LifterLMS – WP LMS for eLearning, Online Courses, & Quizzes
LifterLMS – WP LMS for eLearning, Online Courses, & Quizzes

LifterLMS – WP LMS for eLearning, Online Courses, & Quizzes

4.8/5 (393 ratings) 10K+ active installs Updated Nov 4, 2026
Infinitely customizable course catalog layouts: shown with course title, featured image, and instructor information.

Infinitely customizable course catalog layouts: shown with course title, featured image, and instructor information.

LifterLMS is a complete WordPress LMS plugin designed to make it easy to create, launch, and scale online courses from your own website.

  • Build structured courses: Create courses with sections, lessons, and quizzes, and track every student’s progress.
  • Sell and protect your content: Sell courses and memberships, take payments, and restrict access to members-only content.
  • Engage and certify learners: Manage students, award certificates, and report on how they are doing.
  • Grow with premium add-ons: Start with the free core plugin, then add extensions for advanced ecommerce, assignments, groups, social learning, private coaching, advanced video, PDFs, and more.

Try LifterLMS for $1: get a 30-day demo site with every premium add-on installed.

Use LifterLMS for course businesses, membership sites, coaching, schools, corporate training, compliance, continuing education, certifications, and client LMS projects.

Own your platform, content, and student data.

Explore All LMS Features

What You Can Build With LifterLMS

LifterLMS helps you create and manage many types of online learning websites, including:

Not sure which fits you? Explore LifterLMS solutions

A WordPress LMS You Own

Hosted course platforms often limit how you build, customize, price, and grow your learning business. With LifterLMS, you run your LMS on your own WordPress website: choose your hosting, control your content, connect the tools you use, and grow without platform fees based on your number of courses, students, instructors, or revenue. That gives creators, educators, developers, agencies, and organizations complete control over their online learning platform.

Free and Open Source WordPress LMS Plugin

The core LifterLMS plugin is free and open source, with no limits on courses, memberships, enrollments, or earnings. Use it to create courses, build quizzes, manage students, and protect members-only content. When your project needs more, extend it with official add-ons and bundles for payments, advanced quizzes, assignments, groups, social learning, advanced video, private areas, PDFs, notes, continuing education, and more. Start simple and expand as your courses, students, and training programs grow.

We believe in free, distributed learning for all. LifterLMS exists to democratize education in the digital classroom.

Get Started With LifterLMS

Install the free LifterLMS plugin from WordPress.org to start building your LMS, or get a temporary 30-day demo website with LifterLMS and all premium add-ons installed to test the course builder, learner experience, ecommerce settings, reporting tools, and add-ons before deciding which setup is right for your project.

Try LifterLMS for $1

Works With Your WordPress Theme, Block Editor, and Page Builder

LifterLMS works with modern WordPress themes, full-site editing themes, the Block Editor, and popular WordPress page builders, so you can use your existing WordPress site or build a new LMS website around the theme and tools you prefer.

LifterLMS works with:

  • Elementor
  • Beaver Builder
  • Divi
  • Custom WordPress themes
  • WordPress plugins used for marketing, ecommerce, analytics, forms, automation, and community features

Premium Add-ons and Bundles

Some LMS projects need more than the free core plugin. LifterLMS offers official add-ons and bundles for advanced features, ecommerce, vouchers, student engagement, reporting, integrations, and business growth. See LifterLMS pricing.

See why so many people start with LifterLMS or switch from another WordPress LMS or hosted platform to LifterLMS for their successful online courses, membership sites, and remote schools.

Who LifterLMS Is For

Course creators: Create and sell courses, quizzes, certificates, and memberships from your own website instead of a hosted course platform.

Coaches and consultants: Turn your expertise into guided programs, private coaching offers, memberships, and premium learning experiences.

Schools and educators: Create online learning spaces for students, lessons, assessments, certificates, and course materials.

Training teams: Build internal training, employee onboarding, compliance training, professional development, and client education programs, with groups and group leaders.

Developers and agencies: Build WordPress LMS websites for clients who need courses, memberships, ecommerce, reporting, and custom design.

Membership site owners: Add structured courses to a membership website, restrict learning content, and bundle course access with membership plans.

Organizations and nonprofits: Deliver educational programs, community training, certification paths, or continuing education.

Meet the LifterLMS Team

The LifterLMS team is a diverse group of talented course creators, developers, designers, marketers, and entrepreneurs.

Before creating LifterLMS, we built high-end, custom WordPress learning and membership websites for clients worldwide. LifterLMS was born from that hands-on experience, with the goal of giving WordPress users the kind of LMS tools that previously required custom development.

The team continues to develop LifterLMS as an open-source project while supporting the people who use WordPress for online learning.

Learn more about the people behind LifterLMS.

LifterLMS by the Numbers

  • 130 million+ Course & Membership Enrollments
  • 151 million+ Courses & Lessons Completed
  • 1.8 million+ Achievements Awarded
  • 9.7 million+ Certificates Earned
  • 308 5-star reviewers

Features

Make Money Teaching Online

Set up LifterLMS and add the Stripe or PayPal payment add-on, or use WooCommerce. That’s all you need to get started. As your business grows, free and premium add-ons help you create more value for your students and increase revenue.

  • Credit card payments
  • One-time payments
  • Recurring payments
  • Payment plans
  • Unlimited course and membership pricing models
  • Checkout
  • Free courses
  • Course bundles
  • Private coaching upsells
  • Course and membership coupons
  • Bulk course and membership sales
  • Affiliate ready
  • Native course and membership sales pages
  • Offline course and membership sales
  • Customizable course and membership enrollment
  • Country and currency
  • Ecommerce dashboard
  • Credit card management
  • Subscription switching
  • Payment switching

Create Courses on Your WordPress LMS Website

Use LifterLMS to:

  • Create multimedia lessons
  • Build courses with sections and lessons
  • Add quizzes and quiz question banks
  • Create assignments
  • Use course tracks
  • Set course and lesson prerequisites
  • Drip lesson content over time
  • Add quiz time limits
  • Support multiple instructors
  • Add lesson downloads
  • Import and export courses
  • Create discussion areas
  • Add course reviews
  • Manage group enrollments for courses and memberships

The Course Builder lets you manage sections, lessons, quizzes, and other course elements from one place, without losing sight of how the learning path fits together. Focused lesson and quiz layouts and clear course navigation help students move through course content with fewer distractions.

Engage Your Students

Use LifterLMS to:

  • Award achievement badges
  • Issue certificates
  • Send personalized emails
  • Support social learning
  • Use student dashboards
  • Show learner progress
  • Track lesson and course completion

These tools help students understand where they are, what they have completed, and what to do next, and let you follow learner activity. For training programs, that supports completion rates, accountability, and clearer learner progress; for course businesses, a better student experience without manually guiding every learner.

Offer Memberships

LifterLMS includes membership tools, so you can sell more than individual courses: protect content, bundle courses, create members-only areas, and give learners access to a wider learning experience.

Use LifterLMS to:

  • Create sitewide memberships
  • Create traditional membership plans
  • Automatically enroll members into courses
  • Restrict non-course content
  • Offer members-only payment plans
  • Create private group discussions
  • Build members-only forums
  • Create learning paths for different member levels

Own and Manage Your WordPress LMS Platform

LifterLMS gives you LMS management tools inside the WordPress admin, from registration, student accounts, and passwords to reporting.

Use LifterLMS to:

  • View course, membership, ecommerce, and student reporting
  • Use a course gradebook
  • Send email and SMS notifications
  • Manage bulk course and membership enrollments
  • Manage course capacity
  • Use WordPress LMS user roles
  • Manage branding and typography through your WordPress setup
  • Test and troubleshoot your LMS
  • Use the system analyzer

Get Support for Your WordPress LMS Project

LifterLMS includes documentation, training, setup tools, and support resources to help you build and manage your LMS.

More Resources

Enhance Your LMS With LifterLMS Add-ons

When your course, membership, or training website needs more advanced tools, extend LifterLMS with official add-ons for assessment, ecommerce, groups, media, private student support, reporting, and learning design.

Advanced LMS add-ons include:

Connect LifterLMS With Your Payment, Email, and Business Tools

Official LifterLMS extensions include:

You can also connect LifterLMS with WordPress plugins for SEO, forms, CRM, forums, page building, analytics, security, caching, backups, community features, affiliates, and marketing automation. It also supports xAPI / Tin Can API workflows and learning authoring tools, and connects to thousands of apps through automation tools such as Zapier.

Run LifterLMS From Any AI Tool You Already Use

LifterLMS is built to work with AI assistants, agents, and automation tools.

Core LMS resources are exposed as WordPress Abilities, so compatible AI and automation tools can discover what your LMS can do and act on it through the same permissions and safeguards used by logged-in WordPress users.

The free core plugin includes AI-ready abilities for:

  • Courses, sections, and lessons
  • Memberships and access plans
  • Students, enrollments, and student progress
  • Quizzes, quiz questions, and quiz attempts
  • Manual quiz grading
  • Student grades and lesson-level progress
  • Certificate templates and awarded certificates
  • Orders and transactions in read-only mode

LifterLMS add-ons can extend this further.

With supported add-ons such as Assignments, Groups, and Events installed, AI-ready workflows can also cover assignments and submissions, group management, seats, invitations, and events.

LifterLMS can support AI and automation workflows through:

  • WordPress Abilities API
  • LifterLMS MCP Server
  • LifterLMS CLI / WP-CLI
  • LifterLMS REST API
  • Webhooks for course, enrollment, quiz, order, and certificate activity

Learn more in the LifterLMS AI agent guide

LMS Website and User Experience Design Tools

Use LifterLMS with the modern LifterLMS Sky Pilot Theme for even more beautiful results. LifterLMS works with any well-coded WordPress theme, but check out Sky Pilot if you want to start with a modern, beautiful, full-site editing block-based theme. And consider using our Aircraft page builder plugin to make building beautiful web pages fast using our design template library.

Why People Switch to LifterLMS

The main reasons we hear from users switching to LifterLMS from plugins like LearnDash, Tutor LMS, LearnPress, Sensei LMS, WP Courseware, and MasterStudy LMS (see our shortlist of the best WordPress LMS plugins) are:

  • The best most feature-complete customizable well-coded features
  • Outstanding customer support including live calls
  • The free LifterLMS plugin is amazing making the project affordable
  • Memberships, ecommerce, and gamification included in LifterLMS without the need for 3rd party plugins

Hosted course platforms and other WordPress LMS plugins can suit different priorities; LifterLMS is designed for people who want to build and own a WordPress-based LMS they can truly grow with.

Save on LifterLMS With a Bundle

If your LMS project needs several add-ons, a bundle may be a better fit than buying individual extensions. LifterLMS bundles give you access to groups of tools for course creation, ecommerce, design, marketing, automation, student engagement, and advanced LMS features.

Explore:

Scaling LifterLMS

LifterLMS can support anything from a single paid course or a free training resource library to a multi-course academy, a client LMS build, or a larger learning website with multiple audiences. It is lightweight enough for small niche sites while powering huge universities and employee training in Fortune 500 corporations, and we’ve even worked with a site that has 8,019,355 course enrollments.

Because LifterLMS runs on WordPress, performance at scale depends on your hosting, caching, theme, and plugins, all of which you control.

LifterLMS in Action

Explore real LifterLMS websites and customer stories to see how course businesses, memberships, professional training, coaching, schools, and client LMS projects use WordPress for online learning.

What LifterLMS Users Say

“Now I host all my courses on LifterLMS. Totally different experience. I’m free to do things my way. I’ve never yet hit a wall where LifterLMS didn’t enable me to do things the way I wanted.”

Nick Usborne, Teacher and Entrepreneur

“As a former school teacher, professional user experience designer, and current online course creator, I can honestly attribute much of our success to LifterLMS and its consideration for multiple learning modalities, the LMS UI/UX out of the box, and natural student engagement opportunities. In less than 10 months we’ve gone from $0 to $300K in revenue with LifterLMS playing a huge part in that!!”

Sarah Lorenzen, Teacher and Entrepreneur

Join the LifterLMS Community

When you download LifterLMS, you join a thriving community of education entrepreneurs, course creators, developers, LMS professionals, and WordPress enthusiasts. Use it to see what others are building, ask questions, share ideas, and learn from other WordPress LMS projects.

Join the LifterLMS VIP Facebook group to connect with other LifterLMS users, or the LifterLMS Slack community if you prefer Slack.

Contribute to LifterLMS

Developers can review the code, report issues, and suggest improvements in the LifterLMS GitHub repository, helping improve the plugin for the wider WordPress LMS community. Start with the contributing guidelines. You can also help translate LifterLMS for more users around the world through translate.wordpress.org.

What Should You Do Next?

If you are building an LMS with WordPress, start with the free LifterLMS plugin to create your first course, test the learner experience, and see how LifterLMS fits your website. Then choose the next step that matches your project: