What Happens When Your LearnDash License Expires?

The internet has provided a great opportunity for teachers to deliver courses to students all over the world.

While in the past, education was limited to whatever a person could travel to or afford, now students can sell access courses on the internet from anywhere.

On top of that, they can find a far wider range of educational topics available! But how are these courses optimized and delivered in the first place? The answer is LearnDash.

LearnDash is a Learning Management System (LMS), which is a digital learning environment that helps to manage educational courses.

There are plenty of LMS out there, but LearnDash is one of the most popular, and it operates through the also-popular platform WordPress. To use LearnDash, Learndash users need to subscribe to a license. But what happens when your LearnDash license expires?

The short answer is that you should still have access to LearnDash, in some capacity. Even when the license has become invalid, you’ll still be able to use LearnDash, but you won’t have access to any later feature updates and you won’t have any product support.

This means that your LearnDash account will become outdated, which could even affect its ability to be compatible with future updates and versions of WordPress. 

There’s plenty more to learn about LearnDash and the outcome of its license expiring, and we’ve got all the answers in our handy guide below!

We’re going to look in greater depth at what happens with an expired LearnDash license, the different tiers of license you can get, other reasons why your license may not be working, and much more. Read on!

What Is LearnDash?

To begin with, it’s worth explaining just what LearnDash is, so you understand the kinds of features you’d be getting with a license. 

As we touched on in the intro, LearnDash is a Learning Management System, which means that it’s all about allowing teachers to host and deliver online courses to students around the globe. 

To do this, LearnDash helps teachers manage their educational content. With it, you can create a course, and then assign homemade lessons to it.

These lessons can be grouped into sections to make the learning process even easier for your students in a specific group, and you can also assign topics to help classify the learning further.

Finally, you can even add quizzes to your lessons, allowing students to test what they’ve learned – and you to see where they’ve been succeeding and where they’ve been falling.

LearnDash also makes it very easy for teachers to get paid for their courses, offering a few different in-built payment methods for students to use. Once they’ve paid, they’ll be automatically enrolled in the course, and can enjoy all the teacher has made with the help of LearnDash. 

Of course, LearnDash isn’t just for teachers to educate students around the world, but it’s also trusted by entrepreneurs, companies training their employees, training organizations, and universities themselves.

What Happens When Your LearnDash License Expires?

There are a few different licenses that you can buy for LearnDash, which we’ll cover later in the article. However, what happens when your LearnDash license expires?

While it’s the case that when most of the Learndash subscription expires, you’ll lose access to the platform, you can still use LearnDash with an expired license.

However, you’ll be using it in a form that gets progressively more outdated and could even eventually stop working altogether due to compatibility reasons.

How so? Well, when a LearnDash license expires, it strips you of access to future feature updates. This means that you won’t be getting access to any new features that they add to LearnDash after your license has expired.

On top of that, you won’t have access to product support either. However, you should still have access to the version of LearnDash you had, and you should still be able to use it in its limited state. 

With that being said, the fact that your LearnDash won’t be regularly updated could pose problems. For one, it might mean that any bugs or issues that were present aren’t getting fixed.

Bug fixes are a common part of updates. Additionally, you won’t be getting support for add-ons too.

Finally, an expired license could also mean that your version eventually becomes incompatible with new versions of WordPress, in which case you’d have a big problem and struggle to use the LMS anymore. 

Why Is My LearnDash License Invalid?

On the other hand, it might be the case that your LearnDash license hasn’t expired yet, but it’s coming up as invalid anyway. You’ll want to sort this out as soon as possible because you’ll be missing out on updates.

There are a few different potential causes, though, so you’ll need to check them all.

You’ve Used Your Allowance Of Domains

One of the reasons that your LearnDash license might be invalid is that you’ve used the maximum amount of domains allowed to your license.

We’ll be covering this in more depth in the next section, but LearnDash offers different license tiers for different fees, and each of them offers you a certain number of domains and websites. 

For example, if you’ve got a license that allows you to use LearnDash with 10 different websites, then you’ll get an error message if you try to install LearnDash onto any sites beyond that limit.

Thankfully, you can either upgrade your license and site allowance or delete old and unnecessary sites. 

Email Or License Number Are Wrong

On the other hand, it might be the case that the email address entered in your license field is not the same as the one linked to your account. To fix this, simply correct and update the email address to match it.

To find the place to change it, go to “Learndash LMS”, then the Settings section, then head to “LMS License”.

Similarly, the issue could be that your active license key has been filled in wrongly. When you signed up for a LearnDash license, you’ll have been given a set of details, and one of these is your unique license keys.

Ensure that the license key in your settings matches the correct one. 

It’s easy to make a mistake with numbers. If you’ve got the ProPanel progress tracker add-on, then you might have accidentally entered the license key for that instead of the license key for LearnDash.

Rather than typing out the correct email address or license key, try copy and pasting it instead. This way, you’ll remove the possibility of you leaving extra spaces or entering the wrong number and letters.

There Is A Server Block

If neither of those is the solution, then it might be the case that your hosting provider has blocked the LearnDash license call. Thankfully, you can use a free security plugin called Query Monitor to help check if this is the case. You can install it here. 

With the management plugin installed, go to “Learndash LMS”, then “Settings”, and then “LMS License”. If the top toolbar menu of Query Monitor suddenly turns red, then a server block might be happening. You can then check for two kinds of errors.

One of these is a “401 error”, and seeing one of these will confirm that the server is blocked. To get around it, get in touch with your hosting provider and ask them to let these license calls through. 

On the other hand, you can look for a “timeout error”. To check if these are happening, go to “Learndash LMS”, then the settings page, and then “Support”.

Once here, see if Memory or PHP are written in red. If they are, get in touch with your hosting provider. They should increase the values.

However, you might be getting a timeout error because your IP address is blocked. In this case, contact the LearnDash support team, tell them your IP address, and they’ll see if it’s blacklisted.

What Different Licenses Do LearnDash Offer?

A LearnDash license will grant you a certain number of how many websites (domains) that LearnDash can be installed on, as well as continue to receive updates and support.

There are three differently priced tiers of a license, each allowing more websites than the last. Naturally, the more domains you can use with LearnDash, the more expensive the license is.

The starter license tier will allow you to install LearnDash on 1 website/domain. This is a good pick for teachers who just want to be running one course and keeping things simple, and it costs $199 per year.

The next license tier up from that will allow you to install LearnDash on 10 sites, while still getting updates and support for each of them.

This plan is best for teachers who want to have a decent number of websites, or perhaps a training organization that wants to offer many different training courses. To subscribe to this license, costs $399 a year.

Finally, the top license tier will allow you to have LearnDash installed on an unlimited number of websites.

This gives you no limit for your LMS potential, allowing you to have as many teaching domains as you want, and with all of them still receiving LearnDash updates and support. As you can expect, the price is much steeper, and a year’s license of it will cost you $799. 

When Do LearnDash Licenses Renew?

As you saw from those different license tiers, each of them was charged every year. But what is the specific date that your license automatically renews? 

As you would expect, the license will renew exactly one calendar year after the date that it was purchased. So, if you bought your LearnDash license on the 5th of February 2023, then it will automatically renew on the 5th of February 2024. 

Can You Disable Automatic License Renewal?

Not everybody likes to have their licenses or subscriptions for things automatically, and would rather do it themselves or stop using the service altogether.

Thankfully, you can easily make it so that LearnDash won’t automatically renew your specific license one calendar year after your initial purchase.

To do this, simply go to your Account Portal and find the section on License Details. In this section, you should find the option to disable auto-renewal.

If you do this, make sure you remember what happens to expired LearnDash licenses. You’ll still be able to use LearnDash on as many domains as you had been entitled to, only you won’t receive any product support, bug fixes, new features, or add-on updates. 

Are You Able To Transfer Your LearnDash License To Another Person?

It might be the case that you want to transfer your LearnDash license to somebody else. Thankfully, this can be done!

To initiate the transfer, contact the LearnDash support team and open a support ticket, requesting to transfer your LearnDash license to a different party.

You’ll need to include a few specific details in the ticket: the first and last name of the different party, and their email address too. LearnDash will know your identity and license because you’ll be submitting the ticket from your account.

When the support team has received these details, they’ll work with you to successfully verify the new owner, and then complete the transferral of the license.

Of course, there will be consequences for you transferring the license. For one, you won’t have access to the license’s account anymore, because it’ll be under the control of the new party.

In addition to this, you won’t be billed for every time the license is renewed after that. As you would expect, the new owner of the license will have to pay its bills, rather than you!

Final Thoughts

When your LearnDash license expires, you’ll still be able to use it. However, you’ll lose access to new features, add-on updates, bug fixes, and product support. This can cause your LearnDash to fall behind, or perhaps even eventually make it incompatible with WordPress!