Should you sell online courses on WordPress?

First, my bias — stated up front

I like WordPress.

I've been using it since 2012. Every blog I run is on it, including the one you'd find if you Googled my name.

I'm not a guy who tried it for a weekend in 2019 and has been dunking on it ever since.

So when I say I wouldn't sell my courses on it, that's not tribal. It's that I did the arithmetic — and then went and built something else instead.

Here's the thing worth separating early, because almost every article on this topic mushes it together.

WordPress is excellent publishing software. It is the best writing environment on the internet and I'll argue that with anyone.

But selling was bolted onto the side of it, years later, by other people.

Those are two different questions. They deserve two different answers.

What WordPress actually costs you

Three costs, none of which show up on any plugin's pricing page.

1. It's clunky and slow, and you buy the speed back.

There is an entire hosting industry built on the phrase "fast WordPress hosting," charging $30 a month and up to make one miserable blog load quickly.

That industry exists because the default is slow.

And on a course business you pay that tax exactly where it hurts: on the sales page. A page that takes four seconds converts worse than one that takes one — and every sale you will ever make happens downstream of that page.

2. It was never built to be a store.

So you duct-tape it together. WooCommerce, an LMS plugin, a checkout, something to run the funnel, and Zapier in the middle to make any two of them speak.

Then you build the actual lesson and sales pages in Gutenberg — which you will not enjoy, which is why almost nobody does it, which is why you'll also buy Elementor or Bricks or Divi.

That's one more licence. One more renewal. And a few hundred more kilobytes loaded onto the page you just paid a premium host to make fast.

3. It's the biggest target on the web.

WordPress runs a bigger share of the internet than anything else by a wide margin, which makes it where everyone points their tools.

Nobody spends a weekend breaking into one small shop on a quiet street. They go where the loot is piled up.

A newsletter marketer I know woke up to over 2,000 fraudulent signups on his WordPress site in a single weekend. On a brochure site that's an afternoon of cleanup.

On a course site, where "user account" is "paid access," it's your product.

That third one is also the quiet argument for keeping your store somewhere other than your blog, whatever you decide about the rest of this article.

If your publishing and your paid content share one install, one bad Tuesday takes out both. Two separate things is a safety net that costs you almost nothing to have.

The bill nobody puts in the comparison table: hosting

This one is worth its own section, because it's the line every "but WordPress is cheaper" calculation leaves out. And it's not small.

Page caching works by storing one copy of a page and serving it to everybody.

A course site can't do that. A logged-in student has to see their dashboard, their lessons, their progress.

So WordPress sets a logged-in cookie — and every sane cache takes one look at that cookie and steps politely aside.

Which means that for your students, the only visitors you are actually being paid for, the cache is off. Every page view runs PHP and hits the database.

Three consequences:

• Your $5-a-month shared plan won't do. Cheap hosting is priced on the assumption that nearly every request is served from cache. Yours won't be. Budget $20–$50 a month.
• You must exclude account, login and checkout pages by hand. Miss one and you get the classic course-site bug: a cached dashboard served to the wrong logged-in person. It is exactly as bad as it sounds and it happens constantly.
• Object caching, not page caching. Redis or Memcached cuts the database work that logged-in requests generate. Page caching mostly can't help you here.

Over five years, $30 a month is $1,800 — more than most of the plugin licences below. It belongs in the comparison and it almost never is.

Option 1: WordPress plus an LMS plugin

The standard route. LearnDash, LifterLMS, Tutor LMS or Sensei sits on your existing site and turns it into a course platform.

Here's what they cost — read off each vendor's own pricing page on 9 August 2026.

Read off each vendor's own pricing page on 9 August 2026. WordPress hosting is extra on every row except the last — add roughly $1,800 over five years at $30 a month. SoloStore's five-year total already includes about $7 a month of hosting, so if anything this table flatters the plugins.

Two things in there are worth more than the rest of the table.

LifterLMS halves your first year and tells you so.

Its pricing page prints "All renewals are at full price," and its own FAQ asks the question outright: "Why do we offer the 1st year at 50% off?"

So Earth is $199 today and $398 every year after. Universe is $299 then $598.

I respect that they say it plainly. Most of this category doesn't.

But it means every roundup comparing LifterLMS's $199 to LearnDash's $259 has the ranking backwards. Over five years it's $1,791 against $1,295.

Tutor LMS still sells a lifetime licence — $499 once for a single site, against $199 a year.

That's the only row here that stops charging you. If you're set on WordPress, it's the one I'd look hardest at. Break-even is under three years.

One more, filed under things you can't unsee: LifterLMS will sell you a lifetime Infinity licence for $10,000.

That is a real number on a real pricing page. And it tells you roughly what the vendor thinks a decade of your subscription is worth.

Worth knowing who owns what, too.

LearnDash now sits inside Liquid Web's product line, next to Kadence — the same Kadence that absorbed Restrict Content Pro, which every 2026 roundup still recommends as a standalone $99-a-year plugin and which hasn't been one for a while. Sensei is Automattic's.

Consolidation isn't automatically bad. But "the plugin got acquired" is the number one reason a WordPress stack ends up needing re-platforming.

Option 2: WordPress plus a membership plugin

Different tool for a different problem, and people mix them up constantly.

An LMS plugin structures content into courses, lessons and quizzes. A membership plugin controls access — specifically, revoking it when a recurring payment stops.

If you're selling a monthly community or a subscription library, that's what you need. MemberPress or Paid Memberships Pro is a genuinely good answer.

If you sell a course once, for a one-time price, you don't have that problem. There's nothing to revoke.

Buying a subscription-management engine and renewing it every year for a business with no subscriptions in it is the single most common overspend I see in this space.

The prices are their own article, and I wrote it: the seven best WordPress membership plugins, priced at renewal.

Short version — MemberPress Growth is $349.50 for year one and $699 every year after. And it is not alone.

Option 3: a hosted platform

Kajabi, Teachable, Thinkific, Podia. Someone else runs everything; you pay monthly and never think about a plugin update again.

That is a real benefit and I won't pretend otherwise. I paid for it happily for years.

Two problems.

The first is the invoice. Kajabi Growth is $199 a month billed annually, which is $2,388 a year. And it goes up.

I know, because I've been on the receiving end. I woke up one morning to my autoresponder announcing a 19% price rise — and that same week, my course platform did its own version of the same thing.

I'd wanted out of that platform for three years by then. The bugs. The support. And like a good human, I'd been procrastinating year after year.

The renewal date made the decision for me.

That's the trap with monthly software: you don't choose when you re-evaluate it. The invoice chooses for you, always at the worst moment — and by then three years of your content lives inside the thing.

The second problem is the one nobody thinks about when they pick a platform.

On a hosted platform you don't have your own store. You have a stall inside a giant shopping mall, shared with tens of thousands of other sellers.

Same building. Same front doors. Same electricity. Fine on a normal day.

But when the mall's doors jam shut, every shop inside is closed. Including yours. And since you don't own the doors, all you can do is stand there and wait for the landlord.

I watched this happen in real time. I went to open another creator's sales page for design inspiration and got a 504.

Refreshed. Nothing.

Then I looked at the URL properly and saw the platform's name in it. Sales pages down, students locked out — and not just for him. For everyone on it that day.

And it's the same reasoning as the WordPress security point above, pointed at a different building. A mall with a hundred thousand shops in it is a big, fat target.

When someone gets in through the front door, it isn't one shop that gets cleaned out. It's every customer list in the building.

Option 4: your own store, not on WordPress

Which is where I landed, and why this site exists.

The reason I did not build SoloStore as a WordPress plugin is the whole argument above.

Building on WordPress means inheriting WordPress: the speed you have to buy back, the editor, the plugin surface area, the target painted on the roof.

Building outside it meant the sales pages could just be fast, and the thing could just be simple, because there's no plugin stack sitting in front of them.

It's one application you deploy to your own hosting in about five minutes. Courses, funnels, checkout, order bumps and delivery are already inside it, running on your own Stripe account.

$497 once. No renewal. No cut of your sales. And about $7 a month to host.

No page builder to buy. No membership plugin to renew. No Zapier in the middle.

For me the money side worked out at more than $1,000 a year saved against what I'd been paying in platform fees.

Your number depends on what you're paying now. But the shape of it is the same for anyone: one payment instead of a subscription that only ever goes one direction.

And the honest other side, because a page that only flatters itself is an advert.

SoloStore is not WordPress, so the plugin ecosystem isn't yours to raid. No gradebook, no SCORM, no freelancer on every street corner who already knows the admin, and the affiliate programme it does have is built in but still beta.

If you need any of that, buy LearnDash Pro and don't look back.

When WordPress is genuinely the right answer

There is a case, and it's a strong one. I'd argue it as hard as anything above.

If you already have a WordPress site with real traffic, and the course is an extension of it, use a plugin.

You have the audience arriving on that domain already. You have the SEO. Your posts and your paid content can cross-link and cross-sell natively.

Sending that traffic somewhere else to buy adds a seam that didn't need to exist — and no amount of architectural purity beats the conversion you lose at a handoff.

A few more where I'd say yes without hesitating:

• You need something only a plugin does. SCORM, xAPI, gradebooks, prerequisites, group licensing to companies, an affiliate programme with tiered commissions. WordPress has all of it because thousands of people have built all of it.
• You want to own the code and change it. It's open source. If you can write PHP or pay someone who can, there's no ceiling.
• You're selling a subscription community where access has to switch off when payment stops — and you want it living on the site your readers already know.
• Your budget genuinely is zero. Sensei's free core plus a free membership plugin will let you launch for the cost of hosting. It'll be rough. It'll also be live this week, and live beats perfect.

What I'd push back on is the version where someone with no site, no traffic and no WordPress experience decides to start there because it's cheaper. It isn't. That's the case I wrote this for.

The question isn't whether you can

You can absolutely build a course business on WordPress. People do it every day and some of them do very well.

Sure you can. You can also build your own autoresponder. Your own analytics. Bake your own bread.

The question isn't whether you can. It's whether you should — and whether the afternoons it takes are worth more spent on the thing you actually meant to sell.

Here's the test I'd apply.

Add it up honestly: the LMS licence at its renewal price, the membership plugin if you need one, hosting that can serve uncached logged-in students, the page builder, and the hours a month you'll spend keeping five things compatible.

If that total is smaller than what a purpose-built tool costs you, and the plugin ecosystem is buying you something you'd genuinely miss, WordPress is the right call. Go and enjoy it.

For most people selling a handful of courses, it isn't close.

That was the whole reason I stopped assembling and started building.