How to Drip Feed Course Content in WordPress With Masteriyo

Most online courses don’t die from bad content. They die from binge and bolt: a student buys, rips through five lessons on day one, loses momentum, and never logs back in.

Drip content is the classic fix. Instead of unlocking your whole course the moment someone enrolls, you release lessons on a schedule: on a specific calendar date, or a set number of days after each student joins. Streaming services do it with episodes, and course creators have been borrowing the trick for years.

Done well, dripping keeps students coming back, protects you from refund abuse, and gives subscribers a reason to stick around. Done badly, it just annoys people. This guide covers both sides honestly, then walks you through setting up drip-fed lessons in WordPress with Masteriyo, step by step.

Let’s get into it. 👇

What is drip content, and why does it work?

Drip content (also called drip feeding or scheduled content) means your lessons unlock over time instead of all at once. The term comes from drip email campaigns, where subscribers get messages on a schedule rather than one giant wall of text on signup day. Same idea, applied to courses.

Why bother? Three honest reasons:

Better completion. A student staring at 40 unlocked lessons has to self-motivate. A student who gets a few lessons this week has a plan. Pacing turns “where do I even start?” into “oh good, the next one is here.”
Fewer refunds. This is the uncomfortable one. If your entire course unlocks on day one, nothing stops a buyer from speed-running it and asking for their money back on day two. Dripping makes the buy-binge-refund routine impractical.
Subscription retention. If you charge recurring payments for access, drip content gives members a concrete reason to stay subscribed next month: next month’s lessons.

None of this is magic, though. Drip pacing fixes a delivery problem, not a content problem. If the lessons are boring, slower delivery just means students get bored on a schedule. 😅

Drip vs everything at once: the honest tradeoff

Dripping isn’t always the right call, and pretending otherwise would make this a worse tutorial. Reference-style courses suffer under drip: if someone buys your course to look up one specific technique, making them wait three weeks for lesson 18 is a great way to earn a refund request. Short courses rarely need it either. When the whole thing is under two hours of material, the binge is the point.

Drip earns its keep when the course is a transformation with a sequence: fitness programs, language learning, certification prep, anything where lesson 5 only lands after you’ve practiced lesson 4.

Drip when: the course runs for weeks, order matters, you sell subscriptions or run cohorts, or refund abuse is a real problem.
Skip the drip when: the course is a reference library, it’s short, or your audience expects instant access (developers are famously impatient 🧑‍💻).

Still choosing a platform for all this? The WordPress LMS website guide covers the landscape before you commit to anything.

Before you start: what’s free and what’s Pro

Quick tier check, because it matters here: scheduled drip (unlocking lessons by date or by enrollment day) is a Masteriyo Pro feature. The free plugin still builds your entire course and includes two simpler flow options, Free and Sequential, so you can pace students without paying anything.

Sequential is worth knowing about even if you never spend a cent: students must complete each lesson before the next one unlocks. No calendar, no dates, just enforced order. For a lot of courses, that alone is enough pacing.

Here’s what you need for this tutorial:

A WordPress site with the free Masteriyo plugin installed.
A course with lessons ready to go. No course yet? Follow the guide to creating an online course with WordPress first, then come back here.
A Masteriyo Pro plan if you want date-based or enrollment-based schedules. Pro runs $149/year (renews at $299/year) with a 14-day money-back guarantee.

Full disclosure, casually: Masteriyo is part of the Themeisle family, the same company that runs this blog. You can see how it stacks up against the big paid LMS plugins in this head-to-head breakdown.

Step 1: Install Masteriyo and enable the Content Drip addon

Go to Plugins → Add New and search for “Masteriyo”.
Click Install Now, then Activate.
Head to Masteriyo → Addons.
Find Content Drip and toggle it on.

What you can do inside the addon depends on your plan. Free and Sequential modes work on the free plan; the Date Selection and X Days from Enrollment schedules require a Pro license. More on what those mean in a second.

Step 2: Choose a drip mode for your course

Open Masteriyo → Courses, click your course, hit Edit, then go to Settings → Content Drip. You’ll see four options, and you pick exactly one per course:

Free (free plan): no rules at all. Students can jump from lesson 1 straight to lesson 30. This is the default, everything-at-once behavior.
Sequential (free plan): each lesson or quiz unlocks only after the previous one is completed.
Date Selection (Pro): each lesson unlocks on a specific calendar date and stays open from then on.
X Days from Enrollment (Pro): each lesson unlocks a set number of days after that individual student enrolled.

Since the mode is set per course, different courses can run different schedules. Your cohort program can use dates while your evergreen intro course uses enrollment days.

💡 PRO TIP: Match the mode to how you sell. Cohort course with a fixed start date? Date Selection, so everyone unlocks together. Evergreen course people buy year-round? X Days from Enrollment, so every student gets the same paced experience automatically.

Step 3: Set unlock dates on your lessons (Pro)

Chose Date Selection? This part is a Pro feature, so make sure your license is active. Open the course Builder, click the edit icon on a lesson or quiz, and find the Drip Date option. Pick the date, save, and repeat for each lesson you want scheduled.

Before the date, students see the lesson listed in the curriculum but can’t open it. From that date onward, it’s open like any other lesson. A typical four-week cohort might unlock module 1 at launch, module 2 the following Monday, and so on, with the whole group moving together.

Step 4: Or set a day-count schedule (Pro)

The X Days from Enrollment mode is also Pro, and it’s the better fit for evergreen courses. In the course Builder, click the edit icon on a lesson or quiz, enter a number in the Drip Days field, and save. Lesson 2 might be 3 days, lesson 3 might be 7 days, whatever rhythm suits your material.

The clock is personal. A student who enrolls today and a student who enrolls in three months both start with the same open lessons and wait the same number of days for each next step. Set it once and the schedule runs itself. 👍

Step 5: Check what your students see

Locked lessons don’t disappear from the course page. Students see the full curriculum with upcoming lessons marked as locked, which quietly works in your favor: the visible roadmap builds anticipation instead of confusion.

Before you announce anything, preview the course as a student. Open it in an incognito window or a test account and confirm the right lessons are locked, the right ones are open, and the locked view looks the way you expect.

If everything looks right, you’re live. 🎉

Troubleshooting and FAQ

Lessons are still open even though dates are set

First, check the course-level mode: if it’s set to Free, students can jump anywhere and your schedule does nothing. Second, look at your cache. Masteriyo recommends excluding the learn, checkout, and account pages (plus the masteriyo_sessions database table) from caching, and a cached course page can serve stale locked or unlocked states.

The scheduling options are missing

That’s almost always the tier line. Free and Sequential work on the free plan, but Date Selection and X Days from Enrollment only appear with an active Pro license. If you upgraded and still can’t see them, confirm the license is activated on this particular site.

Quick answers

Is drip content free in Masteriyo? Sequential pacing is. Scheduled drip (calendar dates or days after enrollment) is a Pro feature.
Can students see locked lessons? Yes. Locked lessons stay visible in the curriculum; they just can’t be opened early.
Can lessons be gated behind completing a specific earlier lesson instead? That’s the Prerequisites addon, also Pro. Sequential mode covers the simple version of that idea for free.

Wrapping up 🏁

That’s the whole setup. A quick recap:

Drip content unlocks lessons over time: by calendar date or by days after enrollment.
It helps completion, reduces buy-binge-refund abuse, and keeps subscribers around. It’s a bad fit for short reference-style courses.
Masteriyo’s free plugin covers Sequential pacing; Date Selection and X Days from Enrollment are Pro ($149/year introductory, renews at $299/year).
One mode per course, and different courses can use different modes.

Set it up once, preview it as a student, and your course starts pacing itself.

Are you dripping your course already, or firmly team everything-at-once? Let us know in the comments section below!