Most Online Course Plugins Suck

Down here in Florida, we cooled off to…. 92F. Last week, we had that “heat dome” over a good chunk of the country and, yeah… the Tampa area broke records.

But, while Tampa is hot, one thing that isn’t is online course plugins.

(Like that transition? )

While so many people use such plugins, nobody really likes them. They’re bloated and sometimes just problematic. I know… because I help maintain a lot of sites through Concierge that use these things.

So, today I’d like to discuss these things. And what I’m seeking to do about it.

A LOT of people like to do online courses on their sites in order to sell them. But, what we DON’T want are plugins that are bloated beasts.

Let’s dive into this….

Online Course Systems Are Bloated

When it comes to putting together online courses in WordPress, we often look to plugins like Learndash, TutorLMS, LifterLMS and others. But, there’s a problem with all of them…

They’re bloated.

Not only that, but most people don’t even need them.

Most of these online course plugins do way more than just provide a mechanism to organize your content into courses. They also have sales systems baked in, content protections, quizzing, grading, assignments, instructor profiles, certificates…. the list goes on.

Many of them are built to do… everything. But, most site owners don’t USE them for everything they do. All they wanted to do was organize content into online courses. So, they end up installing these huge plugins that you often feel like you’re spending time fighting.

Of all these course plugins, the one I usually end up using on behalf of clients is Learndash. So, let’s talk about Learndash for a minute…

The plugin ZIP file alone when you download it is 20MB. This is one huge plugin. And they build it to do pretty much everything including selling the courses, quizzes, assignments, certificates, etc. But…

Every client I have who uses Learndash barely touches that functionality. All they really wanted was to organize their stuff into online courses. In some cases, they landed on Learndash because they wanted to use BuddyBoss (there’s another beaut ) and that was all there was to it. They use other plugins for all the main functionality.

But, Learndash has a lot of annoyances you end up fighting…

• It has settings for courses up the wazoo and often confuses people who don’t even need any of that stuff.
• The way they built the interface isn’t default WordPress, so there’s sometimes weird interface issues in the course builder. Things can be hard to find.
• Learndash has it’s own enrollment system that is separate from membership plugins, so sometimes you end up fighting that thing.
• Despite it being such a huge plugin already, you often end up having to install OTHER plugins to make it do simple things.

Another one I’ve worked with some is TutorLMS. While it has a nice interface, it’s templates are so difficult to modify you’ll want to shoot yourself.

All this…. and you end up not using huge chunks of these things. Because, these course plugins are NOT the best way to do half of these things.

If you need quizzes, I’d much rather use a real forms plugin.

I’d much rather use something like WooCommerce to sell stuff than Learndash. Because, it works MUCH better.

I’d rather use WP Fusion any day for content permissions than defer to a course plugin to control it.

Barely anybody cares about certificates. I’ve never had a client use assignments. I’ve never had a client assign grades to their students. People don’t need this stuff most of the time! We’re not running schools!

So, if we’re not running schools, why are we feeling forced to install plugins that are designed for schools?

It is because people go out searching for “online course plugins” and they land on these things. Or, they were looking for something that would “integrate” with some other tool they’re looking at using.

And all they wanted was a way to organize their content into courses and have it look OK. And maybe progress tracking. And… that’s probably it.

For ALL of my clients, all they ever really need is content organization and, maybe, the ability for their people to mark things completed.

The rest of it is useless bloat that just sits there and causes plugin conflicts for no…. damn…. reason.

No wonder some people end up using things like Kajabi. It feels easier. And frankly, it is.

Let’s talk solutions (see you below…)…

Concierge Client Update

Last week, I mentioned how I am putting website profiles into your account profile with me. Here’s what mine looks like:

When you click on your own site profile, you’ll be able to see details about your site. For now, this is limited to clients in Concierge or people I’ve done site work with. As time goes on, this will develop further I’m sure.

But, as you’ll find out below, I’m also getting into the arena of creating plugins. Below, I’m going to tell you about a plugin I’m working on called “Simple Courses”. And here’s the thing about this…

I’m creating this plugin specifically to solve the needs of clients.

As you may imagine, working with as many sites as I do, I see a lot of the “inner workings” of things. And I can see what people struggle with. Big, bloated online course plugins like Learndash is one of those things, so I’m going to create a solution that I can make available.

To that end, I am brainstorming some things here…

I’m always looking for ways to make Concierge more useful. And one way that I can do that is to have a small arm of “go to” solutions that we can plug and play. Things like:

• Plugins that solve specific issues and allow us to run easier websites (hence the Simple Courses idea).
• Code snippets and solutions for quick enhancements to WordPress
• Automations you can import into your site and use, serving as a massive shortcut to building out marketing automations

So, with that in mind, I’d love your feedback. Even if you’re reading this and you’re not an active client of mine, your feedback is helpful. Because, it isn’t as if I’m holding everything in just for Concierge.

What pesky annoyances are you dealing with in your site that perhaps we can solve?

If you could dream up a plugin perfect for you to do something, what would it be?

What shortcuts or improvements do you think would make your life simpler when it comes to working with your WordPress site?

Hit that reply button on this email and let me know your thoughts.

WordPress News & Updates

Roadmap to 6.9. The Roadmap to WordPress 6.9 has been published, which is due for release on December 2nd. There will be some enhancements to the Site Editor, block level commenting (not many will use this), a modular redesign of the Admin experience, and more. You can read more about the admin redo here, which is something I’m most interested in.

Security Hole. A critical security hole was found in the Post SMTP plugin (which connects sites to SMTP services for email delivery). This was an account takeover vulnerability and was found on 400K installations. If you use this plugin, you want to be sure you’re on version 3.3 or higher to fix the issue. Or, just use FluentSMTP which is better anyway.

CSS Class Names Don’t Influence SEO. Can your site’s CSS influence your SEO? Yes and no, according to SEJ. The names of your classes are ignored by Google, so that doesn’t matter at all. But, big oversized CSS files can cause page slowdowns and hurt your core web vitals and that can hurt your SEO. I recommend using performance optimization plugins to fix this, as well as not abusing big page builders like Elementor.

Fluent Forms Milestone. Fluent Forms has reached the milestone of now being in use on over 600,000 websites. Very cool!

MailerPress In The Wild. The team behind SEOPress is working on a new tool called MailerPress. It is in the repository and you can test it for free. It is being developed to be a new email marketing solution baked into WordPress. Could it eventually be a contender with the likes of FluentCRM? We shall see. FluentCRM is a marketing automation CRM (more like ActiveCampaign) and I’m not sure if MailerPress is looking to go that direction, but I’ll keep a casual eye on it.

Can WordPress Be WordPress Anymore?. Jamie Marsland writes an interesting piece about where WordPress stands in the world right now, with the rise of AI and tools like Loveable where people can build and deploy full web apps just by “vibe coding” it. In a world where that is getting easier, where does WordPress stand? One thing is for sure… WordPress needs to adapt.

Fluent Boards 1.8. Fluent Boards has gotten a new, fresh update with some cool features. Version 1.8 now allows you to organize boards into folders. It also gives you a list view, not just Kanban. Read the full announcement here. If I was ever going to move off of Basecamp and bring project management into my website, it would probably be with Fluent Boards.

AI Is Coming To WordPress. Elementor is working on Angie, “the first agentic AI plugin for WordPress”. And Hostinger is working on Kodee, what THEY say will be the first agentic AI for WordPress. This is going to happen. The competition is real. Having an AI agent right inside WordPress that can actually perform tasks within your site is coming.

Flying TTFB. FlyingPress has released a free online tool for testing your site’s TTFB, or “time to first byte”. Basically, it is a measure for how fast your web hosting responds to a request. My clients should find awesome scores since we’re all using Rocket, which uses the Cloudflare worldwide network. Even my xCloud sites are scoring very well. Read more about my hosting partners here.

An Alternative To Bloated Course Plugins

WordPress is a content management system. Which means that the core functionality of organizing content into online courses already exists. It is baked right into WordPress. It is called custom post types.

See, WordPress supports different TYPES of content. Built in, it comes with Posts and Pages. But, that’s not what you’re stuck with at all. You can create your own custom post types and name them anything you want. All big bloated online course plugins are doing that. Learndash, for instance, creates courses, lessons and topics. Those are just 3 custom post types.

You can create your own. Lots of ways to do that, including plugins like CPT UI, Advanced Custom Fields, Metabox, Jet Engine, etc. Heck, you could even have AI “vibe code” a code snippet to create a custom post type for you and you just drop it into a snippets plugin.

Now, I know full well that’s a little more technical than some people can get. And it puts you into a position where you have to build your own course system using custom post types. As well as making your site’s theme work with that stuff. This is something I help my Concierge clients do many times, but beyond the skillset of most WordPress users.

So, I thought I would try my hand at creating my own “out of the box” solution.

I’m creating a plugin. For now, I’m simply calling it…. Simple Courses. I may change the name… not sure yet. And, no, this plugin isn’t ready for primetime yet. I’m still tweaking it (with the help of AI). But, my goal is simple:

• Rely on core WordPress functionality as much as possible.
• Concentrate ONLY on the two main things I find my clients need and want, which is organizing content into courses and, optionally, offering progress tracking.
• Looking good, while deferring to the theme as much as possible so each site can tweak the look how they please.

I’ve now had TWO clients that requested online courses that look like Kajabi. One of the things they like about Kajabi is how it shows the lessons in a nice list along with feature images. It is also nice to be able to divide those things up into sections and have it display nice and clean. Making Learndash do that is a real pain in the butt for multiple reasons.

So, I’m making Simple Courses act that way right away. Here’s a quick screenshot of my testing setup…

As things sit right now, this plugin comes in at a download size of only 88KB. That’s less than half a percent the size of Learndash.

I’m basically building this plugin to the specs of what my clients usually use within their courses. I am specifically NOT building in any of the fluff. If people want quizzes, we’ll use a forms plugin. To control permissions, we’ll use a membership plugin. To sell them, we’ll use a shopping cart. I’m not going to build in reporting or any other fluff because I know from experience barely anybody ever uses it. I’m not doing “drip feed” content, because barely anybody uses it.

All we need is a nice course library page with a “grid” of courses. Courses that look easy to use. And a way for the student to mark things as complete and see what they’ve done. Courses will support downloads, and the user can choose to show them in the sidebar or below the content.

That’s it. Everything about this is being built to be…. simple.

If you might be interested in helping test this out when I’m done, let me know!

But, it goes back to one of my core values, listed right on my about page…

Power lies in simplicity. I believe complexity is a symptom of a system breakdown. When things have gotten overly complicated, it is best to re-evaluate your approach.

It is time we re-evaluate using big bloated complex online course plugins. For 98% of you, you don’t need them.

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