How to Create an Online Course With WordPress (For Free, No Limits)

You don’t need fancy software to create and sell an online course. WordPress can do it – from start to finish. Yes, the same WordPress you’re using to run your site already. You can set up lessons, let people enroll, offer free or paid access, and give them a clean, professional experience that actually works.

In this post, I’ll show you how.

You’ll learn how to turn your WordPress site into a real elearning platform. We’ll cover tools that help you build the course, handle signups, protect your content, and get paid. You’ll see what’s worth using and what to skip.

Bets of all, you can do all of that for free.

If you want to teach online and make money doing it in 2025, you’re in the right place!

The tools you need to get started

First, you need a WordPress site. It doesn’t have to be fancy. Just working. I guess you already have that…

Next, install one plugin: Masteriyo.

That’s it.

No patchwork of multiple tools. Masteriyo gives you a full course system right out of the box.

You can build your course with drag-and-drop blocks. The layout updates instantly. No waiting for page reloads. You also see your whole course – sections, lessons, quizzes – in one place. You don’t bounce between screens or menus.

Students get a clean, focused view…with no usual WordPress clutter.

Best of all, it’s free to start. But not “free” as in watered down. You can create unlimited courses and let unlimited people enroll.

Masteriyo also handles payments. You can sell courses using Stripe or PayPal without adding more plugins.

It installs in under a minute and works with all WordPress themes. You don’t need to touch code or dig through settings just to see your first course live.

How to create an online course with WordPress in 2025

This is how it all works step-by-step:

1. Install Masteriyo and run setup wizard

Masteriyo is listed at WordPress.org, so you can install it by going to Plugins → Add New. Then enter “Masteriyo” into the search field.

If you have any questions about this initial process, check out our article on installing plugins on WordPress.

After activating the plugin, you’ll see the first onboarding screen:

You can watch the video that’s there – which I encourage you to do actually, since it presents the plugin’s abilities in a neat and concise way (under 3 minutes).

Click on the Get Started button to get the real fun going.

The next is where you can make some first decisions on what your online course central is going to look like:

You can adjust the way your courses are displayed on the main page.

• Grid view or list view – grid is better for sites with fewer courses
• Numbers of courses per row – again, go for a low setting if you’re only going to host a couple of courses

You can change those settings afterwards, too. So no worries. Just go with something that feels okay for now. 👍

In the next step, you can pick whether you will be running things yourself, or if what you’re building is a marketplace for courses:

Next, set the currency you want to use and whether or not you want to install some sample courses that Masteriyo comes with. Doing so is a good idea, since it will make it easier for you to get a grasp of the common course structure.

Once the initial setup is complete, you’ll be able to return to your dashboard and start building your first course!

2. See the sample courses

The first thing you can do here is check out some of those sample courses that you installed in the previous step. You can view them when you go to the Courses page (it’s one of the default pages that Masteriyo creates when it installs).

Just click around, see what an example course looks like – how the lessons are laid out, what the content structure looks like. You can try enrolling, tasting the experience.

3. Create an online course

It’s nice to have the sample courses to analyze and test out, but now it’s time to create an online course from scratch!

To do that, go to Masteriyo → Courses, and click on Add New Course:

After that, you’ll see the main course creation interface.

That screen is easy to grasp, with all the key details about the course clearly outlined. It’s basically just a section to set your main course details.

The next screen is where you’ll get to work on your actual course content:

The general structure that Masteriyo suggests is to divide your courses into sections and then have individual lessons and quizzes within each section.

Adding sections is easy, and then you can realign them with drag and drop later.

Create lessons

As part of each section, you can create any number of lessons. There are multiple lesson types to choose from:

Many of these are available in the free version of the plugin, covering nearly anything you’d imagine as a possible lesson type.

I’ll start with creating a video lesson first, given it’s probably the most popular type of course content nowadays. This is what the interface looks like:

For those video lessons, you can choose where you want to host the video – self hosting is supported (meaning on your main web server), and you can also pick any of the popular platforms.

You can also add your lesson description if needed – this text will appear under the video.

There are additional settings (on the right) to control whether you want to allow students to right-click and potentially save the video or share it on social media.

The interface for text lessons looks nearly the same – it just doesn’t have the video source fields.

When you’re done with your lesson, you can publish it to the course (button in top right).

Create quizzes

No serious online course can live without some quizzes, right?

Masteriyo allows you to create these as well. Quizzes are essentially another lesson type (see the screenshot above).

Each quiz has a name and can feature any number of questions. Example question:

Masteriyo also lets you create a question bank, enabling you to save quiz questions and reuse them in the future.

Your quizzes can feature multiple types of questions:

• standard single-choice questions,
• true/false questions,
• multiple choice questions,
• “matching questions” – pairing items on side A with those on side B,
• “sorting questions” – organizing items in the correct order,
• “audio/video questions” – answering based on content from a video, and more.

You can assign points to each question and select the correct answer. For example:

Just a couple of minutes of work, and you can end up with a basic course looking like so:

4. Review the settings

Your course is basically ready to be released at this point, but it’s a good idea to review the settings of the plugin and of the course to make sure everything is in line.

First, go back to your course setup page (Masteriyo → Courses), and go into settings:

Go through the panels here and set things like your course’s difficulty rating, duration, the maximum number of students allowed, start and end dates, and anything else that stands out.

Then, switch to the Pricing tab and decide whether the course should be free or paid:

Masteriyo lets you offer paid courses without having to upgrade to a premium version of Masteriyo. You can handle the payments through PayPal (built in), or you can install a Stripe add-on.

Check the main plugin settings

The above are the settings for your individual course. However, you should also take a look into the main Masteriyo settings panel. You’ll find it in Masteriyo → Settings.

You don’t necessarily have to do any modifications there, but just make sure that it’s all making sense. For instance, are all the main pages such as Courses (your listing of courses), Learn (the page where your students can see the course), etc. pointing to the right places?

Masteriyo creates them when it installs, but it’s good to check if they work.

Next, set who can register for a course:

Pick elements you want to show on an individual course page:

Those are just a few things worth doing in the settings, but I encourage you to spend a bit more time there and get a grasp of how everything works.

When you’re done with that, you can publish your course and let people see it!

What will your course look like for students?

To some extent, the look of your course – the formatting, the design – will depend on your theme. You can find some great WordPress LMS themes here. Other than that, Masteriyo creates a range of pages and templates for common course elements.

For example, your main courses page can look something like this:

Then, when the user clicks on the course, they’ll see:

This is where they can enroll, buy or continue the course (in case they’ve started it already).

Then, the actual course content will look something like this:

As you can see, this is a nice distraction-free look that helps get through the lessons and focus on what’s important.

Next steps when your course is online

You have a handful of options for making an online course with WordPress. The tool and method I showed you today is free, versatile, and has all the features needed to build a truly professional-looking online course.

However, this is not necessarily the end of your path. Masteriyo lets you install add-ons and extend your elearning platform to integrate with third-party tools and other assets of your business.

Then, if you’d like to access some more advanced features, you can upgrade to the paid version of Masteriyo. The paid plans start at $74.50 for the first year, then $149 after that. You can see the pricing here.

Let us know in the comments if you have any questions about making an online course with WordPress and Masteriyo.