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Chris Badgett offers a comprehensive overview to the top WordPress plugins in this episode for creating and expanding an LMS website that goes beyond the LifterLMS core. He begins by emphasizing that LifterLMS itself handles almost all of the fundamental LMS features, such as creating courses, student dashboards, user accounts, memberships, e-commerce with PayPal or credit card payments, group sales, and engagement tools like achievement badges, certificates, gamification, and behavior-based emails.

He does, however, stress that extra plugins are frequently required to operate a completely effective and user-friendly LMS site. He suggests the free User Switching plugin, which enables administrators to swap identities to solve difficulties as a student or instructor, and WP Mail Log, which records all transactional emails received from the site, including enrollment notices and password resets, for site administration and user experience. He suggests the free User Switching plugin, which enables administrators to swap identities to solve difficulties as a student or instructor, and WP Mail Log, which records all transactional emails received from the site, including enrollment notices and password resets, for site administration and user experience.

He emphasizes Document Library Pro, a commercial plugin for organizing and graphically displaying files while managing member access, and Embed Any Document, which can be used to display PowerPoint, Keynote, or PDF files within classes. Loco Translate is crucial for modifying the site’s language and material. He recommends Popup Maker for interesting popups and WP Fusion to sync users with automation solutions for marketing, CRM, and revenue management. He suggests utilizing Gravity View in conjunction with a form plugin like as Gravity Forms to gather and present user-submitted data for forms and data management. Additionally, SEO is crucial, and plugins like Rank Math and Yoast SEO may assist increase the exposure of a website.

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Episode Transcript:

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m Chris Badgett, and today I’m doing a solo episode on the best plugins, the best WordPress plugins for your learning management system website. Besides, of course, LifterLMS, we’re gonna go over free plugins that I use on every LMS site that I build.

Also some paid ones that are my top recommendations for the best plugins. Now, an LMS site is not just courses and memberships and e-commerce and student dashboards. It’s also a fully functioning website that needs, you know, things from marketing, things for operations, things for user experience, and things for scaling for when your website gets really successful.

So think about lifter LMS as the best all-in-one learning management system solution for WordPress. It covers all the LMS features. Everything from courses, student dashboards, user accounts, reporting, uh, gamification, engagement, all that stuff, all that LMS stuff is there. All the membership stuff is there for course, bundles.

For locking down access to other parts of your site, outside of the courses. And, uh, also lifter LMS covers the e-commerce piece. So whether you’re selling with, with taking credit card payments or PayPal payments, or you’re using WooCommerce or you want to do group sales where somebody buys a bunch of seats for a group of people, that’s all covered within the lifter LMS E-commerce.

Then all the engagement features for gamification, like achievement badges, certificates, behavior-based emails that are triggered based on actions in the LMS. This is all included in lifter LMS. So just about everything you need for a learning management system website is covered by or LMS, however.

Lifter. LMS also plays nice in the sandbox with thousands and thousands of other WordPress plugins that do very specific things, some of which have specific integrations for lifter LMS built into their plugin. So I’m gonna go over my top ones today. I do recommend that. You know, you take a minimalist approach to plugins, even when you install lifter LMS, if you have the LifterLMS Infinity bundle, our top plan, I don’t necessarily recommend that you install every single thing we make and turn it on unless you’re gonna use all those features.

’cause LifterLMS has a suite of about 25 different plugins that do different things, but you likely don’t need every single one of those. The main part of this. Podcast is gonna be about the top non lifter LMS plugins that I recommend. So let’s start with some sort of utility plugins for site management and user experience.

So these are two free plugins that I put on every site, and you may not have heard of them. So the first one, which is probably the first plugin I put on any LMS website besides lifter LMS plugins, is called user switching. That’s a free plugin. You can just do a search for it. It’s made by somebody named John Blackborn, and I absolutely love this plugin.

All you do is you install it and what happens is. When you go to the users on your website, if you have this plugin installed and activated, you can switch to that user, which is super helpful for experiencing your website as somebody else on your website. So when somebody tells you, like if you’re doing support for your website, your LMS website, and they say something like, I can’t find X, or I can’t do X, or This thing isn’t working.

The first thing I’ll do is I’ll go to the users on my website. I’ll switch to that user, which is powered by the user switching plugin, and then try to recreate what they’re saying is not working or they can’t find, and I can literally just experience the website as them in the role that they are usually as a student or a teacher on the website.

So that’s super helpful. I use that plugin literally every single day. The next one is called WP Mail Log. Now what that does is it captures all the emails that are sent from your website so that you can look at them. And what I mean by that is we have a whole article on the Lit LMS website about the five different types of emails.

I definitely recommend you check that out. There’s a type of email called transactional email. So these are the most simple example of a transactional email is when somebody forgets their password and they click the for forgot password link. Uh, they enter their email, the website sends them an email, uh, to click a link can choose their new password.

That email communication is transactional email that is not a broadcast email or a marketing email. When Lifter LMS sends email notifications, and there’s many of these, many of these, like a purchase receipt or uh, an enrollment notification or, one of our premium add-ons like private areas, tells a user a new private post is ready for them to look at.

These are all transactional emails. So if you ever want to see all the emails that your website is sending, not from your CRM or your marketing automation tool, but from the website itself, WP Mail log, which is made by a company called WP Vibes, is fantastic for that. So it’s really helpful for just, if you, if someone ever says like, I didn’t get the email, you can go look and you can see like, oh, yep, here it is.

It was timestamped, it was sent. At this time, I can see the content of the email and so on. So, WP Mail log, I highly recommend and that is also free. The next is. Content delivery and learning assets related plugins. So WordPress is a content management system. You can stick anything you’ve seen on the internet.

You can stick on a WordPress website or specifically an LMS website inside of lessons or on course pages or anywhere on your site. Really. So there’s a plugin called Embed any document that I absolutely love. The creator of that is a wsm. There’s a free version I use. They may have a pro version, but the reason I use this is WordPress is great at content management, but sometimes.

It needs a little boost for certain specialized types of documents. So if I ever wanna put, say, a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation or a Apple keynote presentation inside of a lesson and I just want to put that PowerPoint file or that keynote file as the content, I can do that with embed any document and I’m just using the free plugin for that.

Which is also great with when you have that document in your WordPress media library using LifterLMS’s features to protect that content and make that media private so the public can never find that document. Only the people that are supposed to find it can find it. It’s pretty awesome. But anyways, go get yourself the embed, any document plugin.

Another one, which is a premium plugin made by Barn two is called Document Library Pro. This is awesome. What this allows you to do if your LMS website. Your courses, or your coaching programs have a lot of files like templates, document, PDF documents, cheat sheets. And spreadsheets, certain images, maybe CSV files, tons of different files are part of your membership or your LMS document.

Library Pro allows you to easily organize those, present those in a beautiful visual way, even inside of a table and stuff. Stuff like that. So, for example, the easiest way to think about it is if you have a coaching program, and let’s say you have 20 courses in there. It’s all sold through one membership.

They get the courses, but they also get this resource library. You can organize all those files using document Library Pro. And present them in a very visual way. LifterLMS will then kind of come on top of that and protect access to those files for your members. So go check out Document Library Pro, which is made by Barn two plugins.

The next thing I wanna talk about is just internationalization and customizing text and language on your website. The top plugin we recommend for that, which is also free is called Loco Translate. That has over a million installs. It has, it’s made by somebody named Tim W and. So basically you can translate a lifter LMS website without custom development.

Personally, I use loco translate in a little bit of a different way where. Let’s say I want to customize something that LifterLMS does or another plugin does. There’s the text and the content you put on your site. But there’s all these words and language all over your site. That are kind of automatically generated that you can’t edit.

So an example of that would be at the bottom of every LifterLMS lesson is a mark complete button. And you can’t edit that the words mark complete. But if you’re using loco translate, let’s say your site’s still in English, but you want it to say finish class instead of Mark complete. You could just load up loco translate, find the mark complete string, and change it to finish class.

Super fast, super easy. That’s using the Free Loco Translate plugin. The next area of of plugins. I want to talk about is marketing, CRM and revenue operations. So a top pick in the LifterLMS community is WP Fusion. That’s made by, very good plugins. So what WP Fusion does, they do have a free version, but I definitely recommend the paid version is it basically syncs your site with your CRM or marketing automation platform.

So, for example, LifterLMS has integration directly with Kit previously ConvertKit and MailChimp. Back when we were building those, there were many others we wanted to build. But then WP Fusion showed up and built integration with LifterLMS. Which means that whenever somebody enrolls in a course or becomes a user on your site, they’re automatically synced to your marketing automation or CRM tool.

And there’s many companies, many CRM marketing automation platforms, most of them are integrated with WP Fusion. So, besides Kit and MailChimp, there are many other popular ones like ActiveCampaign. Keep HubSpot, Zoho, CRM, Salesforce. All of these can be, are easily integrated using. WP Fusion. So when things happen on your WordPress LMS website, a user is created.

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Or you know, they enroll in a certain course and you want something to happen in the CRM or the marketing automation platform, or you want your users segmented by course so that they can be emailed as groups or cohorts separately based on their enrollment. That’s all possible with WP Fusion. It has some more fancy stuff.

It does. I definitely recommend you get a license to WP Fusion. The next one is Popup Maker by Code Atlantic, which is an awesome tool. Popup Maker has actually sponsored this podcast, so you might be seeing a popup maker, spot in this episode. But Popup Maker is incredible. I use it on all my sites.

I use it on lifter lms.com. I use it on Academy dot Lifterlms.com and many other sites that we have, and popup Maker has super deep integration to Lifter LMS, so Popup Maker allows you to use popups. Now, we have done a webinar with Popup Maker recently, where we go over all the details and how it works and what it does.

But there’s a lot of reasons to have tasteful, ethical, fun, engaging popups on your site. There’s things like exit intent. If somebody’s gonna leave and you want to pop a message before they go, or let’s say somebody clicks a button and you want something to pop up for them to enter their email to download a resource.

Or let’s say somebody’s abandoning a cart on a LifterLMS checkout and you want to throw a pop-up up with a discount code or remind them the value of what they’re purchasing or whatever. That’s all possible with popup maker and the integration is super deep with lifter LMS. It will really blow your mind once you start looking at all the things you can do with popup maker and lifter LMS together.

The next area I want to talk about is, using data forms and building custom experiences. Now Lifter, LMS has integration with four form plugins, gravity forms, ninja Forms, formidable forms, and WP Forms, OS form or, what’s it called? Mark West Guard’s form. WS form is also another great one. So every WordPress website needs a form plugin.

I recommend one of those five. I’m gonna use Gravity Forms as an example, simply because that’s what I’ve used for a long time on lifter lms.com. So all my form stuff is really done with Gravity forms because I’ve been using it forever. And the next tool I’m gonna tell you about, requires gravity forms to work.

But, yeah, you, you, you have a contact page on your site. Maybe you want to do an application process before people can join your coaching program or your membership. Maybe you wanna register people for something, or you want to collect email addresses so people can get a lead magnet or a resource to add value to them while growing your email list.

And again, WP Fusion, which I mentioned earlier, integrates with all these forms. So when people fill out these forms, it can pass the data to your marketing automation tool as well. So if you’re using Gravity Forms, I highly recommend you get Gravity View, which is made by Gravity Kit. This is a premium plugin that has deep integration with lifter LMS, and it kind of, we, we have episodes on this podcast with Zach Katz that you can check out.

If you want to go deep into gravity view and gravity kit and what all that does, but essentially, what gravity view allows you to do is take form data through a form and then display that data on your website wherever you want, however you want, as a view. So to give you a simple example, you could have a gravity form.

That people leave testimonials for your website. They fill out, like, let’s say the last lesson in your course. Ask people to leave a testimonial. They fill out the form, you know, they add their picture, they add their message, you know, they put in their website name all the pieces we need for an effective testimonial.

And then they submit it and it can either publish instantly to, to the front end or go through a moderation step where you, as the site owner would review it before it goes live, but it basically automates collection of data and displaying that data publicly. There’s all kinds of fancy stuff you can do with Gravity View too, inside of courses, like where, let’s say you have a course that helps somebody build a business.

And they are building a business plan as they go through the course, through the various lessons and they keep submitting their information one lesson at a time. All that form data is, collecting into a. What ultimately becomes a business plan, PDF and complete business plan. But you’re collecting that data and you get this visual view that only that user can see of their business plan.

So there’s so much you can do with Gravity View, check that out. The other area is SEO plugins, which are really helpful for getting traffic and building your. Reach in your audience and the amount of people that discover you over time.

SEO still matters even in a world of ai. So there’s, there’s very specific, SEO is even more important for LMS websites than more of a regular marketing site because so much content is behind a login.

So to get found organically through something like a Google search. You really want to have some public content on your site, like a blog, you know, informational pages and so on. And what SEO plugins do is they kind of make sure your site is in the right structure so search engines can read it. It gives you opportunity to modify things like meta descriptions.

To work with your writing to make sure you’re using your keywords effectively. If you want to be found when somebody types a specific search into a search engine. So there’s many great SEO plugins out there. I’ve been using Yost SEO for a long time. I know folks also like rank math or all-in-one SEL.

Definitely any website. If it’s a business and you want help getting found on the internet, I do recommend installing an SEO plugin. Installing an SEO plugin and activating it doesn’t instantly mean that you have great SEO. Now. It just means you have the infrastructure to work on your SEO and improve things so.

You know, those are my top plugins. I’m not making this like my favorite 100 plugins ’cause there’s literally hundreds of plugins that. I love that do very specific things. But if I boil it all down into a plugin set that I would put on literally every LMS website I would build.

Number one is LifterLMS and whatever lifter LMS add-ons I need. But I would also put on user switching.

WP Mail Log, embed any document, Loco Translate, WP Fusion, popup Maker Gravity View Document Library Pro, a form plugin, and an SEO plugin. And that’s it. That’s my minimalist approach to the best plugins for a WordPress.

Learning management system website. So LifterLMS is all about helping you succeed. This podcast, we normally talk about topics, to help you grow, not just about how lifter LMS works and how software works and stuff like that, but I wanted to do a technology focused e episode because we get this question all the time.

Particularly if you’re newer to WordPress. Go check out all the resources I mentioned. It’s about eight different plugins. Try and take a minimalist approach. But just know that the eight or so that I’ve recommended here are the top WordPress plugins. Most of them are free or have a free version that I put on every learning management system website that I build, and you would get incredible benefit from using as well.

That’s it for this episode. Reach out to LifterLMS with any questions. If you have tech questions or tools, drop comments below this. If you have tech questions and are trying to figure out plugins, we also have a dedicated page on our website. Just do a Google search for LifterLMS recommended resources.

In there, we’ll have a more expansive list of the top plugins that we recommend and web hosting and all kinds of stuff. For other software and hardware tools that you need for a learning management system website. I’m Chris from LifterLMS, and I hope you enjoyed this episode.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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