How to Create a LMS Site on High Quality Affordable WordPress Hosting
How to Set Up WordPress LMS Hosting for LifterLMS
This webinar walks through how to create a WordPress LMS site on high quality, affordable hosting using the Cloudways one-click LifterLMS bundle. Chris Badgett of LifterLMS demos the free-trial signup, tours a preinstalled Infinity Bundle site, and covers sales page design, course sidebars, multimedia lessons, gamification through Engagements, access plans, product launches, and why hosting quality decides whether an online learning platform scales.
What You’ll Learn
- Why hosting quality is a load-bearing decision for any WordPress LMS site
- How the Cloudways one-click LifterLMS bundle spins up a fully working Infinity Bundle site with no credit card
- How to use the LifterLMS signature course sales page template, sidebar widgets, and multimedia lesson types
- How gamification works through the LifterLMS Engagements system, including achievement badges, certificates, and personalized emails
- How to build access plans for one-time payments, payment plans, upsells, and product-launch style pre-selling
Key Takeaways
- Start by test-driving LifterLMS on Cloudways for free before you commit to hosting or a license
- Use the signature course template as a starting point instead of designing a sales page from scratch
- Add the LifterLMS Course Progress and Course Syllabus widgets to lesson sidebars so learners always know where they are
- Attach an Engagement to a triggering event like course completion to fire a badge, certificate, or email automatically
- Set a future course start date under Restrictions to pre-sell a course while you finish building it
Frequently Asked Questions
No. The Cloudways one-click LifterLMS bundle spins up a fully working site with the Infinity Bundle add-ons already installed for a free trial period, no credit card required. If you decide to keep the hosting, you add a card inside Cloudways. If you want to keep using the paid add-ons after your trial, you buy a LifterLMS license at lifterlms.com/pricing.
Yes. Every add-on can be purchased on its own. Go to Software then Add-ons at lifterlms.com to see the full list. Bundles exist for people who want everything (Universe or Infinity), but if you only need one piece like LifterLMS Groups or a payment gateway integration, you can buy that add-on by itself.
The bundle site ships with the Kadence theme, which is popular in the LifterLMS community. You are not locked to it. LifterLMS is designed to work with any well-built WordPress theme, so you can switch to a different theme at any time if you have a different design in mind.
Yes. On the course, open Restrictions and set a future course start date. Learners can buy the course through your access plans right now, but they will not be able to open the lessons until the start date passes. This lets you run a product launch, collect payments, and finish the content in parallel.
LifterLMS uses a feature called Engagements. You pick a triggering event, like a learner enrolling, completing a lesson, passing a quiz, or finishing a track, then attach an achievement badge, a certificate, or a personalized email to that event. It fires automatically and shows up on the student dashboard.
Yes. If you are switching from another host and you are not happy where you are, Cloudways handles the migration for you. That removes the biggest reason people put off changing hosts and lets you get the LifterLMS-tuned stack without doing the move yourself.
Because LifterLMS runs on top of WordPress, you can build any content WordPress can hold. That includes video, audio, embedded PDFs, PowerPoint slides, text with images, tabbed content, and interactive lessons built with tools like H5P. The LMS layer wraps that content in structure, progress tracking, and reporting.
Full Webinar Transcript
Why Hosting Makes or Breaks a WordPress LMS Site
Welcome to this complimentary training on how to create an LMS site on high quality, affordable WordPress hosting. This is not a typical slideshow presentation. We are going to navigate through a bunch of websites, build sites, and look at hosting in real time, so this is more of a demo-style session.
Hosting is a real pain point when you are choosing an LMS. LifterLMS is an advanced full-stack all-in-one solution for building a learning management system on top of WordPress. It is not a simple plugin that does one little thing. You are essentially building a whole learning experience with user accounts, progress tracking, reporting, and data on top of your WordPress site, so you need high quality hosting to run it well.
The good news is that people want great hosting with fast, high quality support, but they also do not want to pay too much for it. There has been real innovation in the WordPress hosting space around solving exactly that trade-off.
The Cloudways and LifterLMS One-Click Bundle
A while back, Cloudways reached out to us because they wanted to solve one of the biggest challenges in WordPress. Specifically, getting all the technical details set up for a hosting account with WordPress and LifterLMS so someone could quickly launch an online school, course, or academy without wrestling with the plumbing.
Here is the cool thing they did. They made it possible to try Cloudways hosting and everything LifterLMS makes in the Infinity Bundle for free, for a trial period, with sample content already in place. You get to try it out before making the commitment to pay.
The way it works is straightforward. Click the button on the Cloudways LifterLMS landing page, fill out a short form, and enter a few details. Behind the scenes it builds you a fully working site with LifterLMS and the Infinity Bundle installed, and the pricing to keep the hosting after your trial is very approachable for a real WordPress LMS stack.
How the Free Trial Works and When You Enter a Credit Card
Cloudways instantly builds a hosting account for you with no credit card on file. In about five minutes, you have a WordPress install with LifterLMS and every add-on in the Infinity Bundle already active on the site. That is very different from starting with a blank WordPress install and having to source, install, license, and configure every piece yourself.
If you decide to keep the Cloudways hosting, there is a place inside the Cloudways account where you enter your credit card and confirm you would like to keep the site running. If you want to move forward with LifterLMS beyond the trial, you go to lifterlms.com and grab a license for the bundle that works for you.
Even if you already have hosting and are not ready to move, you can go look at the demo site, poke around, and try everything out completely for free without putting a credit card on file.
What LifterLMS Actually Is on Top of WordPress
LifterLMS is a leading learning management system for WordPress. It helps you create, launch, and scale high value online learning platforms, whether you call it a course, a coaching program, a membership site, or a remote school.
Because it is built on top of WordPress, and WordPress is a content management system, LifterLMS inherits WordPress’s ability to put pretty much any kind of content on the screen. The LMS layer comes in on top of that and lets you structure that content, track learner progress, and design real learning experiences through courses, memberships, and everything around them.
Our mission at LifterLMS is to lift up others through education. There is a talented group of people behind LifterLMS doing all kinds of different things to make the platform work, and you can see the team on the LifterLMS about page.
Who LifterLMS Is Built For
There are three main use cases for LifterLMS across the community. Subject matter experts who want to teach and monetize their expertise. Schools and formal training organizations. And businesses that use LifterLMS to deliver training either to staff, to partners, or to customers.
You can see the mix on the LifterLMS success stories page, where the case studies show subject matter experts, schools, and businesses all using the same platform for very different purposes. That range is why the hosting question matters. If any one of those sites takes off, the underlying stack needs to hold up under real traffic.
Cloudways handles the switch and migration side too, so if you are already running LifterLMS somewhere and you are not happy with your current host, moving over is much less painful than most people assume.
The Five Focus Areas Covered in This Walkthrough
There are five focus areas to walk through on the demo site, all things worth thinking about as you set up your own LifterLMS platform. The first is sales page design. The second is how to think about sidebars in the learning management system. The third is how to think about multimedia lesson content as you take on the role of teacher and instructional designer.
The fourth is gamification, which is a big part of what LifterLMS supports through certificates, achievement badges, and engagement emails. And the fifth is e-commerce and memberships, meaning how you sell access and how you control who gets into what.
All five are covered on the Cloudways bundle site right out of the box, which is what makes the walkthrough possible.
Sales Page Design With the Signature Course Template
It is popular in the course creation community to have a main course, sometimes called a signature course, that carries higher price and higher value. LifterLMS ships with a template you can use if you want a course sales page that is already laid out well, with a signature-course instructional framework already in place. You come in and replace the starter content with yours.
The template even includes lesson videos that explain how to use that particular method of instructional design to monetize your skills, life experience, and passion as an online course. It is a huge resource for fast-tracking your instructional design and laying out a course sales page that actually converts. The e-commerce components are ready to go so you can set up a one-time payment, a payment plan, and a private-coaching upsell without building the plumbing yourself.
The Anatomy of a High-Converting Course Sales Page
Look at what the signature-course sales page template actually contains. At the top there is the promise, which is the message that grabs the visitor, paired with a call-to-action button that jumps down to the payment plan. Then a row of trust logos and a transformation section, because a lot of course creators get wrapped up in dumping every hard-won piece of life experience into the course, when what really matters is the transformation the learner walks away with.
Then a social proof block with student testimonials. A three-pillars section that describes the three things or three ways your teaching approach is different, which forces you to actually name your positioning. A what-you-get section. The course curriculum, which you can hide until purchase if you prefer. Segments or avatars showing who this course serves. An instructor bio, the pricing, sales FAQs, a cost-of-inaction close, and a final call to action with the guarantee and the e-commerce trust icons.
That structure is roughly fifteen years of marketing and sales-conversion study baked into a page you can start editing today.
Importing the Signature Course Template Into an Existing Site
If you go with the Cloudways LifterLMS bundle starter, this template is already inside your site, already built, waiting for you. You do not have to import anything, it is ready to go.
If you are already using LifterLMS on your own hosting and you want the template on your site, open LifterLMS, then Import. The signature course template shows up in the list. Click the button and it adds a full copy of the course, the sales page, and the framework to your site. You can import it more than once if you want to run several courses using the same sales-page technique.
Course and Lesson Sidebars With Progress and Syllabus Widgets
Once you jump inside a course, you can see a sidebar on the lesson pages. LifterLMS ships with a couple of widgets designed for course and lesson layouts. If you have a sidebar on the course or lesson template, you can drop these widgets in and they are genuinely helpful for learners. They see where they are in their progress, they see what they have already completed, and they can navigate the syllabus without leaving the lesson.
To set this up, go into the WordPress admin, then Appearance, then Widgets. Add a widget to the sidebar area. Search for “progress” and you will find the Course Progress widget. Search for “syllabus” and you will find the Course Syllabus widget, which you can also set to collapsible so only the section the learner is in is expanded. It is easy to configure and it changes the lesson experience.
Not every page needs a sidebar. In the demo, the main course page does not have one, but the individual lessons do. The student dashboard picks up a lot of the same navigation, so learners can always pick up where they left off.
Building Multimedia Lessons Inside LifterLMS
Because LifterLMS is built on top of WordPress, and WordPress is very good at putting any kind of content on a page, you have real range on the multimedia side. The demo course walks through several lesson types.
There is a video lesson, which is the most common. Audio content for podcast-style lessons. Lessons that mix text and images. Embedded PDF lessons where the whole PDF displays inline. PowerPoint lessons, which need an extra plugin installed to render slides inside a page. Tabbed content, so a single lesson can hold multiple stacks of related information behind tabs. And interactive content built with H5P, which is a tool for building interactive lesson widgets.
There is really no limit to what you can put inside a course, because you are inheriting the full WordPress content ecosystem underneath.
Quizzes and Assignments Inside the Course Builder
Inside the LifterLMS Course Builder, you can add quizzes directly onto any lesson. Open the lesson in the Course Builder and start adding questions of different types. You can build the quiz right there next to the lesson content, so the flow between reading, watching, and being tested stays inside one screen.
Assignments live in the same builder. If you enable assignments, you can put together task lists, upload prompts where learners submit files, and essay prompts. It is the layer of the LMS that lets you go beyond passive content and ask the learner to actually do something you can review.
Gamification Through the LifterLMS Engagements System
Gamification runs through a feature called Engagements. The idea is that there is a list of triggering events, and you attach outcomes to those events. When the event fires, the outcome runs automatically.
The triggering events cover most of what happens on a learning platform. A visitor becomes a new user on the site. They purchase a particular access plan. They enroll in a course. They complete a course. They pass or fail a quiz. They complete a section. They complete a track, which is a group of courses. They enroll in a membership, or they purchase a membership.
For each of those, you decide what should happen. Attach an achievement badge that pops up on the student dashboard. Award a certificate. Send a personalized email. This is how you build a learning experience that feels alive without having to hand-fire anything.
Achievement Badges, Certificates, and Engagement Emails
Achievement badges are simple. Design one, then tie it to a triggering event through an Engagement. When the learner hits that event, the badge shows up on their student dashboard, and it is a visible marker of progress.
Certificates work the same way. You can use them for anything from a college-style credential, to a continuing-ed certificate for mandatory license hours, to a fun certificate of completion for a lighter course. The LifterLMS certificate builder has been modernized to use the WordPress block editor, so you design certificates the same way you build a page.
Email engagements are the third leg of the system. You write a personalized email, tie it to a triggering event, and it fires the moment that event happens. Something like completing a difficult lesson can pull an encouraging email straight into the learner’s inbox with no manual work on your end.
Building a Course Outline in the Course Builder
Building an actual course takes very little time. Create a new course inside WordPress, give it a title, set a featured image, and publish it. Then jump into the Course Builder. From there you can lay out sections and lessons directly on one screen.
Add three sections. Add three lessons under each section. If you are working with a video host like Vimeo Pro and you already have your lesson videos uploaded, drop them straight into the lessons as you build. Add quizzes to lessons from the same screen. Within a minute or two you have a working course outline, a set of lessons, and the structure your learners will move through.
Setting Up Access Plans for Payments and Upsells
E-commerce lives in Access Plans on the course. Back out of the Course Builder to the WordPress editor for the course, and find Access Plans in the sidebar. This is where you set the ways someone can buy your course, or a membership, or a coaching package. Any pricing model that makes sense for the product.
Add a one-time payment plan for a thousand dollars and save it. Add a payment plan of a hundred dollars per month for twelve months. Add a private coaching upsell as a one-time payment of ten thousand dollars. Within a minute or two, you have a fully working course with three real pricing options attached, ready for a learner to buy.
The same access-plan interface works for memberships and any other product you want to sell through LifterLMS. There is very little pricing or monetization use case you cannot express through it.
Pre-Selling a Course With a Future Start Date
There is a nice pattern for pre-selling a course that is worth calling out. On the course itself, open the Restrictions settings. Set a future course start date. Now people can buy the course through your access plans right now, but they cannot get inside the lessons until the start date passes.
This is how you run a product launch on top of LifterLMS. Sell access first, finish building the content in parallel, and open the doors on the day of the launch. It takes a couple of clicks to configure and it changes how you can market a course before it is finished.
Why Cloudways Is Easy to Scale as Your Course Grows
The area of the WordPress admin under LifterLMS covers memberships, engagements, orders, and student reporting. You can collect custom information as learners register and display that information on the site, in certificates, and elsewhere. It is a lot of surface area, which is exactly why the hosting underneath has to be solid.
If your site takes off and you have tens or hundreds of thousands of people on it at the same time, your server needs to be more powerful. Cloudways makes it easy to scale up when that happens. You can start on an approachable plan and grow into a bigger stack without switching hosts. That is probably the single best feature of working with them.
When It Makes Sense to Switch Hosts
Hosting is one of those decisions where, if you are with a host and you are happy, it may not make sense to move. Even so, it is worth keeping an eye on the landscape.
A couple of years ago we saw a lot of LifterLMS users on SiteGround. Then some of their experiences started to decline, users were not able to get their issues resolved, and we eventually stopped recommending them because we could not work with them to solve the new issues that came up. Watching the hosting market matters over time.
Personally, I run several hosting accounts across different providers. If I were starting a brand new project today, I would drop in on Cloudways after what I have seen from them and their team. Nexcess is another high quality host we recommend. LifterLMS itself has run on a mix of platforms over the years, and the right answer depends on where the site is going.
If you are in the market for hosting, Cloudways is the most advanced integration I have seen from a web host for LifterLMS. Whether you are a do-it-yourself course creator, a subject matter expert entrepreneur, or a WordPress professional building LMS websites for clients, the LifterLMS on Cloudways bundle is worth trying.
