Unlock Digital Sovereignty of Your Membership or Community Website

If you want to build an audience, get your courses built, and are at the stage of realizing you don’t want to spend a lot of money on a platform you don’t own. You’re ready to start building in WordPress, LifterLMS, & WP Tonic, you get the most ownership possible with flexibility, customization, and value for money.

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Owning Your Membership Site With Managed WordPress LMS Hosting

Will Middleton and Kurt Von Ahnen of LifterLMS sit down with Jonathan Denwood of WP Tonic to unpack digital sovereignty for membership and community website owners. The conversation covers why owning your platform matters, how a managed WordPress LMS host removes tech friction, and how to launch your first course in three months without getting bogged down by plugin choice, caching, or email deliverability.

What You’ll Learn

• What digital sovereignty means for a membership site owner and why hosted SaaS platforms take it away
• How a curated WordPress stack (LMS, page builder, CRM, forms, theme) removes the plugin-choice paralysis
• Why caching is the number one cause of LifterLMS support tickets and how a managed host handles it
• The three-month launch rule for a first course and why a smaller course beats a War and Peace course
• When a mobile app makes sense for your community and when it is too early

Key Takeaways

• Launch a small first course inside three months and let real student feedback shape version two
• Trust the LifterLMS presets on your first course rather than customizing the layout
• Ask any host you consider whether they turn off caching for logged-in users
• Do not build a native mobile app until you have real community engagement, roughly a thousand active students
• Text notifications through your CRM can serve as a minimum viable push notification

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Introducing WP Tonic And The Managed WordPress LMS Question

Will Middleton: Hey everybody, it is Will Middleton, Kurt Von Ahnen, and Jonathan Denwood. We are coming to you today with a live stream about hosting in WordPress, managed hosting specifically from WP Tonic. We are going to talk about what a managed WordPress host is, whether that is different from a managed WordPress host, the product offerings at WP Tonic, and how working with a tech partner like WP Tonic allows you to focus on the core subject matter and building your community instead of getting wrapped up in the tech, troubleshooting plugins, and all the things we get bogged down in.

Jonathan Denwood: Thank you so much, Will and Kurt. I have been looking forward to this chat.

Will Middleton: Awesome. Jonathan, do you want to kick us off by explaining what WP Tonic is as a brand, how you came to create it, and what it offers our listeners?

What Digital Sovereignty Means For A Membership Site Owner

Jonathan Denwood: WP Tonic tries to combine the flexibility, digital sovereignty, and ownership of WordPress with the ease of setup you would get from a SaaS product like Kajabi. We provide a middle road where you keep the best parts of WordPress, but we diminish all the separate elements you would otherwise have to figure out on your own. We provide those in a coherent package, plus a great onboarding service, and we get you over the slight hurdles that come with WordPress. You get all the benefits of ownership, digital sovereignty, and flexibility.

Will Middleton: When you say ownership and digital sovereignty, you are referring to the fact that on a hosted solution you have much less control over the style of your content, less ownership over your data, and less flexibility. That is a lot of what people are trying to escape.

When To Choose WordPress Over A Hosted LMS Platform

Will Middleton: Could you speak to what it is like to be on a hosted LMS versus a WordPress LMS?

Jonathan Denwood: It really depends where you are coming from. WordPress runs between 43 and 45 percent of all websites in the world, so most people have been exposed to using a WordPress site. If you like the experience and you are used to it, and you have decided you want to build a community or a membership website and become part of the e-learning industry, it is a great idea to continue with WordPress because you already know it.

If you have no experience at all building any kind of website, there will be a few more hurdles to jump through with WordPress. We have to be real about that. Depending on what you are trying to do, you may get a more unified experience with a hosted cloud solution. But if you jump straight into Kajabi with no experience, that is going to be challenging too. Most people want to build something real, with features and design decisions of their own, and for that WordPress is the better answer.

Solving The WordPress Plugin Choice Problem

Jonathan Denwood: The real problem with WordPress is choice. There is so much of it, and so many honest, different opinions about which plugins to use. I call them Lego bricks. You need a certain stack of Lego bricks to build a modern website: a page builder, a learning management system (one of the best is LifterLMS, which is fantastic), and a handful of other key bricks. You can spend a lot of time researching and trying them all out, and go down a real rabbit hole.

With WP Tonic, we have done that research for you and we supply those Lego bricks as part of the hosting package, fully licensed.

What Happens To Your Plugins If You Ever Leave

Jonathan Denwood: If you ever decide to leave WP Tonic and give us your notice, we will migrate the website for you. You can keep using those plugins. They get delicensed, but they keep on working. All you have to do is buy your own licenses to continue receiving updates. Unlike a cloud SaaS, if you stop paying you lose your courses, you lose everything, and they do not make it easy to get off their platforms in any shape or form. WP Tonic offers a real win-win for everybody.

What The White Glove Onboarding Actually Covers

Will Middleton: Can you speak to the pricing and the onboarding experience? How does WP Tonic specifically help users get over that learning curve while still leveraging the flexibility of WordPress?

Jonathan Denwood: Our starter plan is $55 a month, or $35 a month if you pay yearly. You get our white glove onboarding, which is roughly a 30 minute to an hour call where we go through everything with you. We learn what you are trying to achieve, then customize the plugins we are supplying. We have plenty of customers who have already built their website and are simply looking for a quality partner.

Handling Email Deliverability As Part Of The Hosting

Jonathan Denwood: We also deal with all the frustrations around email, which is one of the things that confuses new WordPress users. Setting up email on a traditional WordPress host is a whole learning curve on its own. We handle all of that, and we supply very generous email functionality for marketing and other forms of email. That is all part of the package, so it is not another loop to get lost in.

Will Middleton: Email deliverability is exactly the kind of thing people do not know to worry about when they get into WordPress. Even if you are comfortable with plugins and themes, there are underlying issues that become important. It is really nice that white glove onboarding covers those pieces as a true feature of the product, so you are not up at night wondering whether your WordPress site is broken.

The Page Builder And Kadence Child Themes In The Stack

Will Middleton: An LMS website is not a static blog. It includes complex functionality: e-commerce, payments, user logins, progress tracking through courses. LifterLMS is one of the products included in the WP Tonic suite. Can you speak to some of the other tools you have found to be the most valuable?

Jonathan Denwood: I am excited about the progress we have made. Aside from the LMS plugin (LifterLMS is a fantastic partner and offers so much value and flexibility), the other main Lego brick is what you use to build the site and the landing pages. We offer Elementor, and we do not force you to use it. If you want to bring your own page builder, that is fine.

We are also moving to Kadence because of the performance benefits. We have developed almost a dozen Kadence child themes that are specifically designed for membership and community building, and that is included as part of our package. You can pick one of those, or one of the other Kadence child themes, or bring your own. They are designed for membership, and the speed benefits of Gutenberg plus Kadence together are excellent.

Will Middleton: Kadence is one of the top themes in WordPress right now. Most popular, most installed. That is a great choice.

Why White Glove Onboarding Is Included On Every Plan

Will Middleton: We had a question in the chat: at what price point does the white glove onboarding kick in?

Jonathan Denwood: It is on every plan, from starter up. I just found it saves an enormous amount of back and forth. We serve a very diverse group of customers. We have websites with thousands of active members, and we have people starting out who have used WordPress a little bit and want to keep using it. White glove service saves an enormous amount of time and frustration. We want these customers to be successful, because when they are, they stay with us for years. A lot of our clients have been with us for years, and that is a real win-win. But it comes down to getting over that initial hurdle, which is choice, and white glove is the main tool we use to get people through it.

Launch Your First Course In Three Months Or Less

Will Middleton: One concept that puts this into perspective is the idea of launching early and often. A rule of thumb we came up with is three months or less. Have your course material together and your site live inside three months: the LifterLMS setup, the Elementor pages, the theme, the plugins. Get your product out to the market. The white glove service absolutely helps you get over that. The WP Tonic offering in general is designed so that as a course creator entering the digital world, you do not have to worry about getting bogged down in the tech, and you can get through the whole setup process in three months.

Why The War And Peace Course Backfires

Jonathan Denwood: This is one of the major things people have to understand. I call it the War and Peace scenario. For understandable reasons, people want to offer the most value to their students. They have all this knowledge in their mind, and they want to give it all. So they build very complicated, very detailed initial courses and spend a lot of time and energy on them.

The truth is, I would never advise you to do that in general. It is better to build an initial course that is smallish, that gets a quick victory for the students, and that enables you to get that first student batch through. You will learn so much from those initial students. Their feedback is what makes your next course much more valuable. And the more time you give to a project, the more life in general can interfere. If you can be focused, and have that finishing line in three months, and get that first course launched, things are going to go much better.

Stick With LifterLMS Presets On Your First Course

Jonathan Denwood: With LifterLMS, you get a really nice, modern back-end interface. You do not have to customize anything initially. I would really advise anybody to go with the presets when it comes to the lesson and course layout. LifterLMS has been on the market a long time and they provide a very clean interface. The beauty of WordPress is that when you get feedback and you want to adapt the actual course or lesson layout structure, you have that flexibility. You are not restricted. But you do not have to spend your first three months worrying about layout. Go with the LifterLMS presets, then adapt later when the feedback tells you what to change.

Why You Might Not Be Ready For Advanced Automation Yet

Kurt Von Ahnen: One of my frustrations is people who are not ready yet, and no one wants to hear that. But some people just are not ready for different automation tools and grandiose ideas, especially without an audience built yet. At some point your business is going to grow to where you want to focus on the business itself. You did not want to be a web developer. You have a product, or a service, or a knowledge base, and you are trying to share it with others.

There are 60,000 plugins out there in the WordPress repository. You could easily get lost and go down some crazy rabbit holes if you are new. WP Tonic curates a top list of really good, lightweight, high-performance tools. You look at your scenario and say, what is the best solution here? The white glove onboarding says, I would suggest you use A, B, C, and D. Then that gets built for the client. Change your text, change your pictures, and get a minimum viable product out so you can build the audience. If it is successful, you can always expand, change, bring on developers, and do whatever you want. The main thing is: get started.

The Free WP Tonic Membership Guide Checklist

Will Middleton: There is a free offer for anyone watching: the WP Tonic membership guide. Jonathan, could you say what someone will find in it?

Jonathan Denwood: It is a two to three page PDF. It is a checklist. If you are looking to build your first membership website, it walks you through what WordPress technology you need and what you have to think about to produce a modern course. It is not War and Peace. It is a nicely laid out, brief checklist. No matter what platform you go with (WordPress, hosted, cloud), there are a number of balls you have to juggle, and this gives you a checklist of the things you need to know.

Fluent CRM, Fluent Forms, And Fluent Booking In One Bundle

Jonathan Denwood: Because we provide the email functionality, we also include another great Lego brick to design your newsletter and send emails: Fluent CRM. It is our partner of choice. We do not force you to use it, and we offer other marketing automation products, but Fluent is our main partner.

What Fluent has done is give you a lovely quiver of plugins. You have Fluent Forms (we provide the Pro version), Fluent CRM, and now Fluent Booking. It is a great set of plugins aimed at coaches and e-learning entrepreneurs. Combined with Kadence and LifterLMS, that is a really powerful stack for doing email marketing and staying in contact with your students.

Why Pricing By Student Count Does Not Work

Will Middleton: Can you talk us through the different pricing levels? It sounds like the white glove service and the tech tools are included at every level. What is the difference?

Jonathan Denwood: It is a difficult one, because people want you to say how many students each plan supports, and you cannot do that. Some membership sites have an active membership but very little interaction. It is written content and some video, with not much back and forth. Others are highly engaged, with quizzes, discussion, and constant activity, so they are far more demanding on the hosting. Pricing by student count would be dishonest.

Why Caching Breaks Learning Management Sites

Jonathan Denwood: The other factor that really affects the experience people have with a great plugin like LifterLMS is that most people go with hosting that was never designed to run something like an LMS. The real killer for learning management systems is caching. It is the thing that causes the most support tickets for LifterLMS and it degrades the general experience.

We switch off all caching on our hosting for logged-in users. We customize it so caching only runs on non-login pages. That way we avoid all the endless frustration people get with 90 percent of general WordPress hosting providers. We do not want to deal with those tickets either. We are here to provide a premier experience, and we are one of the few hosting providers that handles caching this way for LMS and membership sites.

Will Middleton: That does make sense as one of the top features. If a website host lists LifterLMS on their pricing page, you know they are paying attention to the product and know how to support the sites people are building. Not having to deal with caching nightmares on a random Saturday in December when you are trying to relax is a big benefit.

Security, Backups, And Managed Plugin Updates

Jonathan Denwood: We keep all the plugins updated. We install something that allows us to roll back a particular plugin if there is a problem. We do that for security. We use the most powerful security and backup available, and we have three vectors of backup at WP Tonic. For customers who want more control, we also provide a control panel and staging.

Our security partners are MalCare and BlogVault. Those are used by the best WordPress hosting providers in the industry, and that is what we are using for one of our security vectors. We are not cutting back on security or backup quality.

When Your Community Actually Needs A Mobile App

Will Middleton: Question in chat: does WP Tonic create or support Progressive Web App (PWA) enabled websites?

Jonathan Denwood: WordPress is mobile responsive, and the themes we mentioned like Kadence are mobile responsive. That covers roughly 95 percent of what people actually need from an app. The one thing a responsive site cannot deliver is push notifications, and that is where a native app comes in.

One of our partners we love is BuddyBoss, which offers an app. The main reason people go down the app route is push notifications. At the right stage of your membership community, that is important. But most people fixate on the app at too early a stage. They should be concentrating on their students, the ease of use of the back end, whether the course really solves problems for the target audience, whether the email marketing is effective, whether the onboarding is effective. Look at an app solution at the right stage in your business progress. Not before.

A Minimum Viable Push Notification Path With Text Messages

Will Middleton: I have deployed minimum viable push notification solutions with text messages through a CRM. You can push a text notification that says, thanks for completing the course, here is the next one. You want to be careful not to overdo it, but that is a reasonable minimum viable push notification.

Jonathan Denwood: What a lot of people do not realize about apps is that unless you have a very engaged community at a certain stage, offering a lot of value through discussion, you are going to invest a lot of money on an app that never gets uploaded to people’s phones. It is not going to be used because you never got the earlier things sorted out: building the community, providing the content. Your leading community members become your evangelists. It pays dividends, but you have to do it in stages, and people get excited too soon about things they should look at later.

Will Middleton: I would never deploy an app for my own business if I did not have about a thousand active students already using it.

Kurt Von Ahnen: The app answers the question of demand. It does not create the demand. People get it reversed. They think the app is going to magically create demand. It does not. It is an answer to a pre-existing demand.

The Dopamine Hits Argument For Shorter Courses

Jonathan Denwood: It is a very similar scenario to the War and Peace problem. For understandable reasons, people think that by building a massive course with 20 or 30 hours of content, they are providing value. It will not necessarily mean your launch is successful. It usually means you spent a year building it, and if you ever launch it, you are giving even more energy to something that has not proven itself.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Will uses this phrase a lot. He says you have to go after those dopamine hits. What he means is you have to have short bursts of content people can complete, that give them the feeling they are accomplishing something. I downloaded an audio book, had no idea it was 14 hours long, and every time I see it in my library I get angry with myself because I am never going to finish that thing. A lot of people sign up for a really big course, see the value, but do not have the willpower to finish something that big.

When A Twenty Hour Course Does Make Sense

Jonathan Denwood: I signed up for a course about four months ago, and it is a massive course. Twenty hours of video and written content. But I am intermediate in the particular subject and I was looking to move to expert level. I was looking for something meaty. I am still working through it. I am 60 to 70 percent through it, and I knew I would take my time.

That is the higher intermediate to lower expert audience. They are looking for that big, meaty course. But about two thirds of the market are not looking for that. They are beginners and intermediates.

Will Middleton: In that case you are the audience demanding a bigger course. It is not that they decided to create a robust solution and the audience showed up. The audience demanded a robust solution and they provided it.

Jonathan Denwood: Exactly. He marketed to high intermediates and low experts. He is seen as one of the experts in his niche. That is why I bought it. He also ran an early bird price, which was attractive. I had followed his content on YouTube. I had made the decision that he was a genuine expert. Because of that, I was ready to sit with a course that requires me to rewatch videos and revisit concepts. That is the beauty of this platform: it gives you the time to rewatch, try again, and go back.

Bertha AI And Kadence AI Inside The Stack

Jonathan Denwood: One partner I did not mention is Bertha AI. We provide a free account to it, so you get full AI copywriting to help you write your courses. That is integrated with our stack of plugins. Kadence has also introduced AI to help with website layout.

We are still in the early days of AI in online learning, but I think it is going to be revolutionary. You will be able to have a real custom experience depending on your different learning styles and how you are coping with information. The course itself will be able to adapt to how you are dealing with what is being given to you.

Will Middleton: Learning is an extremely neurological process, and as these AI tools get integrated into WordPress, LifterLMS, and the WP Tonic stack, it opens up a whole new world.

Jonathan Denwood: In the end you will have a kind of quasi-teacher, quasi-mentor that is world class. Instead of going to an expensive school or college to be exposed to the best teachers, you will have that teacher in front of you, and that teacher will adapt to your learning style. That is coming much quicker than most people think.

Where To Find Jonathan And The WP Tonic Show

Kurt Von Ahnen: One more thing I do not want to escape the moment. Jonathan is online all the time. He runs the WP Tonic Show, where he interviews experts in WordPress and the tech space, usually on Thursdays and publishing the following Tuesday. He also has the Membership Machine Show, which does not focus only on WordPress. He talks about SaaS solutions on one side and WordPress answers on the other. It is a great conversation piece.

Jonathan Denwood: What is fantastic about WordPress now is that with Fluent CRM you have the power of ActiveCampaign at a fraction of the price. A couple of years ago that was missing. A lot of the hosted solutions have basic email marketing and automation. When you get to a certain level you find you cannot do what you want to do. You will not have that problem with Fluent CRM. It is easy to use at a basic level, and it grows with you. These marketing automation systems have become very expensive. With Fluent, Kadence, and LifterLMS, we now have really fantastic Lego bricks. The prospects for WordPress have looked amazing over the next couple of years.

Final Thoughts On Launching Your First Course

Jonathan Denwood: Build something that looks nice, get that first course out, and aim at the three month mark. That is the Goldilocks sweet spot. Anything shorter, you are really pushing yourself if it is your first course. Anything longer, life can get in the way. Aim at the three month window from beginning to launched, and go for a minimum viable course if it is your first. We would love you to build something on WP Tonic with LifterLMS. You do not need an enormous community to make a really good living and provide great service to your target audience. That is the beauty of it.

Will Middleton: Thanks everyone for joining us on this LifterLMS webinar with Jonathan Denwood from WP Tonic. Thanks for joining us, Jonathan. We will see you in the next one.