Launch a LifterLMS Website in Seconds on the WP Engine Platform!

WP Engine’s LifterLMS site template is the fastest way to build your online training platform and community. Launch your LifterLMS site in seconds on the world’s leading hosting platform for WordPress.

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Launch a LifterLMS Website in Under an Hour With WP Engine Site Templates

Chris Badgett of LifterLMS and David Vogelpohl of WP Engine walk through the LifterLMS site template inside a WP Engine account. In about three minutes the platform provisions a new WordPress install with LifterLMS, the Genesis theme framework, and a set of Genesis themes ready to activate. From there a one-click theme setup, the LifterLMS setup wizard, and the block editor take a live course site from blank to launched inside an hour.

What You’ll Learn

• How the LifterLMS site template on WP Engine bundles LifterLMS, Genesis, and starter content into a single one-click provision
• How WP Engine’s automatic daily backups and one-click restore protect you when a live change goes wrong
• How the Genesis one-click theme setup loads starter pack demo content that actually matches the theme
• How the block editor and Atomic Blocks layouts let a non-developer restyle a page in minutes
• How the Local app fits into a safer workflow so you can test changes off your live site
• How Chris and David think about running an LMS on a sub-domain versus the main site

Key Takeaways

• Choose the site template up front so LifterLMS, Genesis, and the recommended themes are already installed on the latest versions
• After the WordPress admin loads, run the LifterLMS setup wizard first and set your permalinks to Post Name before anything else
• Activate a Genesis theme and pick a starter pack that fits the tone of the business, then edit the content in the block editor
• Do larger design work in a Local copy pulled from WP Engine, then push it back up when the change looks right
• Ship a first pass fast. Replace the demo images and copy with your real story once the structure is in place

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Welcome and the WP Engine Partnership

Chris Badgett: Hello and welcome to this training webinar. I’m Chris Badgett from LifterLMS, and I’m joined by David Vogelpohl from WP Engine. Welcome, David.

David Vogelpohl: Thanks, Chris. Glad to be here. I’m super excited to get into it with you today.

Chris Badgett: What we’re going to present here really speaks to the beauty of the WordPress community, and to a couple of companies collaborating in service of the WordPress user and their customer’s experience. WP Engine has developed something called the site templates program, and they’ve chosen to partner with LifterLMS on one of them, which we are super grateful for. It’s a great intersection of high-quality hosting, a flexible learning management system, and a website that’s kind of ready to go so you can start moving quickly toward launch.

A fun history fact. LifterLMS’s first launched software demo was on the Genesis framework, so here we are full circle. David, thanks for coming on with the LifterLMS audience today. I think what WP Engine has done here with LifterLMS is a great service to the course building community.

Who This Webinar Is For

Chris Badgett: If you’re on this webinar, you’re likely what we would call an education entrepreneur. Either you are one yourself, or you are building websites for clients in that niche. That could be a single online course, a more complex online school, a training-based membership site, or a coaching program. It could be a higher-ed or K-12 site. It could be adult learning. There are companies that use LifterLMS to build internal training portals for their employees. There are lots of different ways to use it.

One of the things that makes technology challenging is that WordPress is so powerful and so flexible, and there are so many options out there. Especially if it’s your first time, or you’re building sites for clients and you’re trying to use a great tech stack and master it, there is a learning curve and it takes time.

The Philosophy Behind Site Templates

David Vogelpohl: We’re excited as well, and really appreciate the partnership. The objective with the site templates program, and particularly the partnership with LifterLMS, is to make it easier for people to launch that next digital experience or website. For the DIY builder, some of what I’m going to demo is really helpful, but I want to reinforce that for the hardcore developer, some of this is helpful too. Everybody likes an easy button, and that’s really the philosophy behind all of this, to create an effortless experience for our customers.

Signing Up for a WP Engine Account

David Vogelpohl: I’m going to screen share and start on the WP Engine LifterLMS landing page. When you land there, the partner coupon is applied automatically, so the discount is already in your cart when you go to check out. From that page you scroll down and pick the plan that’s right for you, and you can see the discounts applied.

I’m not going to bore you with the signup form or enter any personal credit card details on a screen share, but once you enter your information and complete signup, your WP Engine account is created.

Touring the Sites View

David Vogelpohl: When you log into your WP Engine account, this is the home page, what we call our sites view. You can see the sites I have already created. This is literally my personal account. Some of these are test sites I made leading up to the webinar.

To create a new site, click Add Site. Name your site. I’ll call this one lifter live demo. You can optionally select a site group. Site groups let you organize sites by client work or by brand. A lot of course providers have one brand for one type of customer and a second brand for another, and site groups let you keep those tidy. I’m going to leave this one ungrouped.

Creating a Site From a Template

David Vogelpohl: The next step is to create a production environment. This is going to be your live website. You have three choices. You can create a new blank WordPress install, you can create one from a template, or you can copy from an existing site. There is also a fourth option to move a site from another host with the WP Engine migration plugin. Today we are going to create one from a template.

I’ll name the environment. Now I see I have three site templates to choose from. One includes HubSpot and Genesis themes. One is a Genesis-only template with Genesis and a bunch of Genesis themes. The third is the LifterLMS site template, which also includes Genesis themes, but its key feature is that the LifterLMS plugin is pre-installed. We’re going to select that one and click Create Environment.

What is happening on the back end is that our provisioning systems are finding the right server for your site, provisioning it there, and installing the LifterLMS site template version of WordPress on top. I did this earlier today, and it took three minutes. I’ll spare us the three-minute wait and switch over to the one I created before the webinar.

Automatic Daily Backups and One-Click Restore

David Vogelpohl: This is a newer WP Engine feature and one I personally think is magic. On the site’s overview screen you can assign a domain, enable the CDN, set up redirect rules, and access backup points. WP Engine automatically backs up your site every day. If you happen to break your site, you can come here and restore it to a previous point in time.

Chris Badgett: If that hasn’t happened to you yet, it is only a matter of time.

David Vogelpohl: Right. And someone in the audience just said they used this restore feature yesterday and it saved them a lot of time. The other cool thing is you don’t need a developer for it. You can restore no matter your skill level. There are also access logs, FTP users, SSL, and one-click WordPress-to-WordPress migration on this same screen.

Logging Into WordPress and Running the LifterLMS Setup Wizard

David Vogelpohl: I have not logged into WordPress yet on this install, and there is a reason. Clicking the WordPress admin link logs me straight in as an administrator. The first time you log in, the LifterLMS setup wizard triggers automatically. If you dismiss it and want it back, go to LifterLMS → Status → Tools & Utilities and click the button to rerun the setup wizard.

Chris Badgett: That’s right. You’ll find it under Status. It’s a good one to know.

David Vogelpohl: Here is the standard LifterLMS onboarding wizard. It sets up the pages you need, like the course catalog and the membership catalog. I’ll walk through it. I’m in the United States, US dollars looks good, I’ll skip offline payments, get my coupon on the feedback step, and then install the sample course.

A First Look at the Sample Course on the Default Theme

David Vogelpohl: The wizard finishes and creates pages for courses, memberships, and everything the plugin needs. You’ll see a few visual glitches at the top of the screen. That is because we’re still on the default WordPress theme.

This is the first piece of magic. What LifterLMS has done with the onboarding wizard is give a new user a real sample course ready to go, so they can see the shape of a working course site before they change anything.

Chris Badgett: I have not announced this yet, but this month our top priority is redoing the sample course to be even better.

David Vogelpohl: Before we change the theme, Chris, what is one of the first things you do on every WordPress site?

Chris Badgett: I make the home page a static page instead of the blog.

David Vogelpohl: Good one. The audience called out permalinks in the chat, and that’s what I was after. Go to Settings → Permalinks and choose Post name. In a future version of the site templates we’re looking at having a setting like this handled ahead of time.

Why the Default WordPress Theme Falls Short for a Course Site

David Vogelpohl: Now let’s look at some pages with the default WordPress theme so you can see the starting point. Here’s the QuickStart course. It’s readable, but the beige background and red color scheme are not exactly what you want to launch with.

Chris Badgett: Every fresh WordPress install ships with the current default theme, and they usually aren’t exactly what you’re looking for. Most people I know do not use them as a real launch theme.

Meeting the Bundled Genesis Themes

David Vogelpohl: Go to Appearance → Themes. Alongside the WordPress default themes, the site template also pre-installed Genesis, which is a theme framework, and a handful of Genesis child themes. Authority Pro, Genesis Sample, Revolution Pro, Monochrome Pro, and Magazine Pro are all built on the Genesis framework. Genesis is designed for performance and search optimization.

This next moment is one of the coolest things I’ve had the chance to work on since I came to WP Engine. Watch what happens when you activate one of these themes.

One-Click Theme Setup and Starter Packs

David Vogelpohl: Activating the theme opens the one-click theme setup screen. From here you pick a starter pack, which is a bundle of demo pages designed for a particular kind of site.

Chris, have you ever installed a theme, looked at the front page, and thought “this looks nothing like the demo”?

Chris Badgett: Pretty much every time.

David Vogelpohl: I call that the most disappointing experience on the Internet. For a long time, most theme providers did not bake this kind of setup wizard in. When WP Engine acquired Genesis back in 2018, this was one of the first things we tackled. We added starter packs, which follow a different type of demo content per pack.

We tested every single Genesis theme with LifterLMS to make sure the default pages look good without any manual changes. My personal favorite is Monochrome Pro. I’ll pick Fashion as the starter pack for this run.

Chris Badgett: Don’t laugh, but Monochrome is probably a fitting choice for David. His whole wardrobe is teacher T-shirts, dress shirts, and jeans, all in the same cut, different colors.

David Vogelpohl: Fair. While I set that one running, the wizard is installing recommended plugins in the background and loading a set of block-based demo pages. In about the time it takes me to tell a wardrobe joke, the entire site is ready.

Editing Pages With the Block Editor and Atomic Blocks

David Vogelpohl: Now let’s look at the home page on the front end. This is much better than the default WordPress theme. Every section on this page is a block, so nearly anyone can edit it. Click into the editor and you can change text, change block colors, adjust margins, and drop in new sections.

One thing course creators love is a good call-to-action section. If you click the Layouts button in the editor, you’ll see a set of pre-designed sections. That button is not standard WordPress. It comes from Atomic Blocks, which the one-click theme setup installed in the background. So plugins can bundle useful content too, not just themes.

Inside Atomic Blocks I can grab a hero header layout, drop it into any page, and start customizing. Even though it is called a hero header, you can use it anywhere on the page.

The Pages That Ship With the Theme

David Vogelpohl: Go to the Pages list. You’ll see the pages that the LifterLMS setup wizard added, like the course catalog, dashboard, and membership catalog. Alongside them are the pages the theme starter pack added, including a home page, an about page, a contact page, and a pricing page. Every one of these carries block-based demo content, so you can start telling your own story visually.

LifterLMS gives you a simple pricing table on its own, but if you outgrow that and want a fully custom pricing page in the block editor, this is a solid starting point.

Chris Badgett: I’m a big block guy. It never used to be cool to be called a block head, but I think that’s coming back into fashion.

How the Sample Course Looks With a Genesis Theme

David Vogelpohl: Let’s revisit the sample course pages now that Monochrome Pro is active. The beige-and-red look from earlier is gone. The overall structure of the course, lesson, and checkout pages is the same, but they are now styled by the active Genesis theme. The lesson page, the purchase page, the student dashboard all look much more polished with basically no manual work.

Local Development With the Local App

David Vogelpohl: One thing you may have noticed is that I’ve been making all these changes on my production environment, on the live site. That is generally a bad idea, because if you break something you might be causing problems for real visitors. WP Engine does have staging and development environments on the server, but my favorite workflow for simple sites is Local.

Local is a free desktop app that runs full WordPress environments on your computer. Before the webinar, I pulled down the demo site to my Local install. From the Local dashboard I can open the WordPress admin of the local copy and mess around all I want. When it’s in a good state, I click a button and push it back up to WP Engine.

If you’re on WP Engine or our sister company Flywheel, Local integrates directly. From the app you can pull a site down from WP Engine, and you can choose to include the database or not. Excluding the database makes the pull faster and avoids overwriting live orders and users on push.

From Blank Site to Launched in Under an Hour

David Vogelpohl: That’s about it for the tour. We’re 32 minutes in and I’ve shown you the whole stack.

Chris Badgett: If you show up with a WP Engine account, an image to represent your course, a title, and let’s say ten videos ready to upload into lessons, you can get this puppy launched in under an hour. Easy. It’s going to look great. You still have to replace the demo content with your real content, but the speed is the feature.

David Vogelpohl: Yes. And if I need a Team block for the About page and my team happens to be named Kyle, Fran, and Yannis, that’s already there in the demo. Change the names, drop in real photos, and you have a real page.

Chris Badgett: One thing that is super important to a course creator, besides the course, checkout, and student dashboard, is a nice-looking About page and a great-looking Contact page. People do not buy from someone if they don’t know who is behind the site. Then there are landing pages, sales pages, and webinar registration pages. Course creators do webinars, they run Facebook ads, they need pages that focus on one offer.

Where WordPress Is Heading With Full Site Editing

David Vogelpohl: In today’s WordPress, Genesis is a parent theme, and Authority Pro, Monochrome Pro, Magazine Pro, and the rest are Genesis child themes. That is how it works right now.

When full site editing lands in WordPress core, Genesis will likely become a plugin instead of a parent theme. For most users the practical impact will be small, but the block editor will expand to cover the header, the footer, and the sidebar, not just the post content. Right now the block editor edits only the middle of the page. In the full site editing world, the whole layout is edited in blocks, and Genesis is being reshaped as a plugin to help with that transition.

What This Means for Agencies and Freelancers

Chris Badgett: If you build LMS websites for clients, the starter content and the block editor combined are a huge lever. One of the hardest things to do is get content from a client and then hand off a site they can actually drive on their own. The block editor keeps getting easier to use. And with real demo content in place, instead of telling a client “I need an image for the top of your about page,” you can point at the demo and say “I need an image to replace this.”

David Vogelpohl: The relationship works best when both parties work together. When a client just says “make it pop” and walks away, that’s not helpful. When the agency does all the driving, that is not ideal either, because the agency does not know the business the way the client does. Systems like this let people meet in the middle, either by showing starter content and iterating, or by working together directly in the block editor.

Chris Badgett: As a freelancer or agency, being able to do something meaningful, beautiful, and elegant in a day and charge a premium for it is a huge deal. There were times when it would take me three weeks to build one webpage for a client. Tools like this collapse that.

Reusable Blocks and Scaling Your Design Work

David Vogelpohl: If you are a developer and you’ve been sour on the block editor because you would rather hand-code everything, consider the leverage. Every block or layout you build is componentized. You can reuse it on every landing page, every course sales page, every launch. Your innovation scales instead of living on one page and never coming back. If you own a site and hire developers or designers, you can commission custom page layouts and custom blocks that your marketers will use over and over.

Switching Themes and Rerunning Starter Packs

David Vogelpohl: An audience question came in. Can you switch themes and starter packs after the initial setup, and what happens when you do?

Yes. You can activate any other Genesis theme at any time. Each theme carries its own starter packs. If I switch from Monochrome to Genesis Sample, I get a different set of starter packs. If I re-run the one-click theme setup for the new theme, it will install a fresh set of demo pages. Because it does not remove the first set, I’ll end up with duplicates.

If you want to actually test a starter pack cleanly, use one of the backup points from earlier to reset the site to zero, or install the theme in a Local copy and run the wizard there. Just switching themes without re-running the wizard is fine and does not create duplicates, it just does not load new demo content.

One more note. Demo content and styling are two different things. A starter pack labeled for a lifestyle blog or a food site is really just a set of pre-built pages. You can absolutely take those pages and reshape them into anything else. Do not feel locked into the label.

Running Your LMS on a Sub-Domain

Chris Badgett: A question from Carrie on Facebook. Can a WP Engine plus LifterLMS membership site have a different theme than your main website?

Sometimes when you’re building an LMS you already have an existing site, sometimes on WordPress and sometimes not. It often makes sense to build the LMS on a sub-domain or a completely different URL, then link the two in the menus. One reason is that you may not be ready to redesign the whole content site, but you want the LMS to look modern. Focus on the LMS as a fresh install and put it on a sub-domain like academy.yourbusiness.com.

David Vogelpohl: WP Engine supports that model. My personal preference for completely separate WordPress instances is sub-domains over subdirectories, but both work. Any WP Engine WordPress instance can use any WordPress theme. Splitting concerns also protects each side of the site. Marketers can experiment on the marketing install without touching the LMS, and course administrators can update lessons without breaking marketing pages. If one side goes down, the other side stays up.

Chris Badgett: If you don’t want a separate site and just want different designs for different types of pages, that’s fine too. Genesis and the block editor both support custom page designs. My earlier landing page in the demo had no header or top navigation. That’s an example of a custom page layout on the same install.

How LifterLMS and WP Engine License Sites

Chris Badgett: One more question from the audience. How do WP Engine and LifterLMS charge for sub-domains?

For LifterLMS, we treat each real WordPress install as one site against your license. A single add-on covers one site. The Universe Bundle covers five sites. The Infinity Bundle is unlimited. LifterLMS has built-in detection for staging and development environments, so those do not count against your total.

David Vogelpohl: WP Engine bills by site rather than by sub-domain. If a domain or a sub-domain resolves to a WordPress install on the platform, that install counts as one site. My personal account has 25 installs, and any test sites I spin up count against that 25. If I want to play around without burning a slot, I do it in Local. Local also has a feature called Enable Live Link, which lets me share the local site with someone else for review without spinning up a real WP Engine install.

Why the LifterLMS Team Chose to Partner Here

Chris Badgett: The three reasons I love WP Engine most are visible right here in this demo. First, the staging and production environments, the automatic backups, and the one-click restore. I am not a developer, so when I make a mistake, or want to test something, the peace of mind that I can click a button and go back to a known-good state matters. WP Engine does that as well as anyone.

Second, the chat support. I hear people talk about it constantly. Even LifterLMS customers ask us when we’re going to have chat support like WP Engine’s.

Third, and new here, the LifterLMS easy button. WP Engine has now put LifterLMS into a site template alongside Genesis and starter content and a set of themes optimized for LifterLMS. I am super grateful for that, and I’m excited to see how the LifterLMS community uses it.

David Vogelpohl: Thank you for having me. When we think about our partnerships, we ask first how we can help the partner, then how we can help our customer, and only then how it helps us grow. All of this is about working with others to enable people to have a digital voice and to get there quicker than ever. Really appreciate the partnership and being able to provide our customers a reliable answer to “I need to launch an LMS in a hurry, what do I do?”

Chris Badgett: Thanks for coming, David. Thank you Kathy for helping put this on, and thank you to everyone in the audience for coming.