, ship a minimum viable course, pay attention to speed, and pay attention to security.

Jonathan Denwood: I understand why people skip the audience step, building the course itself is genuinely hard work, but of the two, I actually think building an audience is even harder, which is why people start with the course instead.

Chris Badgett: It’s a long game. Whether you go the YouTube, podcast, or Instagram route, all good strategies, the first step is finding a niche that’s big enough to market to. If only two people in the world care about what your course is about, you’ve got a problem, but if you can build an audience of 100,000 to 200,000 in a specific niche area, you can build a very successful business on that, depending on the resources your audience has and the pain you’re solving for them.

Do You Need a Captcha Plugin on a LifterLMS Site

An attendee, Kurt, asked whether there are any recommendations for using a captcha plugin for administrators or subscribers.

Jonathan Denwood: In general, captcha is fine but not the be-all and end-all. It varies from site to site. Some clients we support get inundated with spam through their contact form even with a captcha, and others don’t get much spam without one. On WP Tonic’s own public-facing contact form I do use a captcha, and we happen to include Gravity Forms as part of our turnkey package too.

Chris Badgett: I don’t think you need captcha on the LifterLMS side itself. We have some pretty high-traffic LifterLMS sites doing fine without a captcha plugin, because LifterLMS doesn’t use WordPress’s standard open registration system that hackers and bots are trained to target. The other reason is that a lot of people are using our strong password feature. As a WordPress administrator, or anyone with admin access, make sure you and anyone with technical access are using strong passwords, since that account can do the most damage. If somebody gets into a student account, the damage is much smaller, they might take the course for free, but that’s not nearly as big a deal as an administrator account being compromised.

Why to Think Twice Before Combining WooCommerce With LifterLMS

Jonathan Denwood: Unless you really need it, I’d try to avoid running WooCommerce alongside LifterLMS initially. It works fine technically, and there’s an add-on for it, but it complicates things quite a bit to support WooCommerce and LifterLMS together, and unless there’s a real reason, it’s best to start with the simplest setup you can.

Chris Badgett: There is a place for WooCommerce, LifterLMS has a WooCommerce add-on to integrate the two, and one attendee on this call runs LifterLMS with WooCommerce because she also sells a whole store of products beyond her courses, so in that case it makes sense. But if you can go with LifterLMS’s native e-commerce, through the Stripe or PayPal add-ons or Authorize.net, that’s the cleanest, simplest way to do it.

Troubleshooting Recurring Payments With WooCommerce and LifterLMS

An attendee mentioned struggling to get recurring payments working correctly on a combined WooCommerce and LifterLMS setup.

Chris Badgett: That’s likely a WooCommerce Subscriptions issue. If you want recurring payments through WooCommerce, you need the separate WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin, and LifterLMS does support it, it’s aware of subscription status, but it’s not a cheap add-on, it runs a couple hundred dollars, and that’s probably what’s causing the friction.

Moving a LifterLMS Site Off GoDaddy Hosting

An attendee said she’s running LifterLMS on GoDaddy, is unhappy with the experience, and asked how moving to WP Tonic would work.

Jonathan Denwood: We’d migrate the whole website for you. For a situation like that, I’d suggest signing up for one of our standard site care plans, and we’d recommend moving to a host like SiteGround, and then we’d typically set up your main website and LifterLMS on a subdomain separately, which based on experience gives you a much better result than GoDaddy. Our turnkey solution specifically is aimed at people who are just getting started and haven’t built their site out yet; for a migration like this, our site care plan with a proper hosting move is the better fit, and depending on the host, we either do it for free as part of onboarding or, with some hosts, there’s a standard charge that we handle by hand rather than relying on an automated migration script.

Understanding What Actually Makes a Strong Password

An attendee added a note in the chat about people misunderstanding what makes a password strong.

Jonathan Denwood: A strong password needs capital letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols. The passwords a tool like 1Password generates are genuinely hard to remember on purpose, you’re not meant to memorize them, you just rely on the password manager, and if someone did somehow crack one, you can rotate it easily. LastPass works well too, though I’ve mostly used 1Password for years and its interface is fantastic.

Every Course Creator Wears Five Hats

Chris Badgett: Course creators end up wearing five hats: expert, community builder, teacher, technologist, and entrepreneur. I’ve very rarely seen one person pull off all five without a team, a business partner, a freelancer, or a solution that takes a big chunk of the technology work off their plate. That frees you up to focus on being a course creator: making your content engaging, coaching your students, or building your community. Those are the best uses of your time, not getting into the weeds of technology just because you happen to know how.

Jonathan Denwood: People underestimate how much time it takes just to build the course itself, organize it, and get it ready to launch and test, on top of everything else. Building a course is more work than people expect going in.