If you’re using WordPress for education, there are plenty of ways you can make your site more engaging and effective for learners. The best way to transform your WordPress site is through plugins.
Plugins have a variety of uses. You can use them to build engaging lessons, collect information, gamify your courses, build community, offer events, and so much more. There’s a plugin for nearly every need you have, which allows you to streamline the delivery of your online course and run your educational site efficiently.
In this article, we’ll cover the essential plugins you should have installed on your WordPress site for your online courses. We’ll cover the main offerings and benefits and talk about prices for the following plugins:
- LearnDash LMS
- GamiPress
- Yoast
- Solid Security
- bbPress
- Kadence WP
- The Events Calendar
- Gravity Forms
- MemberDash
- Weglot
- BuddyBoss
Let’s get started!
1. LearnDash LMS
LearnDash LMS is the most trusted LMS plugin for WordPress. With LearnDash installed, you can build courses directly on your WordPress website, customize those courses, deliver and manage assignments, and much more.
LearnDash incorporates best practices from the instructional design field to ensure your learners are receiving the best possible course experience: automated notifications, Focus Mode, rewards and certificates, and completion bars keep learners engaged and coming back to your course.
Beyond installing the plugin, LearnDash also plays nicely with other plugins and offers tons of add-ons to fill all your education needs. LearnDash integrates with Gravity Forms, WooCommerce, The Events Calendar, BuddyBoss, Weglot, and more.
Price: $199 per year for one site
2. GamiPress
Gamification is a tried and true method for increasing educational engagement. Studies around high score psychology show that leaderboards increase completion rates, as people love seeing their name rise in the ranks.
Fortunately, a plugin like GamiPress lets you easily add gamification elements to your course, where you can reward learners with points, awards, and badges. For example, you can offer achievement badges after modules are completed, points for participating in discussion boards, and high-score ranks on practice quizzes.
If you use LearnDash, GamiPress integrates well, and you can always use LearnDash Achievements (free) for more customization options. Either way, gamification elements are a nice addition to any course.
Price: free!
3. Yoast
Yoast is a plugin for SEO that helps optimize your website for search engines. With Yoast installed, you can optimize your pages and posts for keywords, use AI for SEO meta descriptions, eliminate dead links, get suggestions for internal linking language, and more. It’ll save you tons of time and stress when it comes to marketing your course and helping folks find you online.
Yoast also solves a lot of technical SEO issues you may not even know you have, with behind-the-scenes features that are working without user intervention. This is a great plugin to add if you want to boost your organic traffic and help learners find your course through keyword searches.
Price: free to start, or $99 a year for a premium license.
4. Solid Security
Solid Security will defend your site against the most common vulnerabilities on WordPress. With Solid Security installed, your user and ecommerce data is protected, you can add two-factor authentication and passkeys, and also identify any vulnerable plugins you may be using. A plugin like this ensures that your course is protected and runs smoothly, helping you rest assured and focus less on backend issues.
This is an essential plugin if you’re building a robust education site. It’ll ensure everything’s running as it should. Additionally, you can add Solid Backups (formerly BackupBuddy) to back up your site in case something goes wrong with a set-it-and-forget-it system.
Price: $99 a year for one site, or all SolidWP products in a bundle for $199/year.
5. bbPress
bbPress lets you easily add forums to your education site to build community between you and your learners. It’s a small, light plugin with tons of add-on features. And yes, it integrates with LearnDash!
With forums added to your online course, you can encourage students to discuss course content, share drafts for feedback, discuss readings and videos, ask for help, or simply go off-topic and get to know one another. Forums can be public or private, with access granted immediately upon enrollment. This plugin is a must-have for your educational site.
Price: free!
6. Kadence WP
Kadence WP has a suite of multiple products that can help you build your education website. Specifically, Kadence has a variety of education templates that give you a head start when creating and designing your course. The Kadence Theme is a popular, fast, and reliable theme with easy customization using Kadence Blocks.
Plus, with additional products like Kadence Conversions, you can add popups and banners that connect site visitors to offers – such as a free trial or a demo lesson. Checking out Kadence is a good idea if you’ve been searching for the right theme and suite of tools to get started.
Price: Products start at $49, but you can also get started with the Kadence theme for free! Or purchase a bundle for the best value.
7. The Events Calendar
As the #1 calendaring solution for WordPress, The Events Calendar is a perfect addition to your education site. You can use a calendaring system and populate it with due dates, live events, office hours, in-person meetings, and more. It’s the ultimate way to create community and keep your course top of mind.
The Events Calendar is also more than a calendar. The Events Calendar has expanded their lineup to include multiple products to help with all your event needs. For example, you can allow others to add their own events to your calendar, enable additional calendar views, collect RSVPs, and even sell tickets, all from your WordPress backend.
Price: Events Calendar Pro and Event Tickets Plus are $149 each for 1 site per year. But we recommend browsing the bundles to get all you need all for one low cost.
8. Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms is the ultimate form builder plugin. It allows you to create web forms using a visual interface – no code required! Think registration forms, contact forms, assignment submission forms, forms for uploading files and documents, and more. You can create an unlimited number of forms, build from a wide range of field types, edit and review easily, and enable email notifications for when a form has been submitted.
Gravity Forms also offers several extensions, allowing you to integrate forms with payment gateways and email automation platforms. And yes – it integrates with LearnDash! This is a great plugin if you collect information regularly, such as for free trials, sign-ups, registrations, and more. The unlimited forms amount really sweetens the deal.
Price: $59 per year for one site
9. MemberDash
MemberDash offers a suite of professional tools for managing a WordPress membership site. With MemberDash, you can gate your contact under a variety of subscription types and models. You can restrict content on certain pages and posts, or restrict based on membership level.
MemberDash also integrates with multiple payment gateways, notably Stripe and PayPal, to make accepting membership payments a breeze. You can also build coupons and offers right into MemberDash, along with prorating rates and offering custom invoices to ensure a great customer experience. If you’re already using LearnDash to build your courses, then MemberDash is the perfect addition to create memberships.
Price: $199 per year for one site
10. Weglot
With Weglot, you can translate your course into multiple languages, offer a multilingual website, and even boost SEO with multilingual features. Over 110 languages are supported, which can make your course material accessible worldwide. You also have the ability to edit your translation to your liking or hire a professional Weglot editor right from your dashboard for help.
Weglot integrates with LearnDash, and it’s compatible with every WordPress theme. It’s a great way to ensure learners – and parents of learners – have access to reliable information about your course all in their native language. This is a simple addition if your course needs to be accessible to learners from a variety of backgrounds and native languages.
Price: Get started for free, or $170 per year for one language and 10k words
11. BuddyBoss
BuddyBoss has the power to turn your WordPress site into a social media networking platform site by adding profiles, activity feeds, groups, and more. BuddyBoss is ideal for learners on the go who still want access to all their course features on their mobile device. Your course will take on a whole new look and feel on mobile with feeds to browse, badges to earn, and notifications to read. It’s perfect for microlearning – or breaking your course into small chunks that users return to often.
Plus, BuddyBoss teamed up with LearnDash to make learning accessible and engaging for your users, so it’s built to integrate specifically with LearnDash LMS for mobile learning.
Price: $299 for one site
Enhance your site with plugins built for education
Plugins can enhance your WordPress website and learner experience in myriad ways. It’s not just themes and ecommerce you can add; it’s games, SEO, forums, events, memberships, translation, security, and more!
WordPress is the best tool for building an educational site due to its endless customization and flexibility, and LearnDash LMS is the best WordPress plugin to transform your site into a learning management system. If you’re ready to see how LearnDash can transform your next course, try out our free demo.