A well-liked WordPress LMS plugin called LearnDash is suitable for both major academic institutions and lone course makers, as well as everyone in between.
You may add an infinite number of classes and subjects, quiz your students, assign homework, and more with its assistance.
Along with complex features including content dripping, course requirements, and other features, it also has built-in capabilities to collect one-time or ongoing access fees.
Overall, it’s unquestionably among the best WordPress LMS plugin solutions to embed code and embed videos. And in this LearnDash guide, we’re going to look in-depth that what kind of media can be uploaded in Learndash platform and if this plugin is the appropriate choice for you.
What Is A Learning Management System (LMS)?
Learning management systems (LMS) enable you to design a whole online course.
Both teachers and students have access to it. They can each add to that environment in order to fulfill their individual objectives.
The instructor can design programs, classes, subjects, and tests. Additionally, they can assess pupils and design classes to assist a number of students at once. and deliver awards as a final acknowledgment of course completion.
A student may enroll in one or more courses. They must achieve their objectives. These objectives could include reading all of the lectures, viewing videos, doing quizzes, and obviously completing a free essay.
Within learning management software like LearnDash, there are many different ways to evaluate a student’s work.
Who Is LearnDash For?
LearnDash is a rather adaptable plugin that can be useful for corporations, single artists, academic organizations, and more.
For heavy-duty solutions in the academic space, LearnDash enables SCORM, as well as Tin, Can API (xAPI). Academic institutions can benefit from the ProPanel feature, which provides easy assignment administration, emailing options, and more thorough learner information/analytics.
However, LearnDash may also be extremely useful for smaller-scale applications.
For instance, LearnDash is an excellent tool for monetizing your website with online courses if you’re a solo course producer because it can assist you in creating and distributing free or paid teaching material to your users.
Businesses that wish to train their staff members may find it helpful. To ensure that your staff members have finished the necessary educational courses, you could use LearnDash to build up employee induction or certification programs and track video progression.
LearnDash is one of the best WordPress LMS plugins since it can be used in a wide variety of ways.
LearnDash’s Process
We’ll give you a broad picture of the LearnDash course material creation process in this part. Following that, we’ll highlight some particular advantages and disadvantages:
1. Simple Setup
LearnDash launches a “bootcamp” guide to walk you through all the steps necessary to set it up when you initially activate it. Each step has a text article and an entire video, and you can check each one off as you complete it:
Overall, we think this is incredibly practical because it ensures you don’t miss anything crucial.
2. Establishing A Course
Add a course as your first step. Each course may have an infinite number of lectures, subjects, tests, assignments, etc.
The native WordPress blocks editor (for the content of the course listing page) is available when you build a course, along with tabs across the top to set up extra settings:
3. Making Use Of The Course Builder
One of LearnDash’s most helpful tools is the course builder, which enables you to organize your lessons, subjects, quizzes, and much more using a straightforward drag-and-drop interface.
The primary building block of knowledge is a lesson, which can then be further divided into a topic.
The buttons can be used to add new classes, subjects, and tests. You can then drag and drop items to reorder them as necessary.
4. Adding One Or More Lessons Or Subject Matter
You can use the editors for specific lessons/topics to add any material for those units after using the builder to establish the course’s high-level structure.
You can use the standard WordPress block editor to add content when you create a lesson or topic. In the sidebar, there is a helpful Associated Content box that shows how this unit compares to other topics:
LearnDash Courses
You can set up additional features like:
- You can include a specific video that people must watch in order to finish the lesson in the Settings tab.
- Lesson resources (e.g. PDF checklist)
- Assignments
- Timer for lessons
- Setting up lessons
- Including a test
- You will receive a special quiz builder that functions very similarly to the course builder so you can create a quiz.
- You can add additional questions and reorder them using drag-and-drop.
- Advanced settings like the score, retakes, question sequence randomization, quiz certification, quiz timer, and more can be set up by going to the Settings tab.
Configuring Course Access
The next stage is restricting access to the course after you’ve added and organized its content. You can do this via the course’s settings.
Among your five choices are:
- Access to the course is open to everyone. On your website, it is accessible to everyone.
- Free – although enrollment in the course is required, it is free.
- Buy Now: Users pay a one-time access price.
- People who want access must pay a regular cost.
- Closed; you must manually add students (or make use of a different payment/membership WordPress plugin).
Additionally, you can put up limits like access expirations and course prerequisites.
And that concludes our overall high-level overview of the LearnDash course creation process. Naturally, we didn’t cover almost all of the features because there are so many choices. But you ought to be familiar with how it operates.
Pros Of LearnDash

Let’s examine some of Learndash’s strong aspects and a few of its weaknesses in more detail.
1. Drag And Drop Builder That Is User-Friendly
The course builder merits mentioning one more time because it is such a helpful tool.
It can be challenging to understand how everything comes together and the development your students will take as they continue through the course when there are numerous lessons, subjects, and tests.
The course builder tool not only makes it simple to observe how everything works but also enables simple drag-and-drop alterations.
Additionally, because you can quickly launch the editors for every piece of course content from a single location, course creation often goes more quickly.
2. Excellent Experience In Front-End Learning
When considering LMS plugins, it’s simple to get caught up in all the backend capabilities. These are definitely significant, but it’s also crucial to consider the experiences your students will have upfront.
LearnDash is aware of this and has developed one of the top front-end user interfaces available. Along with helpful elements like progress indicators, table of contents, and other features, learners receive a truly pleasant, distraction-free experience.
This is done with the free Astra design and one of the LearnDash example sites.
Here, you receive a variety of helpful features, such as:
- The course’s whole table of contents is on the left.
- The top-left course progress indicator.
- The list of instructional topics.
- The center-stage video.
- The simple navigation to move on to the following lesson
Naturally, your theme might appear a little differently. The fact that LearnDash assists you in giving your visitors an excellent front-end experience is still important.
3. Detailed Support For Video Content
Nowadays, there is a great demand for video course content, so it is essential that LearnDash has unique tools for handling video content.
You can add the video preview to your course as well as built-in video options to add videos to classes and topics.
Additionally, you can mandate that students watch a clip as a part of the curriculum and even have a video start or stop automatically when a student opens a lesson.
4. A Versatile Quiz Creator
Among all of the LMS plugins we’ve used, LearnDash is one of the most effective quiz creators. It works pretty similarly to the drag-and-drop course builder, which we’ve already mentioned as one of our favorites.
The ability to set up all of the questions without having to launch a different interface or popup is what we particularly value. This speeds up the process and lets you observe how everything fits together from a single point of view.
Additionally, there is a tonne of questions and options available to you, including numerous possibilities for configuring complex quiz features like passing scores, randomization, timeframes, and more:
Additional Features
Simply put, LearnDash offers several versatile capabilities for customizing the behavior of your courses.
You may “drip” out the course material, for instance, to keep your pupils interested and returning. You can either utilize a schedule for all students or release the content according to a plan based on the user’s enrolment date:
Additionally, you can demand that customers complete one or maybe more course requirements before they can sign up for a course. Overall, it’s fairly flexible in terms of how you put up your courses.
Rules For Automation Using Engagement Triggers
LearnDash’s engagement prompts, which let you create your own unique email automation criteria for your course, are an excellent feature of the platform.
Based on user activities, you can create your own trigger notifications, such as:
- Entered or finished a course
- Completed a topic, lesson, or test
- Submitted a project, etc.
- Individualized notification triggers
This is excellent for marketing, user experience, and another automation setup.
LearnDash has a thriving third-party marketplace in addition to several standard extensions as well as integration plugins, making it incredibly simple to add new features to your course. For instance, among the several third-party extensions available are:
- Reviews and ratings of courses
- Numerous teachers (like Udemy)
- Creating a front-end course
- Individual messaging
- Upsells and custom course checkouts
Some of the most well-liked third-party plugins are listed on a support website that LearnDash maintains.
Cons Of LearnDash
Let’s talk about the negative aspects now.
1. There Are Few Built-In Payment Options
Even though LearnDash comes with built-in tools for one-time and monthly payments, these features aren’t as flexible as those you’d find with a full member plugin or some other LMS plugin such as LifterLMS.
You cannot implement free versions or one-time signup costs, for instance. Additionally, you are not permitted to run promotions and coupons.
All of this can be done using a membership plugin or a third-party plugin such as WooCommerce; it’s just not a feature of the LearnDash plugin itself.
2. There Are Few Built-In Membership Options
As far as how they relate to your courses, LearnDash contains certain fundamental membership benefits. In other words, you can limit who has access to a course.
It does not, however, set up membership services for your entire site. For instance, using the basic LearnDash plugin would prevent you from cutting off access to a standard page to only particular sorts of learners.
Fortunately, LearnDash integrates with almost all widely used WordPress membership plugins, making it simple to add more sophisticated membership features if necessary.
Which Types Of Media Can You Use For LearnDash Courses?
Since LearnDash is powered by a WordPress media library, you can use any WordPress-compatible media library in your courses. To name a few, but not all of them:
- jpg, jpeg, png, and gif images
- PDF, all Word, PowerPoint, and Excel file types
- mp3, m4a, ogg, and wav
- mp4, m4v, mov, and wmv (However, to prevent your video host or server from becoming overloaded, we normally advise using a video hosting service and video providers like Vimeo, Amazon S3, etc.)
Any external material that can be incorporated using an “iframe” or “script” can be added to LearnDash content, along with HTML5 packages created in applications like Articulate Storyline and Adobe Captivate.
Final Thoughts
For serious academic institutions, solo course designers trying to create/monetize online courses, and small businesses seeking an economical employee training solution, LearnDash is an excellent option.
You can upload a wide range of different media types to the Learndash site, in terms of sheer capability. LearnDash is typically much cheaper if you need advanced features like extensive quiz functionality.
Because of this, we are confident in suggesting LearnDash as a fantastic choice for anyone wishing to produce online course material with WordPress, whether you’re a freelancer, a company seeking a staff development solution, or a reputable educational establishment.