Focus Mode: The New LifterLMS Feature That Gets Students to Finish

Focus Mode strips every distraction off the lesson page so more of your students finish what they start.

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How Focus Mode Helps More Students Finish Your Course

LifterLMS Focus Mode strips the header, footer, and site navigation off the lesson page so students see one lesson and nothing else. It is free in LifterLMS 10.0 and works on any WordPress theme. In this training, Chris Badgett covers why online course completion sits below 15 percent, the research behind distraction-free design, and a live demo of turning Focus Mode on and tuning its content width and sidebar position.

What You’ll Learn

• Why most online courses finish below 15 percent, and what every menu link on a lesson page costs you
• Where the distraction-free idea came from, two decades before any WordPress LMS shipped it
• What cognitive load research and landing page conversion data both say about clean pages
• What a student actually sees in Focus Mode on desktop and on a phone
• How to turn Focus Mode on, set the content width, and override it course by course

Key Takeaways

• Solve completion by subtraction, not addition. Removing exit ramps beats adding reminders and gamification.
• Update to LifterLMS 10.0 or higher, then enable Focus Mode under Settings, Courses. It is one checkbox.
• Set the content width to match the lesson. Narrow reads better for text, wide suits video.
• Do not assume your theme is the obstacle. Focus Mode is theme independent and replaces the lesson layout on any WordPress theme.
• Focus Mode applies only to enrolled students and site managers, so people browsing a free lesson still see your full site navigation and can still buy.

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Your Students Are Not Lazy, Your Page Is Loud

What’s going on? It’s Chris from LifterLMS, and welcome to this complimentary training on the all-new LifterLMS Focus Mode.

Your students are not lazy. Your page is loud. What do I mean by that? Focus Mode is available to all LifterLMS users, whether you are on the free plan all the way up to the Infinity Bundle lifetime license.

There are three things we are going to go around. Why people quit courses and disengage, because the dirty little secret of our industry is that low completion rates in online courses are a huge problem. Focus Mode works to help people stay focused, keep going, and not get distracted. We are living in an age of peak distraction. Then I am going to do the demo for you, and show you how to turn it on on your website.

Why Distraction Has Never Been Higher

Distraction in the world has never been higher. Think about whether you were in any way mildly or majorly distracted by artificial intelligence, things like Claude or ChatGPT or all the AI tools out there. We have infinite social media, infinite YouTube videos we could watch, infinite movies we could watch on Netflix or wherever. We have never been in a more distracted age.

80% of workers feel overwhelmed today by information, which is up from 60% in 2020. Just in the last half decade, attention has really reduced and gotten smaller.

Obviously, if you make a great course and your students are really engaged and focused, they will stay for hours and hours and days and months and all of that. But the flip side is the call to distraction has never been higher.

Why Online Course Completion Rates Stay Below 15%

The dirty little secret is that most online courses finish below 15%. Students sign up full of energy, maybe they are excited on the first day, first lesson, and then they just abandon. It happens.

What Focus Mode does is solve the problem of how every menu item on your website, the sidebar, the footer, are links to other pages and things on your website that can be a distraction.

We have been doing focus a lot. If you have been around marketing, you will hear of concepts like landing pages and one call to action per page and so on. The cool thing about Focus Mode in LifterLMS is that it takes some of the best thinking we already know to increase conversion optimization from a marketing and sales perspective, on a landing page or opt-in page or checkout page, and applies that to the actual learning process in LifterLMS.

One of the challenges of our time is what is called context switching. Any time you get interrupted while doing deep work, and there have been scientific studies about this, it takes about 23 minutes to recover that focus. Me personally, I call it enlightened multitasking. I save all that stuff where I am context switching to the end of the day, because if I start my day being distracted, that is just going to train wreck my whole day, and those 23 minute context switching things add up. We know this as entrepreneurs with time blocks and trying to create more focus. We need to do that for our learners, too.

Focus Is Subtraction, Not Addition

The key to focus is subtraction, not addition. The best learning experiences strip everything unnecessary away.

One of my favorite podcasters is Lex Fridman. He does three hour podcasts and they are really good. Somebody asked him once why they are so good. He said that when he is interviewing a guest, which he typically does in person, it is like the whole world goes away, and then these two people are just locked in a conversation with extreme focus for three hours.

That is the goal. Strip away everything and really focus on the matter at hand, which in learning is the lesson content, and quizzing, and assignments, and so on.

Where The Focus Mode Idea Came From

Focus Mode is not a new idea. It is a 20 year old idea. It was born back in the software industry in 2006, grounded in flow state and cognitive load research. It is the same reason a good landing page or opt-in page drops the header and the footer and leaves one clear call to action. The goal of Focus Mode is to remove distraction so that people move forward.

You have seen this before if you really think about it. WordPress itself has had a distraction-free writing mode for a very long time.

Or do we have any Canva users out there? For me personally, I was never really good at Photoshop, but Canva just has a lot fewer options and I found it much easier to use. Canva removes a lot of the options that were in Photoshop, but it is an awesome piece of software, because it is easier to stay focused inside of the tool.

What The Research Says About Clean Pages And Learning

Clean pages win. Some of the top performing LifterLMS websites are often very simple, a lot of white space, not too many links. What that does is reduce the cognitive load. A cluttered interface measurably lowers learning.

You know how in WordPress, because there are so many different settings and options, and you add plugins like LifterLMS or WooCommerce, and now you have got a million options? Sometimes it is hard to stay focused and get something done, and you end up in these rabbit holes.

Marketing proved the same thing. Removing navigation from a landing page can increase conversions up to 336%, and a single call to action by 266%. It is kind of obvious when you think about it. If you have a pricing page and it has a million links on it, people are going to be less likely to click that one buy now button.

Focus Mode brings that science to your lessons.

Why We Built Focus Mode Into LifterLMS For Free

We made it free. We made it available to everybody. We built it into the core LifterLMS plugin, so anybody using LifterLMS has access to the Focus Mode feature.

It is one of our company values. We have seven of them, and one of those is what we call Learner Results First. That means I care a lot about all you awesome people watching this webinar. You are users, our customers, and so on. But I care equally as much about your websites’ learners. We always need to advocate for our learners, and helping them focus is a great thing.

What Your Students See In Focus Mode

Focus Mode removes distraction, builds momentum, and works anywhere.

Here is what your student sees. The header is gone, the footer is gone, and all that is there is basically the lesson content. The navigation moves to the top, along with the progress tracking. It is one lesson with zero noise.

Focus Mode On Phones And Tablets

It is also extremely mobile optimized. Sometimes we forget, as power internet users, that we are always on our laptops and our desktops. A lot of online learning actually happens on the phone or on tablets, which have a lot less real estate. So it is important to keep the focus.

The Mark Complete button is sticky, which means it will always be there. If you have long lessons, it is always there, easy to find, and it really just puts the focus on the learning content.

Focus Mode Works On Any WordPress Theme

By the way, LifterLMS’s theme is called SkyPilot, but Focus Mode will work with any WordPress theme. If you are not using SkyPilot, I would encourage you to check it out, because it is awesome. But Focus Mode will work no matter what WordPress theme you are using.

It will work on your theme. You do not have to use SkyPilot, even though we heavily recommend it. It will work with thousands or tens of thousands of WordPress themes. You will love it, and it is going to perform on any theme.

Who Should Turn On Focus Mode

Who is this for? It is for course sellers, coaches, membership sites, compliance training, corporate learning and development, and much, much more.

If you build LMS websites for clients, this is another value add you can bring to the project by helping your clients understand what Focus Mode is and getting them set up for it. You are not just building a website for them. You are building a learning management system web application that has the learners’ best interest at the center and protects their focus, which is an even more valuable project.

This is a quote from Nick Usborne, who is a LifterLMS creator. He is a prolific course creator. He has a lot of writing and marketing courses, and he has done work for Apple, the New York Times, the US Navy, and many other places. He says: “I’m free to do things MY way with LifterLMS. I’ve never hit a wall where Lifter didn’t enable me to do things the way I wanted.”

We had requests for helping users focus, so we gave you the option. And if you do not want to use Focus Mode, you do not have to.

This is not about pixels. It is about the transformation of learners who stay until the end of the course, who complete the lessons, and who get the results that they came for. That is the whole mission we are working on, advocating for learners’ best interests.

We also had a comment from an attendee that it is easier on people with disabilities, which is true. If somebody is using a screen reader or other accessibility devices, having fewer links and options on a page really improves the performance of your elearning platform for people with disabilities, which is very important.

Live Demo: What Focus Mode Looks Like On The Front End

It is time to see it live. This is a website with Focus Mode on. We will jump into the LifterLMS Quick Start course, and into a lesson.

I am on a pretty big desktop computer screen, so there is a lot of real estate here. The sidebar has been streamlined, so the section toggles are here, which also increases focus. If we are in this section, we do not necessarily need to be paying attention to the lessons in section two.

If we really want to focus in even harder, our learners can close that navigation altogether and have their lesson content front and center, with just the basics: Back to Course, progress tracking, and lesson navigation up at the top. We can always bring that sidebar back.

Now imagine your student is on a tablet, at approximately this size. If somebody is on a smartphone, it is going to shrink down even more. You can see the sticky Mark Complete button that is available and helpful if you have really long lessons.

Our other add-ons, like LifterLMS Notes, work with Focus Mode as well.

Live Demo: Where To Turn Focus Mode On

That is what it looks like on the front end. This is not something that takes a long time for you to implement. You basically just check a box and turn it on. But you can also manage it in the back end.

Go to your WordPress dashboard, then LifterLMS, then Settings, then the Courses tab. The Focus Mode checkbox is right there. The setting reads: “Enabling this setting will display lessons in a distraction-free focus mode.”

Let us look at what it looks like if we turn that off and save the changes. Back on the front end of the website, go back to Courses, into the Quick Start course, and into that same lesson three.

At first you may not notice all the stuff we have removed, but it is a lot. The logo is gone. The menu and all those links are gone. There is a call to action here. We can see all the lessons. We can see the entire footer, which has approximately a button, a search box, and 20 links down there. Focus Mode removes all of that.

I am going to turn it back on and save the changes. Now if we refresh the page, we are back in Focus Mode, and we can always bring the sidebar in if we want to.

Live Demo: Content Width And Sidebar Position

Focus Mode also comes with some other options, so let us play around with these.

The content width is set to Default, which is 960 pixels wide. If we wanted it Extra Wide, we could do that, and that is going to fill up more of the container. It is of course still responsive. The full set of choices is Full Width, Extra Wide at 1600 pixels, Wide at 1180 pixels, Default at 960 pixels, and Narrow at 768 pixels. I usually just use the default.

The other thing is that some people like to have the sidebar on the left for the course syllabus. So we will move that over to the left, and if I refresh my screen, it is now over there. If you prefer to have your lesson navigation on that side, you can do that. I personally like it on the right, but it is up to you.

Live Demo: Per-Course Focus Mode Settings

You can also modify it on an individual course basis. Go to your site, go to Courses, open the Quick Start course, and edit the course. In the general settings you will find the Focus Mode content width, so you can set that on an individual basis, or use whatever global setting you have. You can also put the sidebar on the right or left and modify that per course.

And this is basically the on-off switch. You can enable Focus Mode, or turn it off for the Quick Start course if you wanted to. So there is the global option, and then if you want to modify it on a per course basis, you can.

Why Focus Mode Turns Off For Visitors Who Are Not Enrolled

There is one more thing I want to show you. Going back to the front end, I am going to open an incognito window, so I am logged out in this view.

If I look at my courses, we have got the LifterLMS Quick Start course. LifterLMS has this feature where you can display your syllabus, so people can get a sense for what is in the content. But they cannot actually get into the lesson content without enrolling. In this case, it is a free access plan.

LifterLMS also has this feature called a free lesson, where you give people a sample so they can access part of a course. You can see the Mark Complete button is not there, because this is a free lesson and this website visitor is not logged in and not enrolled.

Just as an FYI, you do not want Focus Mode on when somebody is browsing and considering taking your courses. You want them to easily be able to navigate around your site and maybe make a purchase.

So we designed Focus Mode to apply only to students who are enrolled in the course, plus anyone who can manage LifterLMS on the site. Anybody else, including a logged-out visitor previewing a free lesson, gets the normal theme layout with your full navigation. People who are browsing and shopping can still find their way around and buy. We have already solved that issue.

How To Get Focus Mode

What you just saw is distraction-free learning with momentum built in. It works with any theme and it is freely available for you today.

You can get it in two minutes. You do need to be on LifterLMS 10.0 or higher to get the Focus Mode options in your site, but as long as you are on 10.0, you are ready and able to use it.

If you are new to LifterLMS and you are on this webinar, download the free plugin or get started on one of the paid plans. If you are already on LifterLMS, make sure you are on 10.0 or higher. And if you are just getting started, consider starting with the Earth bundle, which is our lowest cost premium plan that has automated ecommerce included.

I would encourage you to turn on Focus Mode, or play around with it this week, so your students will finish more of what they start.

Creating Focus While You Build In WordPress

One attendee asked about creating focus on the course design side, so that while getting content into a course there is nothing on screen except the course being worked on. That is a great question, and there is already a solution for it, though it comes from WordPress itself rather than from LifterLMS.

Open a course and edit it. The first thing you can do is move the meta boxes at the bottom, which are the panels that plugins like LifterLMS add. Drag those out of the way and down to the bottom, and you can always drag them back up when you need to get at them later.

The next thing you can do is close the settings sidebar on the right, which gives you more focus. From the editor Options menu you can turn on Spotlight Mode, which dims everything except the block you are working on, and Fullscreen Mode, which removes the WordPress admin sidebar. Hover at the top to bring the toolbar back and turn things on and off, and you can always pop the sidebar back with the button in the corner.

One more WordPress pro tip. I personally do not like a cluttered WordPress dashboard. Most sites have all kinds of stuff on there with a million options, to the point where you cannot even see the LifterLMS panel. There is a Screen Options button at the top of the dashboard. You can move those dashboard widgets around, but one of the things I like to do to create focus is remove all that and keep only the ones I want. In my case I just keep the LifterLMS one.

Why Focus Matters For Your Learners

Thank you for coming. Thank you for letting me do my best work, and do what I love to do, which is to lift up others through education. I am really lucky that my life mission and my company mission are the same. Taking care of our learners and their focus is super important.

If you need anything, we are always standing by to help at team@lifterlms.com. You can come to our live calls, office hours, mastermind, and ask me anything calls, and you can contact our technical support team through lifterlms.com.

Thank you so much, everybody, for coming. I hope you have a great rest of your day. Take care.