The Business of WordPress LMS Hosting with WP Tonic Founder Jonathan Denwood

In this LMScast episode, Jonathan Denwood talks about how WP-Tonic makes it easier for instructors, coaches, owners of membership sites, and educational institutions to create robust WordPress-based learning management systems without having to deal with complex technical settings.

Jonathan and Chris Badgett stress the value of quickness, clarity, and professional understanding while developing online learning companies throughout the discussion. According to Jonathan, many developers find it difficult to select themes, plugins, hosting, CRMs, and automation tools on their own. WP-Tonic makes this process easier by offering a carefully chosen and fully maintained technological stack designed especially for LMS and membership websites. Additionally, they talk about how WP-Tonic helps companies switch from systems like Kajabi to WordPress, offering consumers more long-term flexibility, scalability, ownership, and customisation.

Heal Your Heart, a multilingual international coaching platform with thousands of facilitators, and Psychiatry Education Forum, a professional medical training platform, are two real-world examples that Jonathan uses to illustrate how WP-Tonic assists businesses in creating scalable, high-performing educational websites while offering continuous support, upkeep, and strategic direction.

Here’s Where To Go Next…

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Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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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 Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s Jonathan Denwood from WP-Tonic. That’s wp-tonic.com. Jonathan runs a hosting company and a services company. It’s all under WP-Tonic. He has a e-learning focus, has done a lot of great work with LifterLMS.

But first, welcome back on the show, Jonathan. 

Jonathan Denwood: Oh, it’s a pleasure to be back on the show, Chris. It’s always great having these discussions with you. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And hosting in the WordPress space is a little interesting. There’s huge players like a GoDaddy, for example, and then there’s n- micro niche players like WP-Tonic- Yeah

which provides hosting, but is really focused on courses, coaches, training-based membership sites, LMS sites. And you do something particularly cool where you bundle in, It’s not just hosting. You’re not just getting a rack of server, taking a monthly fee for that, and then crossing your fingers and hope the client figures it out.

You take a totally different approach. You also include software, which is awesome, and one of the unique advantages of WordPress and the general public license and strategic partnerships that you do and all this stuff. But let’s start there. Describe what WP-Tonic offers for hosting and how it’s different, and what does the plus mean.

Plus what? Hosting Plus. 

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. It’s a all- it’s a all-in-one service really. It’s a hybrid. Hosting’s really important. We p- we provide hosting, but hosting plus, which includes a suite of the some of the best plugins if you’re looking to build a coaching learning management system membership website in e-learning, or you’re looking to build a community educational website, which a lot of people are looking to do.

We provide all the best plugins that WordPress can offer, so you don’t… And we, provide- We find out what you’re looking to do, and then we install what we feel is the most suitable from our library, and they’re all fully licensed. And then we can build websites out for the client as well if they haven’t got the time but they still want to use WordPress for all the benefits it provides, but they just don’t wanna do it themselves, we can do that, or they can build it out themselves.

We provide some templates, some starter websites based on Kadence that are quite good to start out with. So we offer a load of options if you wanna do it yourself or you want us to build it out. And then our hosting, we specialize in coaching, in membership, in learning management systems, so we can advise.

We do offer support from our lowest plan. We offer more time on our larger plans. And then we’ve got separate support plans for those that want more time or don’t even have to host with us. So- It’s comprehensive 

Chris Badgett: I love it. And when you look super closely at what’s included in the plans, it’s a ton of value.

Jonathan Denwood: It is. 

Chris Badgett: And you pass most of that value on to your customer. So for example, I’m just looking at some of your plans. You can find these at wp-tonic.com/price, prices. It includes the LifterLMS Infinity bundle, which is huge. Even just that alone is right around the monthly cost, but you get so much more.

You get the hosting, and there’s so many things on here. I’m not gonna name them all, but you have you can add FluentCRM as an example. You can do WP Fusion. You can do a booking system like FluentBooking. You can do Document Library Pro and, which is awesome for membership sites and e-learning for having a r- a well-organized resource library.

You have performance stuff, caching stuff, CDN stuff and I’m just naming 10% of what’s in these plans. And it’s super cool. This is the, really the beauty of open source, and I’ve always wanted to see more people build these kinds of websites as a service and kind of get outside the mindset of, oh- Yeah

we’re a technology company. We offer hosting. No you actually have a full service solution for the e-learning entrepreneur or skill- or school or organization that doesn’t have to get in the weeds of all the tech. You’ve already curated and assembled the stuff, and you’ll also help set it up. You can do everything from basic templates to full service.

So you can meet the client where they are, and it’s an incredible value for the monthly for the monthly investment. 

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah, if you pay yearly on our microsite plan, which covers most people starting out, and it will cover them quite a while, it, and they pay yearly, it’s $35 a month which is amazing value, or you can pay month to month, and it’s $55, and you get all that value.

But I think the other factor is the support, we have knowledgeable people. I do the support tickets. Kirk helps. Got a couple other people help. And we- It’s a ticketing system but we respond p- normally in less than an hour. And your problem will, we will be able to help you when we know about WordPress and we know about these platforms, where you’re not gonna get that from GoDaddy or something else.

And the truth is, a learning management system that starts to get some traction you do need good hosting. And the other factor I wanna point out is that we provide all the email functionality as part. We don’t provide inboxes, but everything else, transactional and marketing email, we provide that through FluentCRM and our partner SendGrid, and that’s part of our package.

So you’d be able to send loads of email, newsletters, email, transactional email and you won’t have to buy another service to do that. That’s part of the hosting package. 

Chris Badgett: That’s amazing. And for you out there listening or watching, I just wanna do a quick educational marketing positioning thing here.

I always… There’s three things that we’re s- whenever you have any business, you’re selling only three things, and there’s actually a fourth, which I’ll tell you about. And one of these is primary, and I’m trying to figure out which one it is for WP Tonic, which I’ll touch on in a second. But people buy, and companies buy, and schools and organizations buy three things: speed, certainty, or insight.

One of those is primary. And the fourth thing, which is funny, is staying out of jail. So when you hire your tax accountant, you are basically hiring them to stay out of jail. When I buy a plane ticket to cross the country instead of using a car, I’m paying for speed, as an example.

So anyways, just to tie this into WP Tonic, we’ll leave staying out of jail off the table, but I think you’re actually hitting all three, speed, certainty, and insight really well, and let me explain that. The first one is speed, which I think might be your primary. And the reason I can say that is because I know when I talk to LifterLMS prospects, people who are- haven’t bought yet, are exploring the options, they’re absolutely exhausted, ’cause there’s 500 LMSes out there.

There’s several in WordPress. There’s all this research. And by the way, even once you get your LMS, you start missing other things like transactional email CRM. You are saving people so much time by just including it all together that’s just a beautiful thing. ‘Cause just doing one of these things, like figuring out which theme should I use or how to set up Kadence or whatever you’re saving so much time.

So that’s speed Certainty. You’ve been doing WP-Tonic podcasts since before LMS Cast started. And you’ve been in, you’ve been in this membership site, WordPress, LMS, and all the surrounding utilities and other needs as well. So when somebody purchases a plan from WP-Tonic, you’re also paying for certainty that you’re getting the best tools that have been thoroughly vetted, researched, and correctly implemented.

So that’s certainty. And then the insight piece, you mentioned the support, and even just talking to you now about your system, whenever somebody partners with WP-Tonic or becomes a customer or client, they, they get to learn. They get to learn tips and tricks from the industry. They get to learn how to think about things like marketing automation and SEO and website performance.

They’re getting insights just by being a customer from working with you. So anyways, I just wanted to take my hat off and congratulate you on nailing all three, which is speed, certainty, and insight. 

Jonathan Denwood: Thanks. 

Chris Badgett: What do you think is your primary in working with your people? If you had to pick one, is it more the speed from idea to website?

Is it more the certainty of having the best tech stack while saving a ton of time? Or is it more the insight of we’re gonna be your trusted advisor and partner, your secret weapon to your L- LMS business? 

Jonathan Denwood: I think it’s difficult because one of, one of the great things about WordPress is you get all sorts of clientele.

But I suppose you could say that in all software offerings. You get people that really are not DIYers, but they like WordPress. They’ve used it before, and they like the flexibility. Then you get the DIY type, and then you get the people that are, that DI- that can do it, or from the two groups that I’ve just mentioned, but they just want it built out for them, and then they want a, player that…

Basically what WP Tony is a reverse, host, a reverse agency. There’s a lot of agencies that do hosting. We emphasize hosting and support, but we also are agency as well. But we also work with other agencies, and that’s quite common as well, isn’t it? There- there’s loads of agencies that specialize in one thing, and they do work for other agencies as well.

So we do a bit of that as well. WordPress, but we specialize in the hosting and the, and that. Because I think we’re really offering something unique which you don’t see that often now in the marketplace. That seems to be a big statement, but I think you would agree with it, wouldn’t you?

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show.

Chris Badgett: I would. It’s clearly one of the situations, and this is something I’m always harping on, which is the best companies put their customer at the center of the business, not their product. And when I look at what WP Tonic offers, clearly you’ve put the customer at the center, and then surrounded them with what they need, which is the hosting, the services, the vetted licensed plugin packages and all that.

And it’s not like a fractured solution, it’s the full solution. Like even LifterLMS, we say it’s all-in-one, and it truly is, it does a lot of things, but you still need to go out and get web hosting, you still need to figure out what to do with your CRM and that kind of thing. And 

Jonathan Denwood: you- Yeah. I just want to, I just want to interrupt.

It just occurred to me what we’re doing is we’re trying to get you at the place where you would be if you bought a kind of SaaS competitor to LifterLMS. We’re trying to get you… That you’ve still got to configure everything, and you’ve got to get the course in i- if you don’t want to hire us to do it, all that for you, which we can do.

But we’re getting you… And it’s the same with, there’s loads of consultants in the SaaS world the leading competitors in there that will set it all up and put your course content in. There’s a whole industry around some of these SaaS products. But we’re, getting you to that level where all the main plugins, if you’ve got some that you want installed we’ll install them for you, but we’ve got an extensive library, and then we configure everything, and then it’s there for you at a much higher level, configured for you just to concentrate in getting your courses and getting your course live.

So we’re removing a lot of the time delay That’s what we’re doing 

Chris Badgett: That’s the speed aspect. 

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And my hat’s off to you because I think I- if I’m doing the math right, I’ve been in WordPress for about 18 years, and I think you’re the same, maybe 19, maybe more. Yeah. But so we take it for granted as power users of WordPress, like we got the lay of the land, we know how things fit together, and we keep up with news and all that.

But for the average busy membership site owner or company that needs to spin up some kind of training or entrepreneur that wants to get into courses, coaching, online community, and these kinds of projects, they don’t have all that 20 years of experience in the industry. They need a tech solution, but they don’t wanna get…

They don’t necessarily have the time or the desire to get involved in all the minutiae of the details of setting something like that up. But WP Tonic is the answer to that, and I think it’s important to recognize that and commend you for what you’ve done as you’ve… People, when they buy software, it’s, they don’t just wanna buy software, they want a solution.

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Y- you have the full solution. It’s not just like a piece, it’s like the whole thing. So good job on that one. Can you tell us a story of Heal Your Heart as a recent customer? 

Jonathan Denwood: They’ve not been, they’ve been with us for over, oh, five or six years. Okay. They they’ve been a great client.

They are in the spiritual educational coaching space. 

They they license the intellectual property from a founder that died a while ago, but is very well thought of and has a number of books out there still in pu- being published. And they provide education courses ar- around the books and thoughts of the the founder.

And they have over, over 4,000 coaches. Each coach has a place on the website, and they run live courses in the area, i- in their location, and it’s a global website. What I mean is it’s running LifterLMS, it’s running a number of plugins. It- It offers, it’s quite a large website, and it also does internal courses as well.

And it offers all these in multiple languages. 

Chris Badgett: Wow. 

Jonathan Denwood: So we’re running a, la- trans- TranslatePress on it, and it’s running about seven languages, and it’s running WooCommerce. It’s running a lot of software, so it’s on quite a large server. And we’ve got it on one of the fastest bare metal servers that we offer, and we maintain everything for them.

And being up and keeping the website running is really important to this operation, Chris.

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Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Congratulations on that. And even you just describing that of courses and coaches and internal training and all this stuff happening, that’s a complicated project to build, and it’s

I don’t wanna discourage somebody who’s a do-it-yourselfer from dreaming and rolling up the sleeves and is gonna learn WordPress and gonna learn all these different tools and servers and scaling or whatever, but for most clients, they just want the solution for their dream to come to life, which you provide to Heal Your Heart, which is awesome.

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah, they were in a bit of a mess. They had gone to another developer or developers, and they had a build out, and it hadn’t really gone very well. So they came to us, and we had to build out the whole website for them. Act- Kurt was involved in this, and we had to build it out and- They had a, so it’d been built out in WordPress, but they had a learning man- a custom learning management system done for them and it wasn’t working.

So we suggested that we use LifterLMS and adapt it, and we added a load of other functionality that wasn’t working. We replaced it and customized it slightly. Where the original build-out was really customized a lot and it just wasn’t working. So there’s a sweet, point to this. You can customize things, but I would suggest that you don’t go totally the full custom route because you might have to pay a fair bit of money, and then you might have to junk it all 

Chris Badgett: Yeah

Jonathan Denwood: If it doesn’t work out. And they were between a rock and a hard place. They’d spent a fair bit of money, and they just didn’t have a functioning website. So we came in, and we quite rapidly saved the situation, and it’s been running now for six… And they’ve grown from a couple thousand to getting close to 5,000 students and facilitators.

I think that’s what they call them, these people that run courses locally. And they’ve got a big presence in India, in the Far East all over the world, so that’s why they have these pages in multiple languages as well, Chris.

Chris Badgett: That is really incredible. Yeah I think what’s important to mention there is WP Tonic is not just for first time LMS projects.

Often you’d come in at… This is a WordPress story, but it’s also more specifically a WP Tonic story, where most pro- in my experience when I ran a agency, a lot of projects were not starting at ground zero. We’re taking a solution that somebody’s not happy with, and we’re upgrading it to a solution that’s more customizable a- and even more affordable with WordPress.

So the fact that you do the migrations from whether it’s a mess from a previous attempt either on somebody’s own or with a an agency or an app builder or whatever it was that didn’t work out, or maybe it did work out, but it’s really limiting and not customizable. We see a lot of people coming over to WordPress and LifterLMS from Kajabi, and I know that’s a sweet spot for you.

‘Cause when somebody gets some traction on Kajabi and they’ve, they get things moving, but then they start to realize how un-customizable, how locked in they are and they start seeing all the potential of having their own platform that’s more customizable. WP Tonic is a great fit for the Kajabi site owner that doesn’t, that wants the performance, customizability, and affordability of WordPress, but they don’t want to actually figure out all the tech details themselves.

They, WP Tonic can just move you over, and then be your r- your right hand and your more customizable LMS. 

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. I think this is the area where AI is really helping- Yeah … because when you’re on one of the, one of these SaaS platforms like Kajabi, actually moving to WordPress or to any other platform another SaaS, is such an undertaking that most people only consider doing it even though they’re fed up with the platform they’re on if they’re gonna do a whole redesign of the website, or because there’s no way- Easy way of getting all the content and the pages out, out of Kajabi.

It has to be done manually. And if you’ve got a reasonably large website y- taking all that content and putting it somewhere else. Using AI now, it can be done a lot less painfully and at w- at a sl- slightly lower cost. But it’s just, gonna be less painful to get stuff moved.

And I think it’s the argument if you’re gonna spend a lot of money on your website, on your marketing, on your students, on your course, having the maximum control, which you do get with WordPress, I think that becomes very important, doesn’t it, Chris? 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it does. When the, when a client or a customer realizes that the LMS and the hosting and the setup there is not a commodity, it’s actually an asset of the business, they s- that’s, those are the folks that are a great fit for a solution like WP-Tonic.

I’ve 

Jonathan Denwood: got another client that we’ve been helping. I’ll put it into chat. Psychiatry Education Forum. 

Chris Badgett: Okay. 

Jonathan Denwood: They’ve been with us for a number of years as well. A great client. This is in the medical field, but it’s, they provide training in psychiatry to other psychiatrists. 

Chris Badgett: Okay. 

Jonathan Denwood: And resources, books and they do a course.

And they’ve been with us for y- a number of years as well, and it’s quite a nice website. It’s using LifterLMS as well. And, Yeah, he’s he the guy that runs this, he’s a psychiatrist himself, and he runs this course, and he’s been with us a number of years as well, Chris 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And I get that.

A lot of times somebody, a professional, is so busy in what they don’t have time to figure out all the tech. They need help, and that’s- 

Jonathan Denwood: Oh, funny enough, this guy, I think he is a bit of a DIY. Is he techie? Okay. But I think he does it to relax his mind. Hey, 

Chris Badgett: that’s good psych- psychology if some- someone out there is listening would like to have a chat with you you have on your website, Get in Touch, there’s a big button at the top at wp-tonic.com. They can schedule a 30-minute call. Can you tell us what happens on those 30-minute coaching consulting calls? 

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. Basically if you’re looking for any advice, it’ll either be me or Kurt that will take the, your call.

We normally do it over Zoom. And basically, we just find out if you’re looking for general advice, or you’re thinking of moving hosts or providers, or you’re thinking of having a website built out, we can give you some general advice. Most people- They’ve done now, especially with the age of AI, they’ve done a much deeper dive, they- they’ve they’ve been recommended WP Tonic by AI or they’ve just gone on the web in general. People still do a kind of mixture of AI now and going to people’s websites and… But they normally check people out through AI now, and then they go to the website, if you’ve got a product or service.

Or the- or they find two to three and then they go to the website. But they are either using AI overviews, Google, or they- they’re using chat or Claude, whatever, Perplexity, whatever their poison is. Gemini. They’re using those to much more detailed questions. But a lot of people don’t even know what the questions to ask.

So they know that’s where normally the conversation starts. They have some questions. They can put them in chat, but that can lead to even a bit more confusion, because it tends to give them even more options. They- they’re trying, to find what would be the best solution for their particular…

And sometimes chat can do that, but a lot of the times it can throw out even more questions. That’s my viewpoint. I don’t know if you agree with that, Chris. So we get a lot of people that book a chat because they basically, they’re thinking of using us, but they also want to see what are the best options for their particular needs on WordPress.

So that’s why they’re booking that con- that initial free consultation with us, Chris. 

Chris Badgett: And you should do that and talk to Jonathan and/or Kurt. Again, that’s on their website, WP-Tonic. And to go back to our three-part framework, speed, certainty, and insight, this is the insight piece. Like, when you’re a good coach or advisor and a client is considering working with you, that’s a lot of they may not have the perfect questions to ask and but that’s how it starts.

You just start by having a conversation and and, get good advice. And the cool thing about WP Tonic is- It’s not For LifterLMS as an example, we’re all about LifterLMS, obviously. But WP-Tonic is more about a lot of different things. It’s about LMS, it’s about videos, it’s about hosting, it’s about performance, it’s about CRM.

And all, within all those categories, there’s lots of areas to explore and figure out. And even a client may come to you and ha- and may not have even thought about having an email list, but you know if somebody comes to you in that way, that part of the package includes some CRM and thinking about that email list stuff.

So you’re gonna help them do better and fill in their blind spots by simply having the package put together and the coaching and consulting you do on the call to help people build a well-rounded solution and be set up with the highest odds of success as possible. 

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: All right. Thank you, Jonathan, for coming back on.

It is awesome, it is truly awesome what you have built. And I wanna encourage you out there listening or watching to go check out the WP-Tonic website. Schedule the 30-minute call. And also Jonathan is a prolific podcaster. Check out the WP-Tonic podcast. It was… It’s does lots of different things.

You’ve done different types of shows over the years. 

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah, we also do the Membership Machine show, which is spe- 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, tell us 

Jonathan Denwood: about 

Chris Badgett: that. 

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah … which is specifically do with Kurt, and we discuss WordPress marketing and anything else that will help somebody build a membership or build a community- Yeah

on WordPress in 2026. We c- we’ve been doing that for a couple years now, and it’s got a lot of information that really helps somebody starting out or thinking of moving to WordPress or just the different plug-ins. But it’s all around the subject of membership and learning management systems, basically.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Keep up the amazing work, Jonathan. Go visit wp-tonic.com. And thanks again for coming back on the show. We really appreciate it. Thank you for being a great partner with LifterLMS and most importantly taking good care of the course creators and education entrepreneurs in our community who need a full solution like WP-Tonic.

Thanks for coming on the show, Jonathan. We really appreciate it. 

Jonathan Denwood: That’s all right.

Chris Badgett: 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 at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.