PressPrimer Certificate – Certificate Designer & Course Certification for Your LMS

PressPrimer Certificate brings the full certification lifecycle to your WordPress site. A drag-and-drop designer produces the certificate. Unique credential IDs, QR codes, and a public verification page make it authoritative. And it can all be connected to course activity in LearnDash, LifterLMS, Tutor LMS, or LearnPress.

This is a genuinely free plugin. Unlimited templates, unlimited certificates, the full designer, a suite of integrations, public verification, and email delivery are all included at no cost.

Why PressPrimer Certificate?

Certificate tools built into LMS plugins are often afterthoughts: rigid and awkward layouts, no way to verify what students have earned, and no easy way to track certificate activity. Standalone certificate services charge monthly fees and hold your credentials on someone else’s infrastructure.

PressPrimer Certificate delivers a complete, self-hosted credential workflow, including:

• A true-size designer – The canvas is the PDF. What you build on screen is exactly what recipients download.
• Credentials that can be checked – Every certificate carries a unique, non-guessable credential ID and a QR code linking to a public verification page on your site.
• Comprehensive integrations – Certificates award themselves when a learner passes a quiz, earns a grade, or completes a course. Manual certificate generation is also available.
• Records that outlive the template – Issued certificates snapshot their design and data at issue time. Editing a template later never changes a certificate that has already been earned.

Features Included Free

Certificate Designer

• Interactive WYSIWYG canvas with drag, resize, keyboard nudging, undo/redo, and zoom
• Eight starter designs – Formal, Modern, Playful, and Geometric, each in portrait and landscape – every one in Letter and A4, plus a blank option
• Image, logo, signature, and background elements accept PNG, JPEG, and GIF, plus WebP and AVIF where your server supports them
• Six bundled open-license fonts (SIL OFL) with real bold and italic faces
• Text, merge field, image, signature, line/shape, QR code, and background elements
• Merge fields for recipient, certificate, site, quiz, assignment, and course data, including custom user and post meta
• Merge fields inside text: write “Expires:” and insert the expiry date field, and the whole line centers and wraps as one piece
• Alignment tools: align and distribute grouped elements, and guides to help with alignment
• Live PDF preview from the real renderer

Design Defaults

• Site-wide defaults for certificate size (Letter or A4), font, logo, and signature
• Brand colors (primary, accent, text) that starter templates apply automatically

Issuance & Automation

• Automatic triggers: PressPrimer Quiz pass thresholds, PressPrimer Assignment grades, and course, lesson, topic, or quiz completion in LearnDash, LifterLMS, Tutor LMS, and LearnPress
• “Any” award options: one trigger can cover any quiz, any course, or any lesson in a chosen course, so one certificate serves your whole catalog
• Certificate display names built from merge fields, so a template reused across courses names each certificate after its course everywhere it appears
• Manually issue certificates with optional backdating and expiry dates
• Validity periods: set how long certificates from a template stay valid (days, months, or years), pick an exact expiry date, or let them last forever
• Per-trigger control over repeat completions: suppress duplicates or issue a fresh certificate every time (for compliance and recertification courses)
• Revoke certificates and reinstate them if revoked by mistake
• Send yourself a template’s award email with sample values before it goes live

Credentials & Verification

• Unique, non-guessable credential IDs with a check that catches typos
• Public verification page (shortcode and block) that anyone can use, no account needed
• Optional QR code on every certificate linking to its verification page
• The QR code and credential ID on issued PDFs are clickable, so an emailed certificate verifies in one click
• A shareable certificate view page with PDF download
• Download PDF on the verification page for valid and expired certificates, so a verifier can keep a copy
• Certificate Link block and shortcode: one button on a course, lesson, topic, or quiz page that downloads the logged-in learner’s own certificate for that item (or opens its page, your choice), hidden until it is earned
• My Certificates list (shortcode and block) so logged-in learners can see, verify, and download everything they have earned, with status filters and sorting by date, name, or upcoming expiry
• PDFs are protected against editing: Acrobat and other viewers refuse to modify the text, while printing and copying stay available

Admin

• Dashboard with certificate statistics, an awarded-over-time chart, quick actions, and recent certificates
• A guided setup tour that walks you from a starter template to your first issued certificate in five minutes
• Certificates screen with search by recipient, certificate name, or exact credential ID, and template, status, source, and issue-date filters
• Resend a certificate’s email with one click
• Certificate merge fields in the email subject and body, so the email can name the exact course or quiz that was completed
• Earned certificates listed on each user’s profile page with verify and download links
• Certificate templates list with trigger, page size, and status columns

Security, Privacy & Accessibility

• PDF and QR code generation happen locally on your server
• PDF files cannot be modified in Acrobat or other tools to change data like the student name
• WordPress Privacy API integration (Tools > Export/Erase Personal Data)
• Clean uninstall with optional complete data removal
• Keyboard navigation, screen reader support, and reduced motion preferences

Premium Add-ons

Everything above is free on WordPress.org. Optional add-ons from pressprimer.com extend the plugin in three tiers, each building on the one below it:

Educator

• Custom Fonts – Upload your brand’s TTF fonts; they appear in every designer font control and render identically on screen and in the PDF.
• Multi-Page Certificates – Add, duplicate, and reorder pages in the designer; every page renders in the PDF.
• Bulk Awarding – Award a certificate to many recipients at once from a user list or a CSV, with a full per-row preview before anything sends.
• Expiry Reminder Emails – Remind recipients before their certificate expires, on a schedule you control, with an editable message and a test send.
• Branded Verification Page – Your logo, accent color, intro line, and footer on the public verification page, with a live preview.
• Social Sharing – One-click LinkedIn add-to-profile, share composers for LinkedIn, X, and Facebook, copy link, and link previews that show the certificate itself.

School (everything in Educator, plus)

• Issuing Organizations – Issuer profiles with their own name, logo, and web address; members as owners or issuers; templates assigned per organization so members see and award only their own.
• Public Registry – An issuer profile page and per-credential program pages with a sample certificate image and earner count.
• Credential Directory – A searchable public directory of credential holders, listed according to your site policy and per-certificate consent.
• Organization-Branded Verification – The verification page carries the issuing organization’s logo, accent color, intro, and footer.
• Award Past Completions – Find everyone who completed a course, lesson, quiz, or assignment before the trigger existed, preview every row, and award them in one run.
• Email Copies – Per-template CC and BCC on award emails, plus optional copies to LearnDash Group Leaders and PressPrimer Teachers.

Enterprise (everything in School, plus)

• Audit Log – A single, filterable record of who did what and when across the suite, with per-category retention controls and CSV export.
• White Label – Run the certificate system under your own brand across the admin, every email, new PDFs, and the public verification page.
• Verification API and Embeddable Widget – A key-authenticated JSON endpoint that answers what the verification page shows, and a drop-in widget partners paste into their own pages.

Perfect For

• Course creators using LearnDash, LifterLMS, Tutor LMS, or LearnPress who need real, verifiable certificates
• Training providers whose completion certificates must survive audits and employer checks
• Universities and schools issuing program or workshop credentials
• Membership and community sites recognizing achievements with shareable certificates
• Standalone WordPress educators issuing certificates manually (no LMS is required)

Built-in Integrations

PressPrimer Certificate automatically detects and integrates with:

PressPrimer Quiz: Award a certificate when a learner passes a quiz, with quiz score and title merge fields.

PressPrimer Assignment: Award a certificate when an assignment is graded and passed, with grade and assignment merge fields.

LearnDash: Award on course, lesson, topic, or quiz completion, with associated merge fields.

LifterLMS: Award on course or quiz completion.

Tutor LMS: Award on course or quiz completion.

LearnPress: Award on course or quiz completion, including quizzes inside course sections.

Every integration also offers “Any” options, so one template can cover every course or quiz without a trigger per item.

All integrations are bundled in the free version, and the plugin is still fully functional if you don’t use an LMS plugin.

Built for Developers

• Public ppcert_*() functions for issuing, rendering, and linking certificates from your own plugin
• Action hooks for issuance, revocation, and verification events
• Filter-based registries for custom trigger types (including value-only “threshold” triggers) and merge fields
• REST API support
• Custom database tables with automatic schema migration

Documentation & Support

• Knowledge Base

Source Code & Development

The full uncompressed source code for all JavaScript and CSS files is available in our public GitHub repository:

• GitHub Repository

The /src directory contains all unminified source files. The plugin uses webpack for building production assets. To rebuild from source:

1. Clone the repository
2. Run npm install to install dependencies
3. Run npm run build to compile assets

Privacy

PressPrimer Certificate stores certificate data (templates, issued certificates, recipient references, and issuance events) in your WordPress database under your full control. PDF and QR code generation happen locally on your server. No certificate or recipient data is ever transmitted to external servers. The single exception to “nothing leaves your site” is the optional email-course opt-in described under External Services; it sends only an email address that an administrator explicitly typed in and submitted.

Issued certificates are public to anyone who has the link or the credential ID. The certificate’s share page, its verification result, and its PDF download open without signing in and show the recipient’s name, the certificate title, the issuer, the issue and expiry dates, and the full certificate with every merge field placed on its design (which can include the recipient’s email address if the template uses that field). Long random credential IDs and rate limiting make guessing impractical, but anyone a recipient shares the link with, or who scans the QR code, sees the same information. If your site must meet GDPR or similar rules, say so in your privacy policy: the plugin adds suggested wording under Settings > Privacy > Policy Guide.

The plugin integrates with the WordPress Privacy API:

• Tools > Export Personal Data includes all certificates issued to the requested user.
• Tools > Erase Personal Data permanently deletes the requested user’s certificates.

Verification and view events are stored without IP addresses or user agents, and prunable event rows are cleaned up on a configurable retention schedule. Administrators can permanently delete all plugin data via Settings > Advanced > “Remove all data on uninstall” before uninstalling the plugin.

External Services

This plugin offers an optional free email course for administrators. When (and only when) a user types their email address into the opt-in form and clicks the subscribe button, the plugin connects to pressprimer.com to register the subscription.

• When: Only on an explicit opt-in submission. No request is ever made automatically (no telemetry, no activation pings, no environment data).
• What data: The typed email address and a tag naming which screen the form was on. Nothing else.
• Unsubscribing: Every email includes an unsubscribe link, honored immediately.
• Terms of Service: https://pressprimer.com/terms-conditions/
• Privacy Policy: https://pressprimer.com/privacy-policy/

Dismissing the offer is remembered permanently and is stored only on your own site.

Third-Party Libraries

The plugin bundles the following open-source software (nothing is loaded from a CDN and no external requests are made):

• TCPDF (6.11.3, pinned) — LGPL-3.0 by Nicola Asuni / Tecnick.com — renders certificate PDFs on your server. Its bundled barcode module also generates the QR codes. https://github.com/tecnickcom/TCPDF
• Recharts (3.x) — MIT — draws the dashboard’s awarded-over-time chart. Compiled into the plugin’s script bundles. https://github.com/recharts/recharts
• Day.js (1.x) — MIT — date handling in the admin apps. Compiled into the plugin’s script bundles. https://github.com/iamkun/dayjs

The bundled fonts are all licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, with license files shipped alongside each family: Playfair Display, Source Sans 3, EB Garamond, Quicksand, Great Vibes, and Alex Brush.