Ready to begin making money with your online courses? The online course market has exploded in popularity in recent years, with more and more web users looking to expand their knowledge from the comfort of their own homes.
While you can easily host your courses on third-party course platforms like Teachable and Udemy, the best way to generate revenue as a course creator is actually to create your own WordPress website and host your content there. Other course platforms will eat into your revenue by taking commissions in the form of transaction fees for every student that joins your course, so by keeping everything on your own platform you’ll be able to maximize your earnings.
It’s also much easier to communicate your brand if you have your own website, which you can design in any way you want using the right colors, fonts, and layouts. You can add any pages you need, such as an ‘About Our Courses’ page, a contact page, or even an online store if you sell other products.
The best way to set up your website is to start with an online course WordPress theme that’s built with all the features and layouts you need to host courses. In this article, we’ll take a look at the 15 best WordPress themes for online course websites.
Why Should You Use a WordPress Theme For Your Online Course Website?
There are thousands of WordPress themes available to choose from. Many of these are multipurpose themes and can be adapted to practically any situation. However, we recommend opting for a WordPress theme that has specifically been designed with online courses in mind. After all, you’re not a website designer. You’re a course creator. You should be spending the bulk of your time perfecting your online course and putting together your marketing campaign.
That’s why you’ll likely prefer to opt for a WordPress theme that’s been designed specifically for online course creators. A dedicated theme will be optimized to host your online courses, while making it easy for you to create a bespoke and totally unique website that represents your brand.
Let’s look at essential features that any good online course WordPress theme should have:
Learning Management System (LMS) Plugin Compatibility
Learning Management System (LMS) plugins give you the functionality you need to create online courses. A few notable examples include LearnDash, TutorLMS, and Sensei LMS, among others. While the specific details of these plugins vary, in general, you’ll find that they include features such as payment processing, group learning, multimedia blocks, and progress tracking, all of which can be extremely handy when putting together and managing your online course. You’ll want your WordPress theme to be compatible with your preferred LMS plugin.
Blocks and Layouts
The content of your online course isn’t the only influential factor. The presentation of the course is, too. After all, that’ll have a big impact on the overall student experience. Great presentation equals a great student experience, which equals a great online course!
A good WordPress theme will include blocks and layouts, which effectively allow you to create the ideal online course experience. For instance, layouts allow you to add columns that will display your video next to the text, or you can add an aesthetically-pleasing pricing table that outlines your membership and subscription options.
Ease of Use
No technical skills? No problem. Good WordPress themes are extremely user-friendly, so just about anyone can get their site up and running – and looking great – in no time at all. Most integrate with an intuitive page builder that lets you edit pages on the front end of your website.
Responsive Design
It can be tricky to make online courses look great on mobile, but this won’t be a problem with the WordPress themes we’ve listed for you. Thanks to responsive design, your learners will get the same great experience regardless of which device they’re using.
Top 15 WordPress Themes for Selling Online Courses
1. Creativo
Creativo is an extremely versatile multipurpose WordPress theme, which stands out because it includes 24 pre-built sites that you can import to your own WordPress website and customize, meaning it’s as specialized for online course creators as any other theme on our list.
We’ll soon highlight the top 3 Creativo templates that are best suited for course creators. Once you’ve found the one that’s right for you, you’ll just need to replace the images and text, add your course content, and add any other branded details. You can change more if you like, but you won’t need to – your site will look professional even with small changes.
Creativo comes complete with a staggering number of features that allow for complete control over your website, ensuring that it looks and functions exactly as you had planned.
- LMS plugin compatibility: A good Learning Management System (LMS) is essential for all online course websites. Creativo is compatible with all the major LMS plugins, so you’ll have the choice of selecting the one that’s best for you, rather than being tied to just one LMS.
- Elementor and WP Bakery compatibility: Creativo seamlessly integrates with Elementor and includes custom Elementor widgets called Creativo Elements. It’s also compatible with WPBakery, which means you have plenty of choices for creating unique course pages.
- Start Selling With WooCommerce: Your LMS may offer payment processing, but if it doesn’t, then you can always use WooCommerce. Creativo integrates with WooCommerce, so you can begin making money from your courses from the very first day. You can also add the WooCommerce Memberships and WooCommerce Subscriptions extensions to your store, which you can use to create different member packages for your customers to purchase.
- SEO-Optimized: Creativo’s themes are SEO-optimized, making it easier for Google to find you and for your site to score highly on the results pages.
- Automatic Theme Updates: With Creativo, you’ll receive automatic theme updates that keep your website’s design, security, and functionality in line with modern standards.
Now, let’s look at the top 3 Creativo demos for online course creators:
Creativo Coaching
Looking for a clean and effective website? Creativo Coaching is a powerful theme that helps to create relationships with potential clients from the first moment they arrive on your landing page. It’s easy to collect email addresses, and clients can easily book one-on-one meetings. Embedded online courses look great on the site, too, and it handles video content exceptionally well.
Creativo Life Coach
Creativo Life Coach is just as powerful as Creative Coaching. It’s aimed at life coaches and is suitable for people who offer courses related to well-being, nutrition, career development, and more. There’s an included services page, which you can easily adapt to include information about the services and courses that you offer.
Creativo Gym and Fitness
Online fitness instructors can make a strong impression on their potential clients with the Creativo Gym and Fitness theme. There’s a handy ‘book a class’ button that pushes your visitors to take action and offers a clean and professional design.
At just $49 per year, Creativo is a WordPress theme that offers massive value and flexibility for online course creators.
2. Skillfully
Skillfully is a dedicated learning management theme that provides modern education layouts. It’s a good option for webmasters who want to build and sell their own courses, create events, or sell tickets. It includes templates for creating home, course, and login/registration pages, and you can additionally sort your courses by category to make navigation easy for your site visitors.
When it comes to actually creating course content, Skillfully is compatible with Sensei 1.9, but it doesn’t seem to be compatible with later versions of Sensei. At $50 a year, it’s not a risk you may be willing to take.
3. Astra
Astra is a hugely popular multipurpose WordPress theme. Light and highly customizable, it’s a beginner-friendly theme that can be tailored to suit all purposes, including selling online courses. Astra includes 240+ starter sites that you can import into your own WordPress website. One of these is an Online Courses template that includes an instructor directory, about page, course catalog, pricing, and FAQ pages. This theme is specifically designed around LearnDash’s features, so it’s a good choice if that’s your LMS plugin of choice.
Though the starter site we just highlighted is free, if you want premium features you’ll need to get Astra Pro at $59 a year.
4. Geeks
The Geeks WordPress theme is designed specifically for online learning marketplaces, where multiple course creators can publish their courses in one place. As such, it’s not the best choice for businesses with just one course. Geeks is compatible with TutorLMS, a course-building and selling tool for users. Course creators will find it easy to create homepages, landing pages, and other specialty pages using Elementor.
The theme costs $59, which is well-priced, but its primary use case as a course marketplace will be too specific for most.
5. BuddyBoss
BuddyBoss was specifically created with online courses in mind and comes jam-packed with plenty of useful features that allow users to create a highly customized website, where they can sell online courses and memberships, and build communities. Some of these features include highly customizable theme layouts and learner dashboards, live class scheduling, social groups, and LearnDash support.
Though this is clearly a very advanced theme, it’s also quite expensive at $228 a year.
6. Kallyas
Kallyas is a multipurpose WordPress theme that offers more than seventy templates. There are themes for fitness, events, education, and more, making it suitable for a wide range of course creators and online educators. Kallyas integrates with Mailchimp which is handy if you want to communicate frequently with your learners. Prices for the theme start at a reasonable $69 per year.
7. Course
Course is a free block theme that provides a wide selection of font and color variation, Full Site Editing, and plenty of pre-built block patterns to choose from. However, it works best with Gutenberg and the Sensei LMS plugin, so you’ll need these to be your editor and course-creating tool of choice if you want to use Course most effectively.
8. Sydney
Sydney is a multipurpose WordPress theme that includes all the integrations you need to begin creating and selling your online courses. These integrations include HubSpot, TutorLMS, and WooCommerce. The theme also integrates with Elementor and offers additional widgets to improve the customization experience. Sydney includes various starter sites though none of them are strictly online course sites, so you may not want to take the plunge at $69 a year.
9. Guru
Guru is a feature-packed LMS WordPress theme that provides plenty of features, allowing for the straightforward creation and management of all online courses. You won’t need an additional LMS plugin if you use Guru, as the theme includes its own course-creating features, including course assessment, instructor profiles, course news and events, course analytics, and more.
At $69 per year, Guru offers good value, but you may prefer to use another theme if you’re already used to working with a separate LMS plugin.
10. Masterstudy
Masterstudy is an educational WordPress theme that includes its own course-creating features. You can add quizzes, drip feed content, offer paid Zoom webinars, and integrate with BuddyPress. You can even create your own LMS mobile app. Like many of the other courses on our list, Masterstudy costs $69 per year.
11. Divi LMS for LearnDash
True to the name, this is a theme that integrates with Divi. You may know that Divi already comes with multiple customizable course page layouts, but Divi LMS for LearnDash is a child theme built to enable users to quickly set up their course website.
The theme comes with various layouts for home pages, course pages, and quiz pages. It includes animations such as micro-interactions and includes custom icons, so this is a theme for course creators who really prioritize having a unique site design. However, Divi LMS for LearnDash is a little on the pricier side at $89 a year.
12. Eduma
Eduma is an education-specific WordPress theme. It includes plenty of demo content that you can import into your site and edit using intuitive drag-and-drop functionality via WP Bakery. It includes its own events plugin for easy event management, making it a good choice if you host seminars in addition to online courses. Eduma costs $69 a year.
13. CorpTrain
CorpTrain is a corporate-focused LMS WordPress theme used for the creation of training websites for employees, and it includes relevant features like trainer and trainee profile pages. The theme integrates with LearnPress to unlock course-creating capabilities. Selling your courses with CorpTrain is easy as the theme integrates with Stripe, PayPal, and other payment methods. At $54 a year, CorpTrain is well-priced though you’ll want an alternative theme if your niche isn’t related to employee training.
14. Social Learner
Social Learner is a social learning WordPress theme built on LearnDash and BuddyPress. With drip-feed content, assignment management, user report generation, and access expiration, it’s a good option for community-based learning. However, it’s another pricey theme at $179 a year.
15. Tutor Starter
Tutor Starter is an LMS companion theme for the Tutor LMS plugin. It’s suitable for learning marketplaces, solo instructors, and academic institutions, and it’s a good option if you already use and are happy with Tutor LMS. This theme additionally integrates with Qubely and Elementor, has customizable blog layouts, and has plenty of pre-built pages to work with.
What’s the Best Online Course Theme for WordPress?
Your course content is king, but your website will play a huge role in attracting customers and ensuring that they have a top-quality experience from beginning to end. While you’ll have plenty of generic themes available to you, for the best results, you should be looking at WordPress themes that have been specifically designed for online courses.
If you’re looking for a WordPress theme that’s easy to use, cost-effective, reliable, and comes jam-packed with a ton of handy features that can make setting up and managing your online course as easy as possible, then take a look at Creativo, one of the best choices on the market.
The theme comes with many pre-built demo sites that provide a fantastic foundation for online course websites, including Creativo Life Coach, Creativo Gym and Fitness, and Creativo Coaching. All you’ll need to do is add your own information and branding, and you’ll be ready to begin attracting customers.
Get started with Creativo today and take your business to the next level.
