Power Up Your Online Course Website with LifterLMS WooCommerce 2.0

The all new LifterLMS WooCommerce 2.0 makes LifterLMS and the most powerful WordPress ecommerce system even better together. In this webinar, Chris Badgett will demonstrate the top new features and benefits of LifterLMS WooCommerce 2.0.

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How LifterLMS Works With WooCommerce To Sell Courses And Memberships

This webinar walks through selling online courses, memberships, coaching programs, and private communities with LifterLMS and WooCommerce together. Chris Badgett tours a live demo site to show how LifterLMS access plans connect to WooCommerce products and variable products, why WooCommerce extends LifterLMS’s built in checkout to more countries and business types, and how a single membership purchase automatically enrolls a student in every course it includes.

What You’ll Learn

• How LifterLMS access plans connect to WooCommerce products, including simple products, variable products, and one product that unlocks multiple courses or memberships.
• Why some LifterLMS sites sell with WooCommerce instead of LifterLMS’s native checkout, from international payment gateway coverage to WooCommerce’s tax and funnel building extensions.
• What changed in LifterLMS WooCommerce 2.0, including access plan association, variable product support, and catalog redirect options.
• How a live WooCommerce purchase triggers automatic enrollment across every course inside a membership.
• Which WooCommerce settings, like the virtual product checkbox, control whether an order completes and enrolls a student instantly.

Key Takeaways

• Every LifterLMS course or membership sold through WooCommerce needs its own linked WooCommerce product or variation.
• Use a direct add-to-cart URL and WooCommerce’s cart redirect setting to shorten checkout by a step.
• Mark digital course products as Virtual, not necessarily Downloadable, so WooCommerce orders complete automatically and LifterLMS can enroll the student right away.
• Vouchers are activation codes for bulk or manual enrollment, not WooCommerce coupons, so they never create a WooCommerce order to auto-complete.
• Take a minimalist approach to plugins and pair LifterLMS and WooCommerce with managed WordPress hosting as your site and traffic grow.

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Why Sell Courses And Memberships With LifterLMS And WooCommerce Together

My name is Chris Badgett, and in this presentation we’re going to be looking at how to use WooCommerce to sell your online courses, membership programs, coaching programs, or private communities, all from your WordPress website.

I want everybody to know this isn’t going to be one of those boring slideshow presentations. I’m going to be playing around with a real website that’s live, with you, here today. So let me share my screen with you. This is the homepage to a website called My Expert Business.

This is just a simple homepage with some course category, or WooCommerce product categories. There’s a Courses category, a Memberships category, an Equipment category, and then a Book in the Box by Mail category, which I’ll explain in a little bit. This is a simple About page, we’re not doing anything fancy here. We’re just using LifterLMS and WooCommerce with the popular Astra theme, plus WooCommerce and the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin. It’s a simple two column layout, built in the new WordPress editor.

A Tour Of The Course Catalog And Access Plans

You can look at our courses right here. We’ve got six courses loaded up into this website, and a big thank you to Ally for helping put all this together. These are six sample courses. This is the official Quick Start Course for LifterLMS, and this is actually a free course. You don’t have to pay $500 or $5,000 to get it, we were just demonstrating some of the features of LifterLMS access plans there. When you first set up LifterLMS, you have an option to install a sample course. This is that sample course, and it gives you a walkthrough on how to get your first course up and running quickly. It’s called the Quick Start Course.

Then there’s a demo course, the Music Course, where we just put in a couple of lessons. You can see the syllabus down here, and I can click on the one time payment or the monthly payment. Those are LifterLMS access plans attached to this course.

Buying A Course Through The WooCommerce Checkout

If I click on the $2,000 for one year of access, that has been added to my WooCommerce cart. If I go to view the cart, you can see this is the WooCommerce checkout screen. We’ve got this course being purchased for a one time payment of $2,000. We could use the WooCommerce coupon code system here, but this is just the classic WooCommerce checkout. We can move on over from the cart to the checkout, and here we could purchase this course for $2,000. Pretty straightforward. That was just a walkthrough from the LifterLMS course catalog, also called the course archive.

Selling A Membership As A Variable WooCommerce Subscription Product

Over here’s the memberships area, so we have a membership here called the Platinum membership, and when you buy this membership you get access to all the courses on this website. This one is what’s called, in WooCommerce, a variable product, from $1,000 a month, or you could do the annual payments for $110,000 a year. Those are what WooCommerce calls product variations. I could click Sign Up Now, and I’ve added that to the cart. I can then view the cart, and I could proceed to checkout and purchase this membership for $10,000 a year. This would be an annual subscription for $10,000.

How Each Access Plan Maps To A WooCommerce Product In The Shop

I’m going to click on Shop here. This is the WooCommerce store catalog, or product catalog, also known as the product archive page. The Music Course we set up had the two options, the $2,000 one time payment or the $200 a month subscription, and we set that up as two separate WooCommerce products. If we look at this one here, this is just the one time payment of $2,000. If somebody were to try to buy that course, they would be checking out through this product. That’s how a lot of these are set up, each access plan associated with a separate product.

But this one right here, the Leadership Course, is kind of like the membership. It’s a variable product, so instead of using two separate products, we gave this one a monthly and an annual option. So there are a couple of different ways to do it, and we’re just demoing both.

Selling Non-Course Products Alongside Your Courses

Inside our shop we also have some non-course and non-membership related products, like the Book Club, which is $100 a month currently on sale from $125 a month, where you get a book in the mail for $100 a month. We also have just a regular old t-shirt. I think WooCommerce was originally built for simple physical products, like a t-shirt company on the internet, so here we’ve got a $100 t-shirt, pretty fancy. And then we also just have a straight up physical product, the equipment here, $5,000 worth of equipment that we could add to the cart.

If we look at the shopping cart, we’ve got the Platinum membership for $10,000 a year, and we’re going to invest $5,000 in the equipment. As an example, if you were selling something like, say, you become an amazing piano person, you could sell a piano for $5,000 or $40,000, or whatever a piano costs, and then a $10,000 a year membership that includes a bunch of courses. That’s just an example of what’s in the shop.

The Combined WooCommerce And LifterLMS Student Dashboard

When you click on Dashboard, this is the WooCommerce dashboard, and when you have LifterLMS enabled with the WooCommerce integration, it basically combines all of the WooCommerce account endpoints, as they’re called, with the LifterLMS dashboard endpoints, like certificates and achievements, and so on.

Why Sell With WooCommerce Instead Of LifterLMS’s Built-In Checkout

The next thing I’d like to cover is why you’d use WooCommerce instead of LifterLMS, because LifterLMS does have its own e-commerce payment system. We have an add-on for Stripe, we have an add-on for PayPal, we have an add-on for Authorize.net. There are really four main reasons why I recommend that you sell with WooCommerce, using the LifterLMS WooCommerce add-on to integrate into the WooCommerce ecosystem instead of just using LifterLMS by itself’s e-commerce engine.

The first one has to do with this map right here, a map of the world and the countries that Stripe supports. Stripe is one of the most popular payment gateways in the LifterLMS native e-commerce system, and WooCommerce even has its own Stripe integration, but as you can see here, it’s only about 32 countries where the website owner’s bank account needs to be located to use Stripe to sell your courses and memberships and products via credit card. So if you can’t use Stripe, let’s say you live in South Africa, or in Russia, there are payment gateways that WooCommerce has developed that you can use. As long as you can figure out a way to sell it with Woo, you can do your enrollment with LifterLMS, and all of the LMS and course features, the protecting of the content, the student dashboard, and all that stuff.

If we bring up WooCommerce’s website, and go into their extensions, I’ll click on Payments, and I love this feature right here where you can select payments and then select your country. If I happen to live in South Africa, I have a lot of options, I could use the PayFast payment gateway, which is popular in the South African e-commerce environment. WooCommerce has been around for a long time, and has a mature ecosystem of plugins.

More Reasons To Choose WooCommerce Reach, Flexibility, And Extensions

Another reason is LifterLMS natively works with PayPal, but some people aren’t comfortable with it, and they want to use some other payment gateway besides what’s available from LifterLMS. LifterLMS is committed to the global international community, so from the very beginning we wanted to always have a WooCommerce option, so that people could use LifterLMS in any country where they could get a payment gateway running through WooCommerce.

Another reason is if someone is selling more than just courses and memberships, and they’re more predominantly a retail store wanting to get into adding courses to the product catalog. If we look at this equipment, let’s say I had an e-commerce website full of yoga equipment and exercise balls and DVDs, physical products for health and fitness, and I wanted to start adding some courses to my store, that’s another good reason to use LifterLMS with WooCommerce, so you can just add courses and memberships to whatever your other product mix is.

The other reason is there may be some WooCommerce extension that you like. For example, WooCommerce has some advanced tax management systems, like Quaderno or TaxJar, for managing EU and VAT taxes. Those tools can be a great reason if you need to use something like that, and WooCommerce has been around a long time, so there are a lot of different extensions you may want, to get the best of both worlds, what WooCommerce has plus the incredible power of LifterLMS for your courses or memberships. There’s also stuff you might not find on the WooCommerce store, like CartFlows, a sales funnel builder for WordPress built on top of WooCommerce. If you want to use CartFlows to develop a sales funnel with upsells, downsells, and cross-sells, that might be a reason to use WooCommerce instead of just a simple course site with LifterLMS and Stripe, even if you’re in the US.

The History Between LifterLMS And WooCommerce

To give you a little bit of an origin story of LifterLMS and WooCommerce, LifterLMS has always worked with WooCommerce from the very beginning, and we did that from day one, even though we were adding our own payment gateways, so that we could grow with WooCommerce and make sure we didn’t exclude any people who needed to use WooCommerce for payment gateway reasons in their country, or whatever other tools they needed from Woo. We’ve always been with Woo on the journey. It can sometimes confuse people, whether they need LifterLMS native e-commerce or should use Woo to sell, but hopefully some of the reasons I just described can help you figure that out.

Just to be clear, if you’re going to use LifterLMS with WooCommerce, you need our WooCommerce add-on. You’re also going to need to install the WooCommerce plugin that’s made by WooCommerce, and for recurring payments to function in WooCommerce you need WooCommerce Subscriptions, another tool that makes the recurring payment magic happen. With LifterLMS, recurring payments are built in out of the box, but with WooCommerce you need this separate plugin to do recurring payments, and it’s a good plugin made by great people.

What Is A LifterLMS Access Plan

Just to talk about the genesis of where all this came from, our most popular piece of documentation in LifterLMS is about what an access plan is. About three years before this webinar, LifterLMS introduced something into the WordPress community where LifterLMS access plans basically handle all the e-commerce, the membership protection, enrollment, unenrollment, and setting up the student dashboard, all bundled into one. You used to have to string together three or four different plugins to make this happen, and then LifterLMS introduced the concept of access plans.

What happened is the native LifterLMS e-commerce engine became more powerful than the WooCommerce integration, and the people using Woo wanted us to add in as much of that native power as the LifterLMS e-commerce engine has. That’s what we did, and that’s what’s in WooCommerce 2.0 now. Anything you can do in native LifterLMS e-commerce, in terms of selling, membership protection, expiring access, and all that stuff, is now possible if you choose WooCommerce to sell as well.

Why Every LifterLMS Course And Membership Needs A WooCommerce Product

The thing to get clear in your mind is that LifterLMS courses and LifterLMS memberships need to associate with a WooCommerce product. If you’re using LifterLMS with WooCommerce, it’s a good idea to conceptualize it this way: if you’re going to create this course in LifterLMS, or this membership that’s going to do all this auto-enrollment and protect content outside of the course, one of the incredible features of LifterLMS memberships, you’re going to need to attach that to a WooCommerce product so that you can sell it, if you’re using the two together.

What that also does is marry the dashboard, so there’s some WooCommerce dashboard activity and some LifterLMS dashboard activity all in one place for a real user.

What’s New In LifterLMS WooCommerce 2.0

This is the LifterLMS WooCommerce 2.0 release post, which just rolled out recently, and in this blog post we walk through all of the things that are new in WooCommerce 2.0. This screen right here’s the access plans area I was telling you about, where you can create an access plan, and you can assign it or associate it with a WooCommerce product. You can do the association, and so on. The access plans can be developed on the courses and memberships, and develop pricing tables, you have got the course or membership expiration.

We also gave you an option to make your free courses or free memberships feel more like an opt-in, than going through a checkout through the WooCommerce store. And we added the ability to do variable products, and redirect people who are visiting course items to the catalog, to the WooCommerce product page, if you don’t want to display both the LifterLMS catalog and the WooCommerce catalog. I highly recommend you check out that release post, it will bring you through the ideas of what makes LifterLMS and WooCommerce awesome.

Three Ways To Connect Access Plans To WooCommerce Products

To help clarify, there are three ways to sell LifterLMS stuff with WooCommerce, and it can be confusing because there’s a lot of options and a lot of power and flexibility, so I want to make sure you’re clear on the different ways to do it.

If we look at the Music Course, I’ve got a one time payment and a monthly payment, and these are actually associated with two separate WooCommerce products. This one is associated with a one time payment, and this one is associated with a $200 subscription payment. So each access plan on a course or membership can attach to a different WooCommerce product, if you want.

You can also do, like with the Leadership Course, a variable product, where it says “from” here. If I click Enroll, I can choose a variation of this WooCommerce product, so this is one WooCommerce product that has variations in it.

And then the final way, which I don’t have an example of on this site, but just to make sure you’re aware of it, is you could have lots of LifterLMS products associated with the same WooCommerce product. So no matter which entry point people come through, they’re going to go to a WooCommerce product that’s actually going to activate more than one LifterLMS item, so multiple courses or multiple memberships. That’s a one WooCommerce product to many LifterLMS courses and or memberships option that you have as well.

Watching A Live Purchase Turn Into Six Course Enrollments

Let’s take a look at this site as a different user. I’m going to log out and sign in as Samuel. I’m on the dashboard, and you can see here that Samuel has this course. If we look at Samuel’s order history, this is the WooCommerce order associated with it, so this is WooCommerce territory right here, should look pretty familiar. Over here’s LifterLMS territory, and Samuel has earned an achievement, and you can see the notification history on the side as well. So this is LifterLMS stuff up here, and this is WooCommerce stuff up here. This is just an example of how the account dashboards of Woo and LifterLMS are merged together.

Let’s be a little more adventurous and do a checkout. The way this works on this site is this membership right here enrolls in every single course, so let me do the annual payment, that’s $10,000 a year. I’m going to sign up right now. Notice how LifterLMS changes the menu item, you can have sign in and sign out links, it kind of knows which state the user is in, so I’m logged out of this website right now, and I’m going to view my cart. I’ve got the $10,000 Platinum membership in it, and I’m going to proceed to checkout. I’m just going to fill out the billing information, a name, an address, an email address, and a password. I don’t have an extra $10,000 lying around, so I’m going to use a coupon code, apply that coupon code, and you’ll see it moves to $0, and I’m going to click Sign Up Now, and that’s how the magic happens.

There’s a lot of enrollment going on because this membership enrolled the new student in a bunch of different courses. If we go look, she got automatically enrolled in these courses, and she has got her Platinum membership, and she is ready to get started on the official LifterLMS Quick Start Course. You can notice the automatic enrollment all happened instantly. That’s an example of using the WooCommerce checkout to buy a membership that auto enrolled in six courses and processed $10,000 to the website.

Tools Worth Pairing With LifterLMS And WooCommerce

I also want to throw out, in the spirit of the WordPress community and the community nature of this ecosystem, where LifterLMS is working together with WooCommerce, I’d like to spotlight some other tools that I see a lot of WooCommerce users using.

One is WP Fusion, which is a way to connect your WooCommerce store to one of twenty different CRMs. For example, at LifterLMS, when we sell our course software, we use WP Fusion to connect our WooCommerce store to ActiveCampaign, just as an example. It’s a great tool, and they also have direct integration with LifterLMS as well as WooCommerce.

I’d also like to spotlight Liquid Web, a managed WooCommerce hosting company, and they have a getting started plan at $39 a month right now. So if you’re looking for not just basic shared hosting, but something more powerful and tuned specifically for WooCommerce, check out Liquid Web.

I also see CartFlows growing in popularity, for creating one click upsells and more advanced checkout scenarios with WooCommerce. And then I’d also like to spotlight the Astra theme, which is what we’re doing this demo on. They have got a lot of great features that make it easy to design your website, and they have integrations with LifterLMS specifically, as well as with WooCommerce. I really enjoy working with the Astra theme, another great tool out there.

Setting Up Access Plans To Point At The Right WooCommerce Product

I want to show you a few things in the back end. Let me show you the access plan area, and then we can get into some more details. If I go to look at the courses, and let’s say we were looking at the Music Course, you can see down here in the access plans where there’s a one time payment and a monthly payment. If I open this up, you can see this access plan is associated with a specific WooCommerce product, this is the Music Course one time payment product, and this is the monthly one, associated with a different WooCommerce product, which is a subscription product.

If I go look over at the actual products in WooCommerce, if we see the Music Course here, these are WooCommerce products, and I use the same featured image as I do with the LifterLMS courses. If I go to the monthly course product, you can see we’ve selected this one to be a simple subscription that’s virtual and downloadable. By the way, you need to set that up if you want the automatic enrollment to happen with digital products, if that makes sense.

Then we have the other Music Course product, the one time payment right here. You can see this is a simple product, virtual and downloadable, one time payment, $2,000, done.

Building A Variable WooCommerce Product For A Course With Multiple Prices

I want to show you something a little different. If we go to the courses and look at the Leadership Course, this is working with what’s called a variable product in WooCommerce. This one only has one access plan, even though there are still two different ways to buy it. If I open this up, I associated it with the Leadership Course product in WooCommerce. Now let’s take a look at our products, and if we look at this, this is a variable subscription product type. If I open up the variations here, you can see there’s a monthly and an annual, I can expand those, and you can see this is how you set up a variable product. So there are two different ways to have two pricing options, one is like two separate products in WooCommerce, and the other way is one product that has two variations, or more.

Setting Up Membership Auto-Enrollment And Its WooCommerce Product

I want to show you something even more complex, which was the membership auto-enrollment. This is our Platinum membership, and if I edit that, you can see down here, under auto-enrollment, when somebody buys this or gets access to this membership, they’re going to get automatically enrolled in these six courses.

In terms of purchasing it, this is associated with the Platinum membership, which is a WooCommerce product that’s also a variable product. If we go over to products and look at the Platinum membership, this is a variable subscription product, and if I open that up to the variations, you can see this is the $1,000 every month, it never expires, so it’s monthly, marked as downloadable and virtual, which allows us to have the instant order completed, so it doesn’t hang up in processing in WooCommerce. Then down here’s the annual option, where it’s $110,000 every year. That’s a quick tour of that, and you can see all your WooCommerce orders in the back here, and all the LifterLMS data and analytics in the reporting over here. So this is what it’s like to use LifterLMS and WooCommerce together.

How Much LifterLMS WooCommerce Costs And What The Bundles Include

I want to be absolutely clear on how, if you’re interested in using LifterLMS with WooCommerce, you can get started. If you head on over to the LifterLMS website and click on the pricing tab, you can see all the individual add-ons. The WooCommerce add-on by itself is $99 a year, you can purchase it individually if you wanted, but it’s also available as part of the Universe bundle and the Infinity bundle.

The difference between the Universe bundle and the Infinity bundle is that they both include the core LifterLMS plugin with all the features that make the LMS awesome. You have got the e-commerce, which in this case you’d be interested in WooCommerce, you have got the theme that we have, you have got the email marketing integrations we have, you have the form integrations we have, the text messaging integrations we have. But the Infinity bundle adds more stuff, you get the advanced quizzing system, the assignment system, the private coaching system, the Social Learning system, and you also get access to the live weekly Mastermind office hours that we do for Infinity bundle customers, a weekly group call. Those are the kinds of things that differentiate the Infinity bundle from the Universe bundle.

Trying LifterLMS Before You Buy, And Getting Help After

Just know that we have a 100 percent, 30-day money back guarantee, if you want to try it out and you’re not 100 percent sure, you can always get 100 percent of your money back within 30 days of your purchase if you decide it’s not what you wanted. You can also try LifterLMS before you invest and spend the $100 or the $300 or the $1,000, by clicking the 30-day demo button. This is a $1 trial, where our system builds you a temporary website that has all the LifterLMS add-ons installed, including the WooCommerce add-on, and you can play around with it. So if you’re the type of person who likes to test drive before you buy, you can sign up for that for a dollar.

You can also email us if you have questions, at Team LifterLMS dot com, and there’s a chat right here if you ever want to talk to somebody, if we’re online somebody will chat with you and try to help you find what you’re looking for. Our chat is a great way to get pre-sales questions answered too. You can also schedule a live call, if you go to the bottom of the LifterLMS website and click that link, you can schedule a live call with a member of the LifterLMS team who can help you talk through what you’re trying to do.

We’ve also got a getting started guide for LifterLMS and WooCommerce that walks through everything I showed you on this webinar, and more, so that you don’t have to try to figure out how to connect LifterLMS and WooCommerce together from scratch. We actually invest heavily in our documentation. And we also have something we just introduced, called LifterLMS Liftoff Sessions. This is a new thing for new customers who buy any LifterLMS add-on or bundle, you get access to a weekly live group call where we can help you answer questions live, make recommendations, or point you in the right direction. Some people prefer to interact with a live human being, and that resource is available for the first 30 days after you purchase. If you like that kind of thing a lot, you might consider getting the Infinity bundle, where we have that kind of call every single week, and there have been people coming every single week for years to the office hours Mastermind call.

How To Send Buyers Straight To The WooCommerce Checkout Page

Paul asked, when a visitor clicks on Buy Course, can we redirect them to the cart, or is there a way to skip that and go directly to checkout instead of displaying the link to the cart. I believed there was a setting in WooCommerce to expedite that, and Jose mentioned in the chat to Google “direct add to cart checkout URL.”

Brad, who joined the call live from the WooCommerce Facebook Helping group, walked through it. He pointed to a Business Bloomer tutorial and explained that one of the most powerful things people can realize is that to increase your checkout process and your conversions, you add one simple product to cart with a URL like lifterlms.com, question mark, add-to-cart equals, then the product ID, whatever that’s. What you’re doing there’s putting the person directly into the checkout, instead of having them go through the cart page, look over what they want, maybe second guess it, and then get into the checkout page. You want to get them directly to the checkout page.

That same technique extends to variable products and their variations, so you can build a direct add to cart URL for a specific variation too, like a specific length of subscription. And while looking at that WooCommerce settings page, there’s also a setting for “redirect to the cart page after successful addition,” which saves one more step in streamlining the checkout flow, just by clicking that box.

The AutoComplete Virtual Product Setting For Instant Enrollment

Michael asked, do virtual and downloadable need to be checked in WooCommerce products for LifterLMS automatic enrollment to work, and if so, why downloadable, when he is selling a course, not something downloadable.

In my experience with Woo, this is just always something you have had to do if you wanted to have that instant auto-complete order after checkout. In WooCommerce, without custom code, you have to set your course or membership as downloadable, even though technically it’s not really a download.

Brad clarified further: in WooCommerce, all you need is for the product to be virtual, and then you run over and Google either the snippet or the plugin that says “autocomplete virtual” for WooCommerce. It doesn’t have to be downloadable. There’s a plugin, or a snippet, you can add to do it. When you go to create a course in the back end of your LifterLMS plus Woo site, what you don’t need to check is downloadable, all you have to do is check virtual, then add this plugin, and your virtual products will automatically complete. In native WooCommerce, it will sit there and ask whether to update the order, make it processing, wait for shipping information, and so on. In LifterLMS you don’t need that, it just needs to auto-complete, so you click virtual, unless you also have downloadable assets, like badge images that a course creator is delivering along with the course, in which case you’d check both boxes. But for most course and membership products, you’ll just want to check virtual.

How LifterLMS Vouchers Differ From WooCommerce Coupons

A question came in through the WooCommerce Facebook Helping group: when a student uses a voucher, the order doesn’t auto-complete, they have to manually complete it, is there a way to make it so vouchers auto-complete too? And this person was using native LifterLMS, not the WooCommerce add-on, just so we’re clear.

A voucher is different from a coupon code. A voucher is more of an activation, not an actual order. If you’re using LifterLMS with WooCommerce, you can use this if, say, you have a course and you sell fifty seats to a company that wants to put fifty of their employees into it, and they send you a check for that, or you create a hidden WooCommerce product just for them, and they pay, and then you want to hook them up with a code. So you can create a batch of voucher codes, say twenty new codes with one use each, and whenever somebody activates one, it’s going to activate the membership. You could rename these, even put in certain people’s names, and email the client a spreadsheet with all the voucher codes for their team to hand out and activate.

It’s an activation, it’s not an e-commerce checkout, it’s not a 100 percent off coupon. If you go to the combined LifterLMS WooCommerce dashboard, or if you’re just using plain LifterLMS, it looks similar, you can redeem a voucher by entering the code right there, no e-commerce checkout involved. If that activates, it would activate the membership, and auto-enroll in the six courses from our presentation today. So it’s a voucher activation, it’s an activation of a learning program, not an e-commerce checkout, which is what coupons are for.

Does Running LifterLMS, WooCommerce, And Other Plugins Slow Down Your Site

Helmo asked, when you use all these plugins, LifterLMS and its add-ons, WooCommerce and its add-ons, WP Fusion, CartFlows, and maybe a page builder’s add-ons, does that cause speed issues.

The more complexity you add, the more that’s going to affect speed. In this case, for the demo I’m doing right here, this is pretty lightweight, there’s no page builder, no CartFlows, this is just plain LifterLMS, plain WooCommerce, the WooCommerce integration, and WooCommerce Subscriptions. It’s pretty lightweight, but that being said, LifterLMS is a platform plugin, WooCommerce is a platform plugin, these plugins can create users, they can create a fully functional online business for you that has lots of moving parts, and the more people you put inside those systems, the more resources you’re going to need.

That’s one of the reasons I mentioned Liquid Web on this call, as a managed WordPress and managed WooCommerce hosting option, and there are other great ones out there like WP Engine, and Kinsta is growing in popularity. These are managed WordPress hosts that aren’t the cheapest in town, but do better when your site gets more stuff going on, more people, more traffic, and all that. So when you add page builders and other things, you just have to take that into account, but with good hosting it’s not that big of a deal. I recommend taking a minimalist approach to plugins, just like an inexperienced website builder from what I see will sometimes add 40 plugins when they could have gotten the job done with 10. So be a minimalist, try to develop a minimalist aesthetic, and over time, as you get better and better at building websites, less is more, is kind of my thought. But you should not be scared of using something you really want to use, if you really want to use a page builder or a certain theme you’re used to, don’t be scared to use it, especially if it’s popular and well supported.

Why A Slick Checkout Design Alone Isn’t A Reason To Abandon WooCommerce

One attendee mentioned liking Shopify’s checkout better than WooCommerce’s checkout. That’s okay, if you want to use Shopify checkout, that’s actually something you could use with a voucher system, you could sell with Shopify and then, in the welcome email, send a link to a registration screen on your LifterLMS site so people can activate their voucher code. So it’s flexible, you could do that if you wanted to sell through a different system.

Brad jumped in on that one too: just because you like Shopify’s checkout better, that’s not really a full justification to completely jump over there, because Shopify has its own tradeoffs, its own subscriptions system, its own everything. Just because you like Shopify’s checkout, that’s fine, but go look at CartFlows or Build WooFunnels, because both of those, just because you like the layout of a checkout page, that’s not a great justification to completely abandon WooCommerce. If you look at what CartFlows or Build WooFunnels have done with their checkout, you can add validation, add verification, add reviews to the checkout page, all types of options that will even surpass the conversion rates of a Shopify checkout page. You can also very easily customize the LifterLMS checkout page itself, so those forms look however you want, you could turn the form upside down if you wanted to. Just because you like a certain checkout isn’t a great justification to completely abandon WooCommerce altogether. WooCommerce is really powerful, and there’s a lot you can do with it, without being boxed into a SaaS platform like Shopify.