Want to build a conversion-optimized eLearning site? Plugins can help you do just that in a few steps.
eLearning is an excellent way to train your employees, customers, and students. Organizations that implement eLearning can save 40-60% of their employees’ time compared to learning the same material in a classroom setting. eLearning makes customer training more efficient and can help improve students’ retention rates too.
WordPress plugins can help you build an eLearning site easily, with all the features you’d need for a professional look and a great learning experience. In this post, we take you through the best WordPress education plugins to set up your eLearning website.
Why should you use a plugin?
A plugin enables you to create an engaging and user-friendly eLearning site. You can have quizzes, flashcards, videos, and image hotspots, set up easy payments, evaluate grades, and track students’ progress. You can add a dash of creativity and fun for a meaningful and enjoyable learning experience.
What should you look for in a WordPress education plugin?
Not all WordPress education plugins offer the exact same features, and you might choose any of the plugins in our list below based on your specific business needs. However, any plugin you consider for your eLearning site should have the following qualities:
Ease of use
All good WordPress education plugins will be easy to install and start using. A familiar interface will allow you to get comfortable with the plugin quickly and hit the ground running on course development.
Comprehensive features
eLearning is seen as a convenient mode of learning. However, eLearning sites have to work harder to replicate the experience of the traditional classroom, where face-to-face communication makes learning more interactive and intimate. To engage learners, your site should integrate media, images, and gamification, easy course scheduling, and student progress tracking and reports. You should also be able to set up easy and secure payments for your courses, which makes it more straightforward for your students to get started. Your WordPress education plugin should offer the functionality you need to design a great learning experience.
Integrations with tools
A good WordPress education plugin will allow your site to play well with other tools that bring additional features and capabilities. For example, it’s important that your LMS can integrate with tools that allow you to sell your courses. If you have a WooCommerce store, a good approach would be to use an LMS that integrates seamlessly with Woo extensions such as WooCommerce Payments.
Other useful integrations could include tools that let you embed videos and other media into your lessons if this doesn’t come standard with your LMS, or tools that let you send email marketing campaigns to your students, manage student relationships, run affiliate programs, create a student forum, and view enrollment progress.
Affordability and scalability
Your eLearning site should be able to take on more students and content without any downtime or impact on loading times. That’s why it’s important to choose a WordPress education plugin that lets you scale your eLearning site as your business grows. You should also keep in mind that while purchasing an eLearning solution for WordPress is an investment, a high-quality plugin with all the aforementioned features won’t need to break the bank.
Top 12 WordPress education plugins for building an eLearning site
Here is our pick of the best LMS plugins for WordPress, based on features, ease of use, price, and support.
1. Sensei LMS
Entrepreneurs, academics, coaches, and agencies use Sensei LMS to create online academies. It comes with all the features you need to create and sell online courses in an easy way.
One of Sensei’s flagship features is Sensei Blocks, which are interactive elements you add to your lessons or anywhere else on your site. You can build quizzes (multiple choice, true/false, fill in the blank, and others), flashcards, tasklists, image hotspots, and interactive videos for an engaging learning experience. You don’t have to start from scratch – using Sensei, you can convert your existing blog posts into an online course.
A drip feed learning strategy is possible with Sensei. Drip feeding content creates a structured learning path for students, and motivates them to keep returning for more information. It gives you more control of the content learners can see and also lets you keep content fresh and current.
You can view students’ grades, course progress, and course content schedule in one place. Need to monitor students individually and make updates to your courses and lessons in an informed way? Sensei generates detailed reports on students, courses, and lessons, offering insights on how everyone is coming along and whether you’ll need to improve some aspect of the course to give income a boost.
The student reports contain information on enrolled courses, last activity, completed courses, and other details for each student. You can download the data as a CSV file for more detailed analysis using your preferred tool. You can then, for instance, send reminder emails to students that haven’t logged in or completed a lesson in many months.
The course reports tell you the last activity date of each course, the time taken by students to complete a course, and average grades.
The lesson report has lesson completion metrics. You can, for example, compare the completion rates of all the lessons in a course, and drill down into a lesson that has a far lower completion rate than others.
A course completion certificate can be awarded to students to prove that they have gone through the material and completed all required tests and assignments. Sensei LMS makes it easy to create certificates with your logo and text.
Online course takers expect providers to offer multiple, secure payment options. Using Sensei Pro and WooCommerce payments, you can offer PayPal and Stripe as payment methods on your eLearning site, which makes it easy for potential customers to enroll in your course.
This WordPress education plugin is easy to use, with an intuitive interface as well as documents to guide you visually on setting up your online course. You can have your course up in a matter of minutes – here’s a quick demo!
Start by choosing a course layout.
Alt text – Create course layout
Organize your course into modules and lessons. You can create an outline by simply clicking on ‘lesson’ and ‘module’. You can change the lessons and modules later as needed.
Sensei creates lesson drafts automatically for you.
You can then start creating your lesson content.
Sensei LMS is available in three pricing plans, starting at $49/year for Sensei Blocks, $149/year for Sensei Pro, and going up to $349/year for 20 sites under the Sensei Agency plan.
2. LearnDash
LearnDash is a popular LMS that allows you to create multi-tiered courses with lessons and sections under each course. You can also create advanced quizzes using new question types, set time limits, and deduct points for wrong answers. Students can save their quiz progress and return where they left off.
Using this WordPress education plugin, you can create different learning paths. One is the linear path such as ‘Part 1’, ‘Part 2’, and so on. The other option is to offer a bonus course if students complete at least one course from a group of courses. The third option is to accumulate points to unlock access to materials. Although the plugin has many useful features, the course navigation itself isn’t as intuitive compared to other tools.
LearnDash integrates smoothly with WooCommerce, MailChimp, ThriveCart, PayPal, Stripe, BuddyPress, Gravity Forms, and over 300 other apps. The plugin starts at $199/year for one site. It is scalable, allowing you to add an unlimited number of students.
3. Tutor LMS
Using Tutor LMS, you can create quizzes with options such as multiple choice questions, fill in the blanks, true or false, and image matching. You can drip-feed the content and have content prerequisites to motivate students to learn effectively.
The drag-and-drop builder makes it easy even for non-technical users to create courses. However, the lesson layouts aren’t intuitive as those from other LMSs, which can hinder students from having an engaging learning experience.
The built-in email notification system updates students and coaches with the latest news. You get customizable certificate templates that you can brand with your logo, and detailed reports and analytics to track student and course performance. Tutor LMS offers three payment methods: bank transfer, e-checks, and PayPal.
The Pro plan, at $50/month, is their most popular plan but the cost is somewhat high for just a few extra features compared to the free version.
4. LearnPress
LearnPress is available as a free education plugin for WordPress websites, with basic features to offer a simple online course. For more features, there are paid add-ons, which include certifications, some quiz options, payment methods, content drip, assessment tools, and grade books. You’ll have to pay a one-time fee to access premium features.
5. Lifter LMS
LifterLMS offers a core plugin for free and paid add-ons, which include advanced quizzes and videos, assignments, private student areas, and social media-style conversations. You’ll also need to pay to integrate the plugin with payment gateways such as Stripe, PayPal, and Authorize.Net. Many other WordPress education plugins include these add-ons in their basic pricing tier.
6. TeachPress
This WordPress education plugin combines course management and a publication management system. It is geared towards professors and researchers. You can export your course lists in XLS/CSV, and import publications in BibTeX format. You can make use of shortcodes to create publication lists and searches, course overviews, and enrollments. It is not good for starters as it’s quite complicated to use and is meant for advanced publications.
7. WP Courseware
The plugin is great for creating unlimited courses, lessons, and modules. You can embed media into your lessons and enable dripping content. You can set an expiration date on courses and offer live learning events. However, you can add fewer types of questions compared to other WordPress education plugins. It is also less user-friendly compared to other LMS plugins we’ve explored in this list.
8. MasterStudy LMS
MasterStudy has only some of the features of WordPress education plugins like Sensei LMS and LearnDash, including quizzes and content drips. Trial courses, course bundles, and grade books are useful additions.
9. WP Education
WP Education is a new plugin using which you can create pages offering details on courses, events, teachers, teams, galleries, and testimonials. It can be used to support your existing eLearning site. The plugin’s support for the Elementor page builder allows you to show any information related to a course on your site.
10. Namaste! LMS
Using the WordPress education plugin, you can manage unlimited courses and lessons in each course. You can add assignments, award certificates, and badges. You can also connect to exams through plugins like Watu, see students’ to-do lists for each course, generate leaderboards, and run reports.
11. WP Courses LMS
This WordPress education plugin lets you create lessons using text, images, audio, and videos embedded from YouTube, Vimeo, and VdoCipher. You can also add multiple choice and multiple answer quizzes. You can structure lessons by modules with a single click. You can view students’ progress in the admin area and access an analytics dashboard to see which students are most engaged, which courses are most popular, and how many learners are completing lessons on a daily basis. Because this plugin is free and relatively new, it has fewer features than many of the other plugins we mention here.
12. WP Attest
The Gutenberg-ready WordPress LMS plugin has been closed since April 2022 on account of a security issue. WP Attest allowed you to create online courses through the familiar WP dashboard and present course lessons in a simple layout. Through the Elementor extension, you could add widgets to create a unique look for your eLearning site.
Sensei LMS is the best WordPress education plugin
Sensei is a complete LMS for WordPress users, offering features that help design meaningful learning experiences. Here’s a recap of why you should consider Sensei LMS to build your eLearning site –
- It integrates seamlessly with WordPress, making it the easiest LMS plugin to use from the list for creating courses and writing lessons.
- With Sensei Block you can add unique interactive elements to your lessons.
- Thanks to its integrations with WooCommerce, it supports user registration and allows you to add elements like physical products to courses
- It has features for student progress tracking and reporting
- It comes with multiple quiz template designs like true/false, single line, file upload, and multi-line tests
- It’s created and backed by Automattic, and even powers all of Automattic’s employee training and courses
Get started with Sensei LMS today
A WordPress education plugin is perfect for teachers, entrepreneurs, agencies, coaches, and subject specialists looking to create and sell courses without any coding knowledge. Of the many LMS plugins available for WordPress, Sensei LMS offers the best value.
“Sensei has helped me to create my online art academy in a simple and uncomplicated way. If you want to create an Online Academy on your website, without a doubt, Sensei is the best option.”
- Kevin Faria, Illustration and animation expert
Ready to give Sensei a shot? Choose the pricing plan that works best for you and get started with a 14-day refund guarantee.
