LifterLMS Review – A Unique LMS Plugin Full of Gems!

Looking for LifterLMS review before purchasing it? Well, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we are doing an in-depth LifterLMS review and we’ll see how good the plugin is. From this post, you’ll be able to determine whether it fits to your online course platform needs.

Building a website in WordPress is fast and simple. WordPress makes website development a breeze. If you are looking to build your next LMS website, then there are plugins that could make your development a lot easier. One such plugin is LifterLMS.

In the past, we’ve discussed several WordPress LMS plugins. But we haven’t actually done a LifterLMS review. So in this post, we are going to do a full review of LifterLMS. We’ll look at the installation process, how to create and sell a course, how to add quizzes, etc. Basically, we are going to look at all the core features that LifterLMS provides. And hopefully, we can help you decide if LifterLMS is the plugin for your next LMS project!

So, let’s start our LifterLMS review and see if it’s the right LMS plugin for you.

What is LifterLMS?

LifterLMS is an LMS plugin for WordPress. Using this plugin, you can create an eLearning or LMS website. It has the tools and features that you can use to create and sell online courses. You can create a single course website or you can create a course marketplace with LifterLMS.

LifterLMS is free but many of its powerful features are only available through additional addons. But you can try a demo version for 30 days for $1 which will include additional features.

In the demo version, you’ll get access to all the features. This give you a chance to see what you will get before purchasing the main paid package. You can actually use all the features of LifterLMS on a demo site hosted by the company.

However, after testing out the demo version, if you don’t like the plugin, then you’ll get your $1 back! Interesting, isn’t it?

LifterLMS has some really cool add-ons that you can use to make your online courses a lot more helpful. Using these addons or extensions, you can also add new functionalities to the plugin and make your course building process a lot easier.

Some notable features of LifterLMS

LMS plugins are always packed with numerous features. This is one of the reasons why LMS plugins are so expensive. But these features are necessary for creating and managing an LMS website. So, let’s take a look at some of the core features of LifterLMS.

1. Performance

Performance is significant for any website. If your website takes a long time to load, it will drive away traffic. You will lose potential users if this happens. So the LifterLMS team concentrated on performance a lot. Since an LMS plugin is full of features, it might be natural that the website will take a long time to load. But for LifterLMS, that’s not the case. In fact, LifterLMS websites have excellent performance.

LifterLMS provides great speed. To test its metrics, you can try out the demo for $1 and put your site’s URL on the GTmetrix site. Depending on how many courses you have on your demo site, the performance might vary. But in most cases, you’ll see that the performance is great.

2. Compatibility

When creating an LMS site, it is important to consider compatibility. Because in order to build the perfect eLearning website, you might need other plugins or add-ons. Again, the LMS plugin you are using should be compatible with different themes. LifterLMS is compatible with popular page builders like Elementor, Gutenberg, and Beaver Builder.

LifterLMS also supports all the popular themes like Astra, OceanWP, ConsultPress, Kadence, etc. It works best with the LaunchPad theme. The theme is designed by the LifterLMS team. It’s intended for those who want to create online courses and turn their experience & passion into an online business. The LaunchPad theme is highly customizable.

3. Usability

An LMS plugin has many features and it might be a little complex for beginners. For this reason, the interface should be easy to understand and use. Without proper usability, it gets a lot difficult to create courses and manage an LMS site. According to many user reviews, the interface of LifterLMS is intuitive and easy to use. It allows the users to make changes to their courses and handle all the backend stuff from one place.

The base plugin provides you with features to create courses, quizzes, and certificates. If you want to add additional features, you can always install other plugins or addons. Many users prefer this approach because they can only include the features they need. There are other LMS plugins that give you a ton of features in the main plugin that you might not even need- which can slow down your site.

LifterLMS gives you the features that you need for a general online education platform. But if you need more features, you can install other add-ons. This makes the plugin lightweight. With the intuitive interface, the plugin becomes simple and easy to use.

4. Support

Even if you have experience working with LMS plugins, sometimes you might get stuck. At this time some support is necessary. LifterLMS has dedicated support and documentation that you can take help from. If you need help with the installation, there is also a guide that helps you with LifterLMS installation.

It has a knowledge base with a collection of known issues and their solutions. The page is well-categorized so that you can easily locate your problem. There’s a search bar as well, if you don’t want to look for the issues, you can search for it and find what you’re looking for. Sometimes you can get the solution from the knowledge base and don’t need to submit a ticket.

While on the subject, if you can’t find the solution to your problem in the knowledge base, then you can submit a support ticket. However, to do that, you need to log in or create an account.

5. Integrations

LifterLMS integrates really well with many different plugins and themes. In case you’re installing a theme, make sure it follows proper coding standards. There are lots of LMS themes in the market which are really great and provide good support. But before installing or purchasing make sure it’s compatible with LifterLMS. 

LifterLMS also integrates well with other essential plugins such as WooCommerce, Ninja Forms, Stripe, and many other 3rd party plugins. To see the full list of integrations, check out the official page of LifterLMS Add-ons.

6. Premium add-ons for LifterLMS

LifterLMS provides a range of premium add-ons so that you can take your eLearning site to another level. If you want to build an online education platform in 2022, you need advanced features like: 

• Advanced quiz option
• Assignment system 
• Grading system
• Private and group messaging
• Group learning
• Video lessons
• Lesson attachments (PDFs), etc.

LifterLMS provides you with several premium add-ons so that you can build a modern LMS website. Let’s take a look at some of these premium add-ons:

• Advanced Quizzes: With LifterLMS’s Advanced Quizzes, you can create quizzes of different categories, tests, grade your students, etc.
• Assignments: LifterLMS gives you the option to give out assignments to the students. This creates a “Task” that the students must complete and submit. Students can also submit long answer essays.
• Private Areas: Sometimes students need that one-on-one session with their instructors. This feature provides the student with a private area where they can have a discussion with their course instructors privately.
• Social Learning: It is said that you can learn something faster if you’re learning it in a group. LifterLMS has included this feature where students can learn together and communicate just like social media.
• Video Lessons: Today modern online education platforms like Udemy, Coursera, etc. have video lessons. This is an effective way of delivering lectures. LifterLMS has an advanced video feature that allows you to make video lessons.
• Course attachments (PDFs): Sometime you would want to include notes and guides for your students. Using the course attachment feature, you can upload PDF files and your students will be able to download those files.
• Reports: In order to see how your courses perform and how well your students are taking the course, you need a report system. LifterLMS provides you with the following analytics:
  • Courses
  • Students
  • Enrolments
  • eCommerce info

There are many more features of LifterLMS to talk about, but we’ve discussed some of the important ones. We will explore some more features during reviewing the course creation process. So let’s continue.

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LifterLMS installation and configuration experience

We can’t write a LifterLMS review without using the plugin. So let us share our hands-on experience with you.

As I’ve mentioned earlier, LMS plugins are very feature-rich. It might get a bit confusing even for seasoned WordPress developers. To make things simple, most LMS plugins have a setup wizard. Using a setup wizard, you can easily install and configure your LMS plugin. LifterLMS also has a setup wizard, let’s see how it works.

The welcome screen

As soon as you install and activate LifterLMS, the setup wizard is launched. It has 5 steps of installation.

The first step of installation is the welcome screen. Here LifterLMS gives you the option to skip the setup or continue. Just go through the setup, it only takes a few minutes.

The page setup process

In the next step, LifterLMS shows you some of the essential pages that you’ll need. It’s going to automatically create these pages for you. So just click on the ‘Save & Continue’ button to proceed to the next step.

Payment options

In the payment processing option, you can select your country and the currency. But you have to install a payment gateway to accept payment. LifterLMS integrates well with WooCommerce and Stripe.

Using LifterLMS you can accept online and offline payments as well. There’s a checkbox in the installation called “Enable Offline Payment”. If you want to accept offline payment then check this box and move on with the setup.

Diagnostic data sharing to get a coupon

This part of the installation is optional. You can ‘Allow’ LifterLMS to collect non-sensitive diagnostic data. This will help the LifterLMS team to make the plugin better with each update. If you want you can allow this or you can click on the ‘No Thanks’ button and move on to the final part of the installation. If you allow this, LifterLMS will give you a discount coupon.

Completing the setup

The final step of the installation just informs you that the LifterLMS configuration is complete. It then gives you the link to LifterLMS video tutorials and a “LifterLMS Getting Started Guide”. You can visit these links to learn more about LifterLMS and how to create courses with it.

You can also import sample courses and templates. Since you’re just starting out, your course library will be empty. This gives you a chance to import some demo content so that you can get an idea of how your LMS website will look.

LifterLMS LaunchPad theme

Now that you have your LMS plugin all configured, it’s time to install an LMS theme. As I said earlier, you can use any well-coded theme for LifterLMS, but there’s a native theme called LaunchPad. It’s fully compatible with LifterLMS and has options to customize the theme layout.

To install the theme, follow the steps given below.

Step 1: Go to LifterLMS Add-ons page

From your WordPress dashboard, go to LifterLMS > Add-ons & more. 

Step 2: Find LaunchPad Theme and Click Install

Next, find the LaunchPad theme on this page and click on the install button.

Once you install and activate the theme, you can check out the layout of your website. Now you have the LaunchPad theme installed which works great with LifterLMS. However, you can use any theme you wish, I just wanted to show you how to install the LaunchPad theme.

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LifterLMS course creation experience

One of the most important tools for an LMS plugin is the course builder. The course builder is the tool that you use to create a course, add lessons to the course, add quizzes, and other content. Let’s experience this feature by building a course!

Generally, there are a couple of steps for creating a course. First, we have to create the course. Then fill it with contents like course description, featured image, materials included, quizzes, certificate, etc. Let’s see how LifterLMS handles the course creation.

The course introduction

First, let’s create our course introduction. To access it, we have to go to Courses > Add New from our WordPress dashboard.

This will open up the course introduction page. Here we can give the name of our course and provide a course description and information. We can also see a course instructor section where the name and image of the instructor can be displayed. If you are using the Gutenberg editor, then you can simply select a block and edit it.

To add a description for the course instructor part, we can go to User > Profile from our WordPress dashboard. Then add ‘Biographical Info’ in the box. This will be added to our course instructor part.

There’s another section called “Course Settings” on the top right corner of the screen. This section gives us various options to customize our course layout. Here we can tweak the course display layout, content style, featured image options, etc.

Course options

If we scroll down, we can see some course options. This place gives us the sales page, general, restrictions, reviews, forms, and advanced video options. From the ‘General’ tab, we can select course length, course difficulty, featured video, etc.

We also have the option to display our course featured video on the course title instead of just a featured image. If you are creating a course, make sure to go through these options- especially the sales page, general, and restrictions.

Course Access Plan

After the course options section, there’s another option called the Access Plan. The access plan determines the payment options and access time periods available for a course. Since we are just creating a new course, we don’t have any access plan. To add a new access plan you need to click on the ‘Add New’ button.

The Course Builder

Now that we have created an introduction for our course, it’s time to add some lessons to our course. Let’s open the course builder. To open the course builder we can click on the settings tab, scroll down and click on the ‘Launch Course Builder’ button. 

You can also open the course builder from the courses page. Simply hover your mouse over your course and select ‘Launch Course Builder’.

The interface of the LifterLMS course builder is quite different than other LMS plugins. It has a drag-and-drop feature with which you can create sections and add lessons to the sections very easily. What we loved most about it is the speed at which you can complete your entire course curriculum.

After adding sections and lessons to those sections, you can click on them and edit its name. Then you can open the lesson editor to put the contents of your lesson. From the course builder, you can do a lot of things. You can upload materials, link content, add quizzes, add videos, etc. You can do all these just from this one section.

Adding a lesson to a course

To open the lesson builder hover your mouse over a lesson and click on the WordPress logo to open the lesson builder. 

This opens up a familiar interface. We can either use the classic WordPress editor or Gutenberg editor to create your lesson. We can add texts, images, etc. to the lesson. We can also add a video to your lesson. To do that, we can simply scroll down to the Lesson Settings and click on the General tab. Then copy the YouTube, Vimeo, or Wistia video lessons URL and paste it into the ‘Video Embed URL’ input box.

That is how we can create lessons.

Course assignments in LifterLMS

To create an effective course, it is a good idea to add assignments to the course. However, to do this, you have to have the LifterLMS Assignment add-on. To install it, go to LifterLMS > Add-ons & More option from your WordPress dashboard. Find the LifterLMS Assignment addon and install it.

Now that we’ve installed the Assignment addon, we can add assignments to the lessons. To add assignments, you can click on the checkbox icon. Here we have 2 options, to either create a new assignment or add an existing one. Since we don’t have any assignments, let’s create one.

We have the option to choose our assignment type and embed a video or audio to our assignment. We can also set a passing score and also assignment weight. We can add descriptions to the assignment. To do that we can simply enable the ‘Description’ button and add our description.

That was really easy. Now let’s add some quizzes.

👉 Tutor LMS vs LifterLMS – Which One is Best For You?

LifterLMS Quizzes

So we have created some lessons and added assignments to our lessons. Now let’s see how to add quizzes to our lessons to make our course much more effective. Click on the Quiz tab after the assignment, and it will open up another section. Click on the ‘Add Question’ button in the bottom right corner and it will give you a bunch of quiz categories to select from.

There are in total 12 quiz categories you can select. 3 are basic and 9 are advanced. We are selecting a basic single-choice quiz. After you select your category, you can click on more categories and all of those will be added below.

Using this method, we can create multiple quizzes for our lessons.

Creating a Certificate with LifterLMS

Since we’ve created a course, it’s a good idea to add a certificate to it. So when students complete this course, they will be awarded a certificate. To access the certificate feature, go to Engagements > Certificates from your WordPress dashboard.

This is the place where all your certificates are kept. You can also add new certificate templates by clicking on the ‘Add Certificate Template’ button on top. There are a couple of ways to customize and create a beautiful certificate for a course. So we created a simple certificate for our course.

And that is how we can create an entire course in LifterLMS. One of the most impressive things about LifterLMS is how powerful and intuitive the course builder is. You can create an entire course from just one page. After you’ve added lessons, you can simply add quizzes and assignments and it’s so simple to use.

👉 Video: How to Create a Course with LifterLMS

Managing membership with LifterLMS

LifterLMS also has membership options where you can add and manage different members. This allows multiple users to access various courses, pages, posts, etc. Using this method you can sell courses more effectively. There are options to manage membership contents from the Membership Settings.

LifterLMS Pricing

The pricing of LifterLMS is different for every user. The core plugin is available for free and if you require more features, you have to pay for additional extensions.

So basically, you’re paying for the extra add-ons that you need. Otherwise, you can use the free version of LifterLMS. The free version provides you with enough features to create a course but it lacks certain functionalities. These are sometimes essential for a modern-day eLearning website.

There are 3 packages of LifterLMS that you can purchase. These are:

• Earth Bundle: Costs $199/ year
• Universe Bundle: Costs $360/ year
• Infinity Bundle: Costs $1200/ year

Each of these packages has added features and support. Check out the official LifterLMS pricing page for more details on LifterLMS pricing.

👉 Get LifterLMS at Discount
🎉 Use coupon code WPGIZ for exclusive discount! 🔥

Conclusion

That brings our LifterLMS review to an end. We explored the installation process, course creation process, and the general interface of the plugin.

We have tried many LMS plugins and we loved using all of them. Each has its own uniqueness. To be honest, using LifterLMS was quite interesting. The unique thing that we noticed was the ease of use. We created an entire course just from the course builder. Because of its simplicity, it was fun building our course. Although there are various other features that we still haven’t explored, so far it was a good experience.

If you are looking to build your next LMS website with LifterLMS, I would say, go for it! Since the core plugin is free, why not try creating your eLearning website? Also, you can try LifterLMS with premium features just for $1. It gives you access to all the features of LifterLMS for 30 days. Again, if you don’t like it, you’ll get your money back. So what’s stopping you from building your dream online education platform?

We hope that you liked our LifterLMS review. If you have any queries leave them in the comments section. We’ll try our best to answer them. Also, leave your thoughts in the comments section about our LifterLMS review. We’d love to hear from you.