In this LMScast Joshua Millage and Christopher Badgett discuss how the LifterLMS WordPress learning management system plugin stacks up against the competition in online WordPress LMS reviews. If you are in the market for course development software, you will want to take notes on this LMScast to help you in evaluating your choices.
The main focus of the LifterLMS development team is to know what our customers want by studying reviews and gathering direct feedback. We watch for trends in what people are looking for in a course design platform and build those elements into our frequent upgrades.
A primary interest for course developers is ease of use and a minimal investment of time required for course creation. Online reviews indicate that users find the LifterLMS Course Builder interface extremely quick and easy for building their courses. They also like the overall visual and navigational design of the tool.
When you choose your LMS, you want to make a good decision so that you won’t have to reconstruct your courses in a new tool if your first choice doesn’t work out. One of the best ways to make the right choice is to find a tool developed by capable, responsive people who are passionate about education, and are also diverse in their knowledge and experience, like the LifterLMS team. We sponsor a forum for users and monitor it consistently for feedback on new options our users want, and then build those capabilities into the platform upgrades.
Another important consideration is scalability. You may only be interested in offering free courses at first, and most LMS platforms are fine for that. But what if your free courses do well, and you want to offer paid courses? Before you make a decision based on cost or immediate usability, think about what you might want to do with your online courses 6 months to a year from now. Make sure you choose a LMS platform that you can grow with and that is constantly evolving.
User reviews also show that people love the LifterLMS eCommerce system, because it is easy for course developers to set up. More importantly, it is quick, simple, and seamless for students to purchase courses with its minimal interface. Ease of purchasing significantly boosts conversion rates.
The LifterLMS platform also includes an abundance of options for customizing and integration that course developers enjoy, because they can create and expand on a variety of lessons, quizzes, certificates, media, and other elements that are unique, relevant, accessible, and attractive. You aren’t locked into fixed templates or bundled plugins with limited options, like you could be with other development software.
The LifterLMS team encourages course creators to compare all other LMS development software to ours, because we are certain you will find LifterLMS to be the best course building tool on the market. You can read a variety of LifterLMS reviews in our recent blog post.
We also offer a 30-day money-back guarantee if you buy the software and decide you don’t love it. You can try a demo of LifterLMS for free and see for yourself what it can do for you.
Remember that you can post comments and subscribe to our newsletter for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. Also, another thing is if you want to engage with us at a deeper level, you can go check out our Facebook group LMScast Confidential. Thank you for joining us.
And if you’re an already successful expert, teacher or entrepreneur looking to grow, check out the LifterLMS team’s signature service called Boost. It’s a complete done for you set up service where your learning platform goes live in just 5 days.
Episode Transcript
Joshua: Hello, Everyone. Welcome back with another episode of LMScast. I’m Joshua Millage, and I’m joined today with Christopher Badgett. Today we’re talking about WordPress LMS reviews. Chris, it’s on you, Man. My head is so into Lifter, I don’t even know what else is available.
Chris: We’re starting to get a lot of WordPress LMS reviews for LifterLMS from people in the WordPress community, the WP community, and other bloggers and such. It got me thinking, because we try to really get inside the mind of our ideal customer, the person who wants a WordPress-powered learning management system. When I look at these reviews that other people are writing about our product or other WordPress LMS plugins and WordPress LMS themes, I’m just looking at what people are looking at, because a learning management system has a lot of pieces to it. What are these WordPress LMS reviews focusing on? And I’ve noticed some trends.
One thing that people really like is our WordPress LMS system course builder. We have a video on YouTube about how to build an online course in 3 minutes. I can see people are really focusing in on how quick, easy, and painless it is to build an online course with our course-builder interface. I find that fascinating. That that’s kind of what people gravitate to first, it’s the actual course creation, maybe even more than the powerful eCommerce cart system. I just find it interesting, and other people, thing that people like is just the design. People are doing a lot of screenshots of the user interface. There’s a lot of different angles of looking at your student, at your course, at your lesson, at your quiz. People are taking a lot of screenshots and talking about that, with LifterLMS and other with WordPress learning management solutions. I just find it interesting in how people focus in WordPress LMS reviews.
Joshua: That is very interesting to me. I understand why though. Because once you start down the path with a WordPress LMS system, it’s difficult to change. You don’t want to take the time to re-input content or anything like that, so you want to make a good decision on the front end. I would say there’s two things. I’m completely biased, and I’m not ashamed of it, but you want to work with a team that’s passionate about education, who’s pushing the limits of what WordPress can do. That’s us in a nutshell. Just look at our product offering versus the other options out there.
The other thing I would say is that you want to look at where you’re headed in six months, where you’re headed in a year. Maybe you only want to do free courses, but what happens when you want to do paid courses? How easy is it to implement a paid course versus a free course? If you’re looking at free courses, I think the beauty of Lifter is little bit less, because you can accomplish things with other plugins if you’re just doing a free course. However, what do you want to do after that? What do you want to do next?
Actually, I kind of take that back, because I’ve gotten so many emails this week about people saying, “I’ve tried Zippy Courses, or I’ve tried WP Courseware, or I’ve tried LearnDash, or I’ve tried Sensei, and your course-builder is by far the easiest to use and implement and structure. I created my course so quickly. It’s amazing. Thank you for creating it.” They’re right, because it is the most awesome course builder ever. It’s interesting, even at the free level. I think people can really benefit from that. When you’re looking, and you’re reviewing yourself for a plugin, Chris, what are those things that you really look for?
Chris: I think that’s a good point you bring up about the team. Another thing behind the plugin, and there’s a lot of great people behind the other WordPress learning management system solutions. One of the things that I really value and appreciate about our team at LifterLMS is how diversified we are. We’re not just one or two people. We’re a bunch of people with a bunch of different skill sets. They have to converge on solving this problem of building online courses and selling them and making them engaging. The team is really important, like you mentioned.
The other thing is the rate of change in iteration. For example, I saw a WordPress LMS review go up the other day that someone had taken screenshots before our course-builder was in place. I was like, “Oh, they’re not showing the latest part of our course builder, but you know what? That’s okay. That’s our issue for just changing so fast. We’re just evolving the product based on customer feedback. I think that’s something that’s important to look at is how quickly are people iterating. Are they listening to customers? We have a whole forum dedicated specifically to feature requests. We can’t do every single thing that comes in, but we’re there looking for trends of like what do our customers want? Let’s build that. That is another part.
Another part is the eCommerce system. If you want to sell online courses, it’s really important to make that user experience of purchasing a course or a membership that contains a collection of courses very easy. I love it. We were doing a demo of LifterLMS yesterday with somebody, and I was just proud when the eCommerce screen came up. We had the Stripe integration in the demo, and there was this simple little credit card box. I love WooCommerce, but there’s all these fields when you’re trying to check out. When in our demo when we were buying that course, it was just credit card number, the 3-digit code, the expiration date, done. If you’re into optimizing conversion and having a seamless, easy, user experience, I think it’s important to look at that sort of thing when you’re evaluating a learning management system.
That carries over not just from eCommerce, but also to the lessons, to the quizzes, to all the LMS elements with certificates. How easy is it to use, but at the same time, in the WordPress learning management system ecosystem, people want customization. Everybody wants to do things differently. For example, in certificates, we make it so you can switch out your certificate background. You can put video in your questions in your quizzes. You can create your own badges. You’re not locked in. We built our own quiz system which can be further developed upon, whereas some other learning management systems out there, they just bundle in WP-Pro-Quiz plugin in it, so now you’re locked, and there’s a dependency. We have our own non-dependent system that’s clean and extendable without dependency. It’s all those types of things, and of course we’re biased towards LifterLMS. We encourage you to check out all the other options.
Joshua: One thing I want to say is we’ve got a 30-day guarantee, money-back guarantee. If you come try it out, if you don’t like it, just send us an email, and we’ll refund your money. We refund as soon as we get a request, we refund it within 24 hours, unless it’s a weekend, and it might be 48 hours, but very quickly is my point. We’re not trying to keep money away, but we really want people to come and check it out and encourage you to really take it for a spin.
Chris: Yeah. Do a Google search for WordPressLMS reviews and see what’s out there. Like Josh said, if you want to be really detailed and take things for a test drive, you’ve got to buy some stuff and set them up. Buy the different solutions. Try them out and see what you think.
Joshua: Absolutely. Cool. This has been a fun episode, Chris. I just want to let everyone know they can check this episode out along with all the others at LMScast.com and we’d love to hear your feedback on this episode. It’ll be on the Home page. You can just click on it. Leave us a comment. Also, another thing is if you want to engage with us at a deeper level, you can go check out our Facebook group which I believe is LMScast Confidential.
Chris: That’s right.
Joshua: Cool. We have some fun discussions over there. Thank you Everyone for listening, and we’ll see you next week.
