Transferring your LMS from LearnDash to LifterLMS

Learn about a new way to transfer courses from LearnDash to LifterLMS in this webinar featuring James and Justin from the HonorsWP team with their new product: Transfer allows for Learndash migration of courses, lessons, quizzes, and other data to LifterLMS.

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How to Migrate a WordPress LMS Site From LearnDash to LifterLMS

Moving a WordPress course site from LearnDash to LifterLMS used to mean rebuilding it. In this webinar, Will Middleton and Kurt Von Ahn from LifterLMS sit down with James Tryon and Justin Pine of Honors WP to walk through Transfer, a new tool that moves courses, lessons, quizzes, users, and student progress between LMSs in one connected step. The live demo takes a full LearnDash site into LifterLMS in under thirty minutes.

What You’ll Learn

• Why standard WordPress import and export tools break student progress and course relationships when moving between LMS’s
• How Honors WP Transfer moves courses, users, and user meta as one connected set instead of loose content
• Where Transfer fits beyond migration: dev-to-production pushes, semester archives, and isolated LMS backups
• What a full LearnDash to LifterLMS migration looks like from export click to imported courses
• Which additional Honors WP tools plug into a LifterLMS site: messaging, flashcards, dynamic content, and block styles

Key Takeaways

• Migrations that used to run twenty to thirty hours can now finish in twenty to thirty minutes with the right tool
• Install both LMS plugins on the destination site so Transfer can bridge the source and destination formats during conversion
• Use Transfer’s automatic backup and one-click undo as a safety net before any risky import or update
• If your host caps upload sizes, either upload the export file through the file manager or run the migration from a local WordPress environment
• The course-to-PDF export turns any online course into a printable workbook, useful for certification submissions, corporate onboarding, and blended learning

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Why LMS Migration in WordPress Has Been So Painful

Will Middleton: Hey everybody, it is Will Middleton and Kurt Von Ahnen from LifterLMS, and today we are joined by James Tryon and Justin Pine from Honors WP. We are going to dive into a demo and a walkthrough of Transfer, the new tool they have created for LearnDash and LifterLMS. What this product does is it allows you to move courses from one LMS to another. It migrates your courses, your lessons, your quizzes, your user meta, and the relationships they have to each other. The relationship lessons have to courses, the relationship lessons have to sections, all of that complicated stuff that has not been possible up to this point to do automatically without thousands of dollars in custom development work.

Now there is a product available on the market you can get your hands on. I get this request all the time, so I am happy to see a product come onto the market where this makes it a lot easier for users to migrate from one LMS to another within WordPress. There are a lot of unlocks there.

Meet the Team Behind Transfer

Will Middleton: We will do a quick intro. My name is Will Middleton from LifterLMS. I have been working with the company for about seven years doing all kinds of stuff in sales, support, customer success, tutorials, and webinars. Kurt, who are you and why are you here?

Kurt Von Ahnen: That is a great question, I ask myself that all the time. Kurt Von Ahnen, I have an agency called Manzanas focused largely on learning and membership websites, and I also work directly with LifterLMS and help with some customer support. It is awesome to have James and Justin with us today.

Will Middleton: James, you want to give us an intro?

James Tryon: I am James Tryon. I have been around WordPress since around 2007. I have been running an agency for a long time. A couple of years ago we decided to fork some of our agency work and put it toward the higher LMS spaces, making products off of our custom client work. About three or four years ago we ended up acquiring a small LMS brand and started leveraging, improving, and adding to their product line. That is where we are now.

Will Middleton: Justin, you want to give us an intro too?

Justin Pine: I am Justin. I handle all the support and marketing for Honors WP. I have worked with James for about three years now and enjoyed every minute of it.

The Core Problem With LMS Migration

Will Middleton: Thank you guys for joining us. The main challenge and outline around why we are here today is that there has been a big question in the ecosystem for years about how do I migrate from one LMS to another. We have people come to LifterLMS migrating from a Teachable site or a Kajabi site, migrating from an outside LMS, and a lot of the time it is a case where it is another WordPress LMS. Someone will say, I want to migrate from LearnDash to LifterLMS, and we have had to tell them, well, you are going to have to copy and paste, your users are going to have to start over on their course progress. It is basically a complete site rebuild, as if you were coming from an outside LMS.

Now you guys have come to the market with a new solution to make that process a lot easier. It is no longer a copy and paste job. There is a product available to make it a very seamless process.

Beyond Migration: Other Ways to Use Transfer

Will Middleton: That product also has some other features around even lifter-to-lifter websites. LifterLMS has a course export and import option where you can export your courses and import them, but it does not take any user meta data, it does not take a lot of that progress data. Your tool does include that user migration data. If you were going to go from a LifterLMS site to another LifterLMS website, maybe you are on LifterLMS 4.0 because you have not updated your website in six years and now it is time to make the change, it might be a bit easier to migrate with a setup that carries user progress instead of having users start over.

James and Justin, before we dive into a demo, do you want to highlight any of the common questions people come to you with about the Transfer product where you say, this product would be perfect for you?

Everything Stays Connected: The Secret Sauce

James Tryon: A lot of times someone has already tried using the built-in tools, or even the built-in WordPress import and export. They might move all their stuff over but they realize all the connections are gone, or they have to relink everything. Our tool really specializes in that. Not to give away the secret sauce, we are really copying over everything, holding it, and then remapping all your IDs to make sure that nothing gets lost.

We also have a nice backup feature in case something happens or you are not quite happy with the result, or maybe you imported the wrong export, so you can undo that.

Using Transfer for Site Redesigns and Dev Environments

James Tryon: A lot of our users, as well as migrating, find it useful when they are doing a redesign of their site. They are not moving their courses but they want to redo their sales page. They let their course run, get approval on all the design requests, and once they are ready to go live they use our tool to resync their courses and their user meta one more time to their new dev environment, then push the whole thing live. That way they are not missing any users, they are not missing any order history, and they are not losing any progress history.

Semester Archives and Yearly Course Purges

James Tryon: A lot of times our customers will use it from semester to semester where they archive their courses and then just import the ones they want. Or they will use it where they have such a large library but the courses come and go so fast they will just purge them on a yearly basis. So it is more like an archive tool where someone is using it for multiple purposes.

Exporting a Full Course as a PDF Workbook

James Tryon: In fact, we have a simple little tool, it is not a big thing, but a lot of times somebody will need to submit their course material to the state. Say you are running a traffic school, or a small certification that needs to get approval. You need to submit that stuff for review. We have a tool that just exports your entire course out to a PDF so you can then email it off to whoever you need to. It makes everything into one PDF versus what you currently have.

We try to make it not just a one-time-use tool. We are trying to make it a little bit sticky and a little bit more valuable to you. Our tool does not migrate your entire WordPress stuff, but we specialize in just the LMS and the user meta around it.

Will Middleton: There is a lot of value there. I had not even thought a lot about that PDF-to-state feature, because a lot of times what we send them is here are some logins for you to try out the website. They do not always want that. Sometimes they want a format they can sit and read in front of the board. The PDF is perfect for that.

The Backup and Restore Safety Net

Will Middleton: Justin, do you have any other interesting use cases you have heard from customers, or setups that our users might not have thought about that this tool would be really useful for?

Justin Pine: The backup feature I find very useful, just because a lot of support tickets we get are people running into issues where something on their site messed up or they had some glitch. All they have to do with our tool is just revert back with the backup tool, restore their previous site, and that takes away a lot of headache and worry.

Will Middleton: I have done that where I have deleted content off something and it is gone. We had that question last week where someone said, I deleted a user and I deleted all the posts they created, and they were an author of some courses, how can I get them back? I am like, oh, I guess you are going to have to go into the database with an expert and try to pull from a backup. That is going to be an absolute nightmare.

But if you were using the Honors WP Transfer tool on your website up until that point, you would be able to just restore the course and the user meta from that course without having to do this massive undertaking.

Snapshot Backups Before Risky Updates

James Tryon: If you are going to do an update on your site, I recommend going to a dev environment and testing everything first. However, our tool does allow you to do snapshot backups of your database, of your LMS. Say you got a little cowboy and just want to update in production. You could quickly hit backup and then update, and that way if something happens you do have a backup right there to revert back.

Import Export vs Transfer: Why We Rewrote It

James Tryon: Transfer is our version two. We have a product called Import Export, and we rebuilt it, and because it does so much we called it Transfer. Our Import Export tool is great except there is no undo, and if you import it twice because you think it was not finished, you have now imported all your content twice. That is the beauty of Transfer. It allows me to sleep better at night to know that our customers are not accidentally importing everything twice or duplicating their content because it just did not finish the first time.

Which Other LMSs Are on the Roadmap

Will Middleton: With this tool you can also go the other way, LifterLMS to LearnDash, but let’s focus on LearnDash to LifterLMS today. Long term, that is such an awesome feature. If there was a feature request for another LMS to be added, and a lot of demand from the market, you could add that in. If a bunch of people say, hey, can you add Tutor LMS because I want to go from LearnDash to Tutor, or Tutor to LifterLMS, you could do all that in the future. If you are using another LMS that is not just LifterLMS or LearnDash and you want to inquire about future possibilities, that is also another option.

James Tryon: We are working on Tutor LMS, LearnPress, and Sensei. The foundation is there, and we can do the basics if we had to, but we have been focusing on fixing some UI first, because it works great but unless you really know how to use the tool it is a little confusing. We are trying to improve the UI, and then we are going to continue picking up where we left off on the other LMSs. If someone happens to have a really good data set on one of those others, we got the basics working, but sometimes these can get pretty complicated. If someone had a good data set we would love to help figure out that migration as we get closer.

Selling and Syndicating Courses With Transfer

James Tryon: One last thing about cool features people are using our tool for, it is not quite an ecosystem yet, but say you wanted to resell or pass out courses. You could totally do that with our tool, as long as both people had copies of the tool. If you bought a larger dev version you could potentially pass out courses or sell courses to other people and syndicate your course, if you will. You could sell the exports of your course so someone else could sell your course.

Live Demo: Exporting From LearnDash

Will Middleton: Justin, do you want to share your screen and do a quick demo showing how we would migrate a course from a LearnDash instance to a LifterLMS instance?

Justin Pine: So you want to go from LearnDash to LifterLMS?

Will Middleton: Yes, though with this tool you can also do it the other way.

Justin Pine: All right, so on here we have LearnDash, view the courses.

Will Middleton: What we are looking at here is the LearnDash site with the interface on the left and the courses area. For anyone in the LifterLMS audience who has not seen what LearnDash looks like, this is kind of the user interface for the back end of building courses.

Justin Pine: Everything is included, price, type, author, categories, tags, all that good stuff. So what we would do is go down to Transfer, then to Export. Say we want to migrate everything. In this case we would just leave all this unchecked. You do not have to do anything if you are just going to migrate the whole thing over. In this case we will also migrate all our users. I will also check all these settings right here.

James Tryon: The new version has this stuff a little bit easier. We are trying to get rid of all the options unless you want to set them, so by default everything is on and then you can customize it. That will be out within a week or so, it is just a little easier, but it is the same.

Justin Pine: We just click Export here, let it wait a little bit. We should be getting a popup window shortly. It shows all the post types included in the export file: user data, global settings, any custom data you might have. We just click Export File to download that to our computer.

Uploading the Export to the New Site

Justin Pine: Now let’s go to our import site. This is the site I would like to bring my content over to. This is the site where we want to import our LearnDash content and convert it into LifterLMS. To do that we are going to go to Transfer.

First we will go to Uploads. We can upload the JSON file.

James Tryon: The next version is going to streamline this a little bit easier. What happens is you have to import it into our system first. You are uploading it to Transfer, and then once it is in Transfer we manipulate that data back out to LifterLMS or LearnDash, whatever you want. Because of all the IDs and everything, we need a safe place to store it and to revert back. So we really are uploading it first and then manipulating it, so we have faster processing.

Will Middleton: So the first step was to download the export from the LearnDash website, and then over on our new website, where Transfer is also installed, do the upload first and then the import.

James Tryon: That is correct.

Both LMS Plugins Must Be Installed on the Destination

Justin Pine: We will go to the export file we just downloaded, click Continue.

James Tryon: One thing to be very sure of is that you have everything installed. You need both LearnDash and LifterLMS on your new site.

Will Middleton: So on the destination site you need both plugins active so Transfer can bridge them.

James Tryon: It does not show up as active if it is not there. So you can just go upload it and then you can go to Import.

Will Middleton: So if you are going from LearnDash to LifterLMS you have to be sure they are both installed on the site so that you can toggle the correct option.

James Tryon: You do not need any of the theory options that show as a dependency. We will work on removing that dependency.

The Import Runs Inside Transfer, Not to WordPress Yet

Justin Pine: All right, we are back to here. Now this is uploading.

James Tryon: We are not doing the import yet, or the conversion yet. This is just importing it into our system.

Will Middleton: That makes sense. That is why you are working on some UI improvements because it is a little confusing, but it works well. Theoretically you could do this on the same website, but it usually makes sense to have a new WordPress install developed to clear out a lot of the old tables. Once you switch from your LearnDash delivery you will not need all the old LearnDash tables existing in your database. So usually you do a separate site, like Justin is doing here, even though you have to have both plugins for the conversion.

Justin Pine: The time it takes to upload also just depends on how big your export file is. This took a little bit longer but it is working.

Running the LearnDash to LifterLMS Conversion

Justin Pine: Now that this is uploaded, we can convert this from LearnDash to LifterLMS. To do that we will go into the Import tab. The LearnDash data we just uploaded is here, and we are going to convert it into LifterLMS. So we click on LifterLMS here and click Continue.

These settings are if you want to change any user roles upon importing your content. In this case we do not want to do that, so we will just click Continue. Import to LifterLMS, no user changes. Again, this might take just a second.

Will Middleton: No problem. This upload process could be limited by your website host’s limit on the file size you could upload. If that is the case, Transfer also has a method where you can upload your file directly to your website host with the file manager, in case it does end up being a problem, where your course has 100 lessons with 100 quizzes and all this stuff. There is a workaround for you to be able to get those in there as well.

James Tryon: That is correct.

What Actually Migrated: 198 Posts, 88 Users, All Connected

Justin Pine: When everything has been converted it will show right here, LearnDash to LifterLMS.

Will Middleton: On that popup it said you had about 198 posts imported. That would be your lessons and your courses and your quizzes, and then you had 88 users. There was a lot of data in that file.

Justin Pine: Yes. Now let’s go to LifterLMS and show that it is there. Courses. You can see everything is now under LifterLMS courses.

Will Middleton: Nice. So that just took all of the courses you had on your LearnDash site and moved them over. All eleven courses.

Justin Pine: Yep.

Will Middleton: If you click on the Builder for any of your courses, all of the lessons and sections were imported automatically. They are all linked up. That is the new awesome thing. Previously you could export all your lessons and quizzes and courses and import them, but they were all disjointed and broken, and you had to go look at each individual lesson, link it up to the course, fix all the quizzes. Here it is just all automatic. It is all set up for you.

As a new user that might take you fifteen or twenty minutes for the whole flow, but it is no longer a twenty or thirty hour migration project. It is a twenty or thirty minute migration. Even if you are paying someone to handle that migration for you, it is going to be way more expensive than going with this product. Saving a lot of time, saving a lot of money.

Justin Pine: Any content that is attached is also included, so you do not have to worry about remapping any content. That can be incredibly time consuming.

Undoing an Import When Something Goes Wrong

Justin Pine: If anything happens during the import process, like a timeout or anything that could disrupt it, you can also undo the import right here. We are not going to do that in this case, but this is also a very cool function if you need to undo anything, to restart the import process for any reason.

What Transfer Does Not Migrate Yet

James Tryon: Things we are going to be adding in the future. We do not quite move over, say, if you sell through a third party shopping cart, we do not move over the order info. If you were selling through WooCommerce, we are not moving the WooCommerce data yet. We are also not moving anything that would be like an H5P embed or a Gravity Forms embed. We will move those over, but shortcodes are still the same shortcodes. So you would need to move that data over, but if you move that data from both sites and it is there, the shortcode should work again. Especially for something like H5P or Gravity Forms, those are pretty easy import and export if they are the same.

Same-LMS Migration Is Also a Real Use Case

James Tryon: This is great for a conversion but also great for a migration. If you are just moving your own LifterLMS sites around, or if you have done a redesign and need to move stuff, it is for going from LMS to LMS but also a great tool for going from the same LMS moving stuff around. We have a lot of users who use it just to keep track of their data or their courses. It is not really a conversion tool for them, but we are trying to make it a little more useful so it is not just a one-time-use tool.

Will Middleton: Like you mentioned earlier, the backups feature and the ability to isolate the data in your LMS and give it a backup is really valuable. There are backup tools you could use to back up your whole WordPress instance, even ones your host might include, but it still requires a lot of parsing of data if you ever need to go recover. You are going to have to dig through a lot of files to find just your LMS data. Isolated LMS backups is actually really useful, maybe even more useful than a full site backup in some cases.

Justin Pine: Anytime that we run the import process it also creates an automatic backup. Right here, as soon as you import, it creates an automatic backup. Anytime you need to refer to it it is right there. You can download it and nothing is lost. You do not have to have any headache or worry about where to find it.

Using Transfer to Reset LMS Data for Testing

Will Middleton: You said it could also reset some LMS data. So if someone has a massive course where they are taking a thousand students through a program that are only going to be viewing the site for a six month period, you might want to export all those user meta tables, save them to a local drive, and then remove them from the website. That kind of thing would save you a lot of space when you are running a massive LMS.

James Tryon: Yes. Be careful with it, but yes, it will factory reset your LMS. It is a fun little tool, especially for debugging and testing in our dev environments.

Justin Pine: In my testing I use this all the time and I love it. It makes it very easy to test things out. If I have to remove something I can remove it. But yes, it is good to note that once it is reset you cannot undo that.

James Tryon: You would have to go to a full site backup to restore that. Or reimport one of your exports.

Will Middleton: That is really useful for troubleshooting as well. If there is a specific issue with cron jobs in the LMS or something becoming an issue at scale and you have to test that with your website host, you could reset the LMS data and see if it is an issue with the website host at any level of scale, or a scale-specific issue by resetting your LMS data.

Handling Hosting Limits and Large Exports

James Tryon: Not to sound too negative toward our tool, but sometimes someone might have an issue with the tool not working. It does require a fair bit of memory. But if your system can run the LMS, it can run our tool. It requires the same requirements as the LMS. As long as you are okay there. We have people who say, oh, it does not work on my XYZ host. I do not want to name names, but it is really because memory maxes out or the file is just too big, so they have to move it manually, or need a little bit more RAM.

Sometimes a workaround for that honestly is set up a local environment, do an entire export of that site, move it to your local using something like Local WP, and then run our tool from your local environment to the new host if your old shared host does not have enough resources.

Will Middleton: That makes sense, if the export is capping out on an old host.

Bundling Online Courses With Printed Workbooks

Will Middleton: Kurt, I know you do a lot of work with various LMS sites, migrations, different use cases. What do you see as some of the high value points of the Transfer product and some of the other Honors WP tools?

Kurt Von Ahnen: I already kicked out my one idea about that quick shortcut to a workbook, a PDF printed workbook that corporate would give out. I cannot tell you how many times, working for corporate, whether it was Ducati, Suzuki, Triumph, any of those companies, the vice presidents are not in the same sphere of adoption that a lot of us are in. When you are talking to the vice president of a corporation, they are old school. So you are like, hey, we have this great virtual program, and they are like, yeah, but where is the workbook, what can I hand to somebody?

Now you can take the course, boom, to PDF. Like I said, throw in a couple of fill-in-the-form pages, redo your PDF, go to print, put a cover on that sucker, and then you have a full virtual program and a sister workbook to go with it. Corporate is happy and you just increased your sales.

LMS as a Vertical for WordPress Agencies

Kurt Von Ahnen: I look at everything from a marketing agency perspective. How can I increase my verticals? When I look at website building, a lot of folks do not even think about the LMS portion. If you are talking to any service oriented company about redoing a website, one of the first questions you should ask is, how are you onboarding your new employees? Are you working remote? If they say, oh no, we are fully remote, you say, oh great, so where is your learning management system to take care of all this onboarding stuff? That is how you get that next vertical. You say, hey, we can do that, we can make this part of the web build. It is hidden content, it does not have to face the public. That is your foot in the door.

Honors WP Beyond Transfer: Messaging, Flashcards, Design Tools

Kurt Von Ahnen: And the messaging. I am going to sound uneducated, I did not realize you guys had a messaging tool. In my mind that is the answer for people who are like, I like BuddyBoss but it is just a little too heavy for me. I do not need all those social tools, I just need people to be able to message each other back and forth.

James Tryon: A couple of our other Honors plugins that work well with LifterLMS. We have a messaging plugin that allows students and teachers to talk, teachers and teachers to talk. We have some design tools. We have a dynamic content tool that lets you take any WordPress block and drop in your custom meta, so you could take a paragraph and add in a first name, or use it on your certificates. Our block styles tool lets you style and make your certificates fancy, and the dynamic content works there as well.

You have access to our full design suite. Block Styles works with LifterLMS. Block Styles gives you about 160 additional inputs to any default WordPress block. We do not make new blocks, we give you additional CSS features for the blocks that already exist. So it gives you the extensions to really take your designs to the next level.

Our flashcards plugin also works with LifterLMS. It is pretty basic, but if you want a little tool for a study aid we have a pretty simple flashcards plugin that works great with LifterLMS as well.

Will Middleton: Flashcards is a really cool feature to have built into WordPress, because H5P is the default way to build flashcards, or a random flashcard plugin for WordPress. Having one specifically that works with LMS and with blocks is actually pretty cool.

James Tryon: It needs some more love, but it is a great simple tool for now. We have some big plans for it in the future. I am really looking forward to making it more like a memory game, where you can run through the flashcards and after you have answered a card three times it takes it out of the stack, so you do not have to keep studying that one. We are trying to make it a little more gamified.

Final Thoughts: A 30-Hour Job Becomes a 30-Minute Job

Will Middleton: I think we covered just about everything. We ran through a demo of the Transfer product, how you can use it for backups, migrations, and there is a lot more features. James and Justin mentioned there will be some new stuff rolling out over the next year.

I think this is just an awesome advancement in the ecosystem. Turning a thirty hour job into a thirty minute job for migrating a site is really the massive high for me. I love being able to tell my clients, this is not going to be a thirty hour job that costs two grand. It is going to be like a five hour job, because now the LMS stuff is just moved in thirty minutes. Then we just have to work on redesigning your old site in WordPress and the theme. It takes all the weight of moving an LMS off of the site owners and developers.

James, you want to give some final words for the audience?

James Tryon: I appreciate the opportunity to be here. I am pretty active on social through Facebook. If you need any help or any feature requests, feel free to reach out. Find me on Facebook, it is just James Tryon. On Instagram it is Mr. James Tryon, and on Twitter it is James Tryon. Feel free to find me if you need help. More than happy to help. Any feature requests you have, feel free to send them our way. We are always adding to the backlog.

Will Middleton: Justin, any final words or next steps for people watching?

Justin Pine: James kind of covered everything. Anybody in the LifterLMS community looking for another LMS to be supported, just reach out to support@honorswp.com. I answer as fast as I can. We are always looking to add features and help the community, so just reach out with any questions.

Kurt Von Ahnen: My final word is, this is such a cost savings on time and money and the whole thing, I am kind of stoked anyway. You can reach me at Manzanas or LifterLMS. Catch us on another episode.