How to Create a Training Site for Your Organization Using LifterLMS Private Site

Enjoy a demo of the all new LifterLMS Private Site add-on for restring access to your entire LMS website.

---

How to Create an Internal Training Site with LifterLMS Private Site

LifterLMS founder Chris Badgett, Kurt Von Ahnen, and Will Middleton walk through creating an internal training site with LifterLMS Private Site, the add-on that locks down an entire WordPress LMS behind one login. The session covers access plans, memberships, drip content, and time-based enrollment, then demos the Private Site integration settings, editing the login page, and blocking search engines, RSS feeds, and the REST API for unauthenticated users.

What You’ll Learn

• What LifterLMS Private Site does and how it differs from access plans, memberships, and drip content
• How to structure an internal company training portal around departments and playbook courses
• The full access control system in LifterLMS, from access plans and auto-enrolled memberships to enrollment periods and drip content
• How to enable Private Site, edit the login page, and lock down RSS feeds, the REST API, and search engine indexing
• Real-world use cases from corporate training, new-hire onboarding, and agency client work

Key Takeaways

• A private LMS is a fundable asset. Some corporate training departments spend six figures a year on hosted learning systems
• Put the private site on a subdomain when the public marketing site stays live. Put it on the main domain when the whole business is internal
• The page selected as the Private Site Login Page must contain the [lifterlms_private_site_login] shortcode or the integration will not display the login form
• Enable Discourage search engines, Disable RSS feeds, and Disable REST API for unauthenticated users together for a full lockdown
• Documenting processes as playbook courses in LifterLMS builds intellectual property that speeds up new-hire onboarding and makes the company more valuable

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

What Just Launched with LifterLMS Private Site

Chris Badgett: Welcome back to another complimentary training from LifterLMS. You’ve got Chris Badgett, Kurt Von Ahnen, and Will Middleton, and we’re going to be talking today about a new just-launched LifterLMS add-on called Private Site. If you’re here live and you stay to the end, you are eligible for a drawing to win a free year of the Private Site add-on. This is going to be an interactive session, so if you have questions about how to create an internal training site or how to restrict your entire eLearning website with Private Site, we’re here to answer that for you today. We are also going to be doing a demo of it.

So what just happened. LifterLMS just released a new add-on called Private Site, and I’m going to pull that up on my screen here. This is a new premium add-on, and essentially what it does is it locks down 100 percent of your website behind a single login. It even removes the header and the footer of your site, so that everything you have is completely private. You control user access. Everything is locked down.

The Internal Training Use Case

Chris Badgett: One of the most common use cases for a Private Site is what is known in the LMS industry as an internal training website. Which is a fancy way of saying, I am a company, I train my team members and employees, and this is a private website for our own internal training purposes.

What you see on the screen is a screenshot, and you will see the actual live demo of it in a little bit, of how we use Private Site with LifterLMS to create our own internal company training portal. Inside a business, it depends on how you organize your company, but LifterLMS exists with seven main departments. We have customer success, design, engineering, marketing, product, sales, and operations and admin. Within each of these buckets are training processes and procedures that we have documented, and our team continues to add to them, so people learn how to do various functions in the business inside this training portal for our company. That is essentially what an internal private training site is.

There are other use cases where you are just not selling courses or memberships to the public. It is private, it is confidential, whatever you are trying to do. It is all possible with LifterLMS Private Site.

Documenting Playbooks Makes Your Company More Valuable

Chris Badgett: The cool thing about it is if you have a company, your company is more valuable, whether you are a software company, an agency, any kind of service provider, or an e-commerce company. It does not matter what kind of business it is. If you actually slow down and document your processes and procedures, and you build a culture within your organization where others help to capture these training assets, you are creating intellectual property. It literally makes your company not only an easier place to work at, especially for new team members, but it also makes your company more valuable.

Where Private Site Fits Beside Other LifterLMS Access Controls

Chris Badgett: Just to go over it a little bit more, a private site protects your entire website, not just pieces. Only the login is available. There is no identifiable information about who is behind this website except for the URL at the top. You have got a login screen and a URL, and you 100 percent control user access.

LifterLMS already has a lot of access plans, controls, prerequisites, drip content, and membership bundling, which Will is going to get into in a little bit. But Private Site is the most extreme version. It is 100 percent locked down of your entire website.

A Corporate Training Manager Explains Private Site for Distributors

Kurt Von Ahnen: If you think about things from a corporate standpoint like a use case scenario, Private Site is super handy. My example, I used to be the corporate training manager for Suzuki. The company does motorcycles, boats, ATVs, all that stuff. They have a Marine division, and in the Marine division they found that they were having difficulty in getting field reps out to the new dealerships to onboard the new dealerships properly into the company processes. Things like how to order more motors, how to order accessories, how to process warranty claims.

If you are dependent upon a physical person to visit remote locations all over the place, this kind of hybrid example of being able to make a Private Site that people can jump into to get the theory before a physical person shows up to their store, well, it kind of fast-tracks everything. It helps build the relationship from a distributor standpoint to a retailer standpoint. When that field rep actually goes to that store, they concentrate more on the relationship and adding to the sale, rather than just getting people up to speed on how to log in, how to sign on, how to order a part, because all that was covered in the online scenario.

Why REST API and Single Sign-On Matter to Corporate Buyers

Kurt Von Ahnen: The other thing I found really interesting, and I do not mean to make it overcomplicated in this session, but LifterLMS has that REST API. When we talk about corporate integrations, single sign-ons, integrating with HR processes, having the site locked down except for login makes it easier and secure at the same time. That makes people who are C-suite type executives more confident with the idea of having an eLearning site added to their portfolio.

A Look Inside the LifterLMS Team Training Portal

Chris Badgett: I am going to do a demo of how we use Private Site here at LifterLMS. I will share my screen and show you a couple of different views. This first view is just the login screen. You can see there is no header, there is no footer. We have a message we added down here, and we also pulled a feature out of the LifterLMS membership functionality out to the front. But it is literally just a login. team.lifterlms.com is our private site, and if you work here and you have a login, that is what it looks like.

We 100 percent control access to the site. The site does exist on the internet, but only people with the login can see it. If you do have a login and you are able to log in, you actually can log into the LifterLMS private site.

Organizing an Internal LMS Around Departments and Playbooks

Chris Badgett: A lot of the stuff in here is private to our company and our operation, so I am not going to drill into the LMS and show you all our systems and processes, which we capture in what we call playbooks. Playbooks are a creative way to use courses where you can organize and structure the data around different topics.

At LifterLMS we have seven main departments. Sales, product, operations and admin, marketing, engineering, design, and customer success. Within each of these courses, the lessons are documented processes and procedures. We also use sections within courses to better organize that content.

How New Hires Get Onboarded Through Playbook Courses

Chris Badgett: If we hire, let’s say, a new customer success person, we give them a login to the site, we enroll them in the customer success course, which is captured what we have learned after eight-plus years helping WordPress professionals, subject matter experts, and business owners be successful with our product. That way, they can better help customers and users who are reaching out for help.

Private Pages, Policies, and Forms Beyond Courses

Chris Badgett: We also have other pages on our site, policies and things like that, that do not really fit inside of a training course. They are more just global policies. Those pages are all 100 percent protected by LifterLMS Private Site as well.

We have certain things like benefit packages that live on pages inside the private site. We also do some stuff with Gravity Forms to create a review system within the organization, and all of that is 100 percent private and protected by the Private Site add-on.

Now I want to think of Private Site as, you are 100 percent, I want to lock down this website like Fort Knox. But I want to make sure you see all the other nuanced ways that LifterLMS helps you control access, and how Private Site is different from those. So over to you, Will.

LifterLMS Access Plans on Courses and Memberships

Will Middleton: In LifterLMS there are multiple ways that you can control access to your website. There are a few different levels to this, and LifterLMS introduces a lot of these interesting access-level controls. Of course, in the back end of WordPress with LifterLMS installed, we have two areas, courses and memberships, that are pretty important for controlling access.

If we dive into a course or a membership and edit any of these, we will see that each course and membership has what is called an access plan. An access plan determines how people are going to gain access to this course specifically. In this case, I can see I have two access plans. One is titled A La Carte Course, so people can buy this one for five hundred dollars. And I have one that says Course’s Membership, so this is a free access plan, but only for people who are already enrolled in a different membership.

The access plan system is really the gateway for how people get into your LifterLMS website, and this applies to both courses and memberships.

Auto-Enrollment and Bundling Courses in a Membership

Will Middleton: Memberships are something we have at LifterLMS as a feature built into the core plugin, but we do not really emphasize it a lot when we talk about learning management system. There is the idea of a membership, and what does that include. In the case of LifterLMS, you can include multiple courses within one membership using a feature we call Auto Enrollment. You list out courses you want to allow access to when someone joins this membership. If someone purchases this membership via one of the access plans below, they are going to be enrolled into all of these courses. It looks like I have fifteen of them listed here.

So they are going to automatically get access to all fifteen or so of these courses within one purchase from the membership. They do not have to buy each course individually. That is the membership level we can use for access as well.

Enrollment Periods and Course Time Periods

Will Middleton: Another way to restrict access is based on time periods. We can have course start and end dates. If I jump into one of my courses and edit, we can dive into a tab, I believe it is Restrictions. We have an option to enable enrollment periods, so people can only enroll in this course during a certain date range if this is a time-based course.

We can also enable course time period so people can only access lessons in this course during certain time periods. If I am running a course once every three months, and it is a one-month long cohort-style course, that is where I would want to use the course time period. To say that this course is only going to be accessible for that period of time. Just by setting the dates, if this is a course that opens on June first and ends at the end of June, I can set that level of access here. That would be the course start and end date, as well as the enrollment period.

Drip Content and Prerequisites in the Course Builder

Will Middleton: The next thing we will take a look at is drip content. Drip content is something we see inside of our course builder. Each course in LifterLMS has the LifterLMS course builder, which designates the sections and lessons in order. We can set items like prerequisites. If we wanted to set a prerequisite saying that you need to complete lesson one before being allowed to move to lesson two, this forces an order that we need to complete the course in.

We can also include drip method as an option. This drip lesson becomes available a number of days after prerequisite completion. So you complete lesson one, then you have to wait one day in order to move to lesson two. Or we could say a number of days after enrollment. So this lesson will become available one day after you enroll in the course, or any number of days after you enroll. There is also the third option of a specific date. If you want this lesson to become available on a specific date at a specific time, you can do that as well.

At LifterLMS we ran a course before that was like a live webinar summit. We did not even have the content ready when we were selling the course. People were enrolling and getting in, but this was a course that was time-based. We were going to record the videos on a certain date with our guest speakers and then add the content into the lessons as we went. That was an example where we used the drip method to say that on June second we are going to have Chris on as a speaker, and then we will have this lesson become available at that time.

There are a lot of options in LifterLMS for restricting the content, and this is just LifterLMS on the side of the box. We have not even gotten into the Private Site setup yet.

Turning On the Private Site Integration

Will Middleton: With LifterLMS Private Site, what this feature introduces is a plugin that you can add to the back end of your WordPress website that adds a tab under the Integrations settings. I have a lot of them on my list, but LifterLMS Private Site, if I click here and enable this integration, what it is going to do is restrict my website. Only users on my website are going to be able to log in.

Like Chris mentioned, there was a login page. Let me pull that up. If I copy my link address to my website, I think I am going to have to re-share my screen to show you what the logged-out view looks like.

What Visitors See and Editing the Login Page

Will Middleton: This is what it looks like for someone who is logged out. Since I just installed the Private Site add-on, checked the box, now nobody can access my website unless they log in with this form right here. Just by installing the plugin and checking one box, we have restricted our site completely. That is a really awesome feature set, to be able to just control the access.

On the back end of WordPress, this is a page that we can edit. If I jump back over here to LifterLMS, I am back in my logged-in view. This is a Private Site login page. If I view this page as a website admin, I have the option to come in here and edit this page if I wanted to add some informational content, for example.

Chris Badgett: It just says login. It’s like, what does that mean? So you could add in, this is a corporate training website for LifterLMS, or you could put a logo up there or some message like, hey, if you think you should have a login and you cannot log in, give them a link on what to do. All kinds of stuff.

Will Middleton: Exactly. We dropped the LifterLMS logo here for our login page and reordered the items. You can do a talking-head embedded video.

Chris Badgett: You could say, if you are not a part of the LifterLMS company, go somewhere else. This is a lockdown internal training website. You could have anything you want on this page, but it is really nice to be able to update this so that when people go to your Private Site, they see it.

Will Middleton: Reload, now that I have made my updates, we can see a little bit of an explanation. I just threw in an image and some text. You could format this however you wanted, throw a video below it like Kurt said. That is the high level of how LifterLMS Private Site works.

The Four Private Site Settings You Should Turn On

Will Middleton: We have a few options in the back end. Under LifterLMS Settings, Integrations, Private Site, I will highlight these settings real quick. There is an option to enable Open Registration. If this is an example where you want people to be able to register themselves, you could check that box. What that is going to do is allow a register form to display below your login form on that Private Site page. That is nice if you want people to be able to register to your website.

For an internal training company, mostly people are going to be added to the website by a website admin creating them as a user. That is really the only way to get in. If not, there is no way to get in. But if you did want to allow people to register on that login page, check this box and that will give you the register form. You can edit that form under LifterLMS Forms if you wanted to change the fields.

Then a few options for search engine visibility. We are not going to need to rank for SEO on a private site, so I recommend checking that box. Probably disable the RSS feed, because we are not going to be sending out newsletters or having our posts available to the public at all. I also checked, only authenticated users can use the REST API. I usually just check these three boxes by default to lock down the site as much as possible.

That is a tour of LifterLMS Private Site and how the functionality on the back end of WordPress works to bring this internal training environment to life.

What an Agency Can Charge for Internal Training Site Projects

Kurt Von Ahnen: We have the URL right here, lifterlms.com/product/private-site. LifterLMS Private Site just launched, as Chris described. You have got the benefits, the screenshots, the details. The big deal here is that it is on sale for one hundred ninety-nine dollars for the year. It is also part of the Infinity Bundle. You can grab it with that.

Chris Badgett: Quick question for you. Just throwing out numbers, how valuable is it for an agency who is building a private site for a company? How much could you charge, or how much could you see somebody charging, to build an internal company training portal for a business? I know one hundred ninety-nine is not cheap, but how much could one of these website projects be worth to a company?

Kurt Von Ahnen: This question comes up a lot, and sometimes the numbers I say sound like they are crazy, but they are not crazy. I have worked personally with training departments that have spent upwards of four hundred thousand dollars a year to host their learning content. And they still had a learning department that made the content, that managed the actual content. It was four hundred grand a year just to manage hosting, membership, and all of that.

The value is definitely there. When I say talking about C-suite type executives, sometimes when you say, hey, why are you using a custom-built learning management system for four hundred thousand dollars a year, I can build you something for twenty grand and have it up by the weekend. That is going to throw a bunch of red flags, yellow flags up to a C-suite executive, because that is not the language they are used to hearing.

Typically when I bid these types of jobs out, it is in the forty to forty-five thousand dollar range, and that is for hosting and using their content for learning. If they need help with curriculum development, that is all on top of that package.

Upselling Ongoing Support and Learner Customer Service

Kurt Von Ahnen: Part of the upsell capability in the corporate training space is actually by offering that third-party customer service on the back end. Helping with their students who need help with logging in, or lost their password, or reset a password, or stuff like that. There is revenue on the back end of these deals that go with ongoing maintenance. This is the kind of tool that could be the linchpin that ties that all together.

To go over it again, it is one hundred ninety-nine dollars a year. Our page here covers the restriction of the entire website, deploy internal training, capture intellectual property, and bundle now, bundle later. We support the Infinity Bundle members like nobody’s business, with our weekly Mastermind calls and things like that.

Should Your Private Site Live on a Subdomain or Main Domain

Chris Badgett: One question I have seen come up about Private Site is, should I put it on a subdomain or not. I will pass it around the table a little bit, but I will just say what we did at LifterLMS. Our main website is for selling software, and we actually have our Academy site for the public on a subdomain. But for a Private Site, it made sense for us to also put the private site, completely different purpose, on a subdomain. For us it is at team.lifterlms.com.

If the whole website was dedicated exclusively to internal training, you could just put it on the main URL, like lifterlmstraining.com, or mycompanyinternaltraining.com. But I could see a lot of them ending up on subdomains or different URLs, because the business usually has a forward-facing website that they are not trying to lock down.

Will Middleton: Yeah, I think the only reason you would want to go with the main domain is for SEO. And if it is a Private Site, there is no real SEO value there. Everything is locked down. You are not really getting anything out of that. I think the subdomain is perfect.

Remote Onboarding and the Employee Experience

Kurt Von Ahnen: I am totally in on the subdomain thing, Chris. When you get to thinking about things like employee onboarding, I have been really active in the onboarding space with corporations since the pandemic, because they offered remote workplaces. Then the first thing they do is they say, hey, for your first week we are going to fly you to the corporate office so we can onboard you. And it is like, wait a minute, you promised me a remote job, why am I flying to the office?

Being able to take these theories and put them into a secure area on the web and let people onboard and train at a comfortable pace, I think adds a lot to the employee-employer relationship. It helps to honor the promise.

Chris Badgett: That makes sense. Kurt and Will, thanks for helping put on this Private Site complimentary training. Thank you all for coming. If you have any questions about Private Site or anything else LifterLMS makes, we are easy to reach. Just shoot us an email at help@lifterlms.com. Go check out Private Site, build an internal training learning portal for your business. It is going to make your life easier. It is going to make your company more valuable. I hope you have a great rest of your day.