How to Migrate Away From LearnDash (Without Losing Your Courses)

If the LearnDash ecosystem feels shakier than it used to… you’re not imagining it.

StellarWP, the umbrella brand behind LearnDash, is gone. LearnDash itself lives on under Liquid Web’s Nexcess brand, with new plans and new pricing. But after layoffs, a reorg, and a licensing shake-up, a lot of course creators are asking the same question: is it time to move? 🤔

If you’re one of them, the scary part isn’t leaving; it’s the years of courses, quizzes, students, and orders you’d have to bring with you.

This guide walks through how to migrate away from LearnDash without losing any of it: backing up, picking a new home, running the migration, verifying everything, and cleaning up after. The demo uses Masteriyo, an LMS (learning management system) plugin of our own creation here at Themeisle, because its migration tool is completely free. Most steps apply no matter where you’re headed, though.

Let’s jump right in!

First: what actually happened to LearnDash?

Quick timeline, because the rumors are worse than the facts:

• 2013: LearnDash launches as one of the first serious LMS plugins for WordPress.
• September 2021: Liquid Web acquires LearnDash and folds it into its then-new StellarWP brand.
• Late 2025 (announced late October): Liquid Web lays off roughly 25% of the StellarWP team, including LearnDash’s product owner.
• April 2026: Liquid Web officially retires StellarWP. Its WordPress products get consolidated into four: Kadence, LearnDash, The Events Calendar, and Give. Everything is now branded “by Nexcess.”
• Today: stellarwp.com redirects to Liquid Web’s homepage. LearnDash lives on (version 5.0 shipped earlier this year) under new three-tier pricing.

That’s the new pricing: Essentials at $259/year, Pro at $399/year, Elite at $599/year. Annual billing, no per-student fees.

To be fair, LearnDash is not dead. It’s still developed, still self-hosted, and the official line is that your current plan and pricing stay the same unless you choose to upgrade. Nobody is forcing you out.

But two things spooked people. One clause in the announcement says that if your subscription lapses, you’ll need to buy one of the new plans to reinstate access, and the rollout itself was rough. The Repository called it “botched,” and plenty of long-time users started evaluating exits.

Stay or go, one lesson stands: your content should be portable.

Step 1: Back up everything and take inventory

Rule zero of any migration: you don’t migrate on hope.

Start with a full backup of your files and database. Your host’s backup tool works, and so does a free plugin like UpdraftPlus. If your host offers staging sites, even better: rehearse the whole migration on a staging copy first.

Two more things before you touch anything:

• Keep your LearnDash license active until the move is done and verified. Remember the lapse clause: if it expires mid-migration, reinstating access means buying a new plan.
• Do the work while LearnDash is still installed. Some tools, including this one, need both plugins active on the same site.

Now the inventory. Open a spreadsheet and write these numbers down, because you’ll compare them against the new site later:

• Courses: total count, plus sections, lessons, topics, and quizzes per course.
• Quizzes: question counts, and a note of any unusual question types you rely on.
• Students: total users, active enrollments per course.
• Orders: how many, and where they live. If you sell through LearnDash’s own checkout, they’re LearnDash orders. If you sell through WooCommerce, that history lives in WooCommerce, not LearnDash.
• Extras: certificates, groups, assignments, and every LearnDash add-on you have active.
• Shortcodes and blocks: search your posts and pages for LearnDash shortcodes (usually starting with ld_ or learndash_) and blocks. List every page that uses them; you’ll thank yourself in step 5.

Boring? A little. But this list is how you’ll know nothing got lost instead of just hoping.

Step 2: Pick your new LMS

You need somewhere to land. All three options below are self-hosted WordPress LMS plugins; here’s our plain-English explainer of how that setup works.

Option A: Masteriyo

Masteriyo is free on WordPress.org, and its Migration Tool is a free addon that imports directly from LearnDash: courses (with sections, lessons, quizzes, and ordering preserved), instructors, enrollments, orders, course progress, and quiz attempts. Assignments migrate too, but that step needs Masteriyo Pro ($149/year intro, renewing at $299/year).

The free version isn’t a crippled demo: unlimited courses, built-in payments (offline and PayPal built in; Stripe, Mollie, and Lemon Squeezy as free addons), certificates, and 0% transaction fees.

The honest downsides: it’s younger, with a smaller user base than Tutor LMS, and the free version ships only 3 quiz question types (True/False, Single Choice, Multiple Choice), while Tutor’s free version has five. We’ve done a full Masteriyo vs LearnDash comparison, and it also shows up in our best free LMS plugins roundup.

⚖️ DISCLAIMER: Masteriyo is a member of the Themeisle family of products. The trade-offs below are still the honest ones, because picking the wrong home for your courses costs you more than it costs us.

Option B: Tutor LMS

One of the biggest free LMS plugins around, with 100,000+ active installs and a 4.4/5 rating on WordPress.org. Themeum ships an official free migration plugin that imports LearnDash courses, lessons, quizzes, assignments, students, orders, and reviews.

Two caveats from their own docs: eCommerce data only migrates if the matching payment engine (WooCommerce, EDD, or Tutor’s native one) is configured first. And the process deletes your LearnDash courses after importing them, which is one more reason step 1 exists. ⚠️

Paid plans start at $199/year for one site.

Option C: LifterLMS

A capable plugin with a free core, but no official LearnDash importer. Their own migration guide points you to third-party tools: “Transfer” by Honors WP for content plus student data, or WP All Import for content only.

Also note: the free version can’t take online payments on its own, and paid bundles start at $199/year as a first-year promo, renewing at the full list price.

Destination	Official LearnDash importer?	What it moves	Paid plans from
Masteriyo	✅ Yes, free addon	Courses, lessons, quizzes, instructors, enrollments, orders, progress, quiz attempts	$99/yr intro (renews at $199)
Tutor LMS	✅ Yes, free plugin	Courses, lessons, quizzes, assignments, students, orders, reviews	$199/yr
LifterLMS	❌ No, third-party tools	Varies by tool; content-only options exist	$199/yr first-year promo

For the rest of this guide, the walkthrough uses Masteriyo, partly because it’s ours and mostly because its free importer moves per-student course progress, which Tutor’s free importer doesn’t document moving. Steps 1, 4, and 5 are nearly identical wherever you land.

Step 3: Run the migration

Here’s the part everyone dreads, and it’s honestly the easiest step. Masteriyo’s migration runs entirely on your own site: both plugins must be active on the same WordPress install, and no data passes through external servers.

The flow:

1. Install the free Masteriyo plugin: Plugins → Add New, search for “Masteriyo LMS,” install and activate. Do not deactivate LearnDash.
2. Go to Masteriyo → Addons and enable the Migration Tool addon, which is free.
3. Open Masteriyo → Tools → Migration. You’ll see a card for each supported source LMS (LearnDash, LearnPress, LifterLMS, Tutor LMS, MasterStudy); plugins you don’t have installed are grayed out. Click the LearnDash card, then Migrate.
4. A confirmation dialog asks you to type confirm (lowercase, exact match), then hit Confirm & Start. Worth five seconds of annoyance to prevent an accidental migration.
5. The migration starts immediately, in the background. It uses Action Scheduler (the same job library WooCommerce relies on) and processes data in batches of 100 items, with each data type (courses, enrollments, orders, and so on) running as its own job.

You can close the modal or navigate away, since the jobs keep running. A banner on the Migration page shows progress with a View Progress button, and if a job hits a PHP limit, it re-queues itself from the last saved position and keeps going. No lost items, no duplicates.

PRO TIP ⚡ Before you start, turn on logging: Masteriyo → Settings → Advanced → Debug → Enable Logger. Every migration step then gets recorded, including the exact ID and error message of any item that fails. Without it, failures are silent.

What actually moves from LearnDash, for free: courses with their sections, lessons, and quizzes (section ordering preserved), instructor accounts, student enrollments, orders, per-student course progress, and quiz attempt records. Two extras worth knowing:

• Assignments migrate only with Masteriyo Pro (the tool auto-activates the required addon if you have a Pro license).
• Certificates: if a LearnDash course had a certificate attached, a default Masteriyo certificate template gets auto-assigned. You can redesign it later at Masteriyo → Certificates.

🆘 Possible issue: on a big site, the migration may look like it’s pausing between batches. That’s normal; it’s the queue doing its thing. Grab a coffee ☕ and check the banner instead of refreshing like a maniac.

Step 4: Verify everything (don’t skip this)

The migration said “done.” Cute. Now prove it: pull up that inventory from step 1 and go down the list.

• Courses and structure. Go to Masteriyo → Courses and compare counts. Then open two or three courses in the builder and check that sections and lessons came through in the right order:

• Quizzes. Open each quiz and check questions and answers came through. Heads-up on question types: free Masteriyo supports True/False, Single Choice, and Multiple Choice. Six more types (Text Answer, Match the Following, Fill in the Blanks, Audio, Video, and Sortable) are part of Masteriyo Pro ($149/year intro, renewing at $299/year). If your LearnDash quizzes leaned on exotic question types, check every single one:

• Students. Check Masteriyo → Students and spot-check a few accounts you know well. Because both plugins live on the same site, your students’ WordPress accounts never moved; what matters is that their enrollments and progress got rebuilt around them.
• Orders. Compare Masteriyo → Orders against your LearnDash order list: counts, totals, statuses. (WooCommerce sales stay in WooCommerce, untouched.)
• The front end. Visit your courses page like a student would. Click into a course, start a lesson, take a quiz: 👀

• The log. If you enabled the logger, open Masteriyo → Tools → Logs and look at the migration-tool file. Any skipped item is listed there with its ID and the reason, so “fewer items than expected” is a to-do list, not a mystery.

Something missing? Fix the cause and re-run the migration, or re-create that item by hand. LearnDash is still active, so nothing is gone. 🛟

Step 5: Redirects, access, and cleanup

Content’s across. Now make the switch invisible to everyone else.

• Redirect changed URLs. Masteriyo generates its own course and lesson URLs, and many won’t match the old LearnDash ones. Map old URLs to new with 301 redirects; the free Redirection plugin handles this fine. At minimum, redirect your highest-traffic course pages.
• Replace LearnDash shortcodes and blocks. Remember that list from step 1? Go through those pages and swap in Masteriyo’s shortcodes or blocks, or rebuild the sections as normal page content.
• Connect payments and test a purchase. Set up your gateways (offline and PayPal are built in; Stripe and others are free addons) and place a test order end to end. SSL is required for payments.
• Tell your students. A short email goes a long way: same accounts, new home, here’s what looks different. Confused students open support tickets; informed ones don’t.
• Keep LearnDash installed but deactivated for a few weeks. Live on the new setup first. Only delete LearnDash, and cancel the renewal, once you’re confident. And keep that final backup.

What won’t migrate

Honesty time. Based on the migration tool’s documentation, here’s what you’ll handle by hand:

• LearnDash shortcodes and blocks in your pages. The moment LearnDash is deactivated, anything it rendered (course lists, progress bars, profile grids) simply stops appearing. There’s no automatic converter, so you re-add those sections yourself.
• Third-party add-on data. If you ran extra LearnDash add-ons, their data lives outside the core LMS data importers touch. Assume it stays behind.
• Design. LearnDash’s Focus Mode, templates, and styling don’t transfer. Your theme plus Masteriyo’s own templates will look different out of the box.
• Drip schedules and prerequisites. These aren’t among the documented LearnDash migration steps, so plan to re-create the ones you need. (Content drip is a Masteriyo Pro feature, $149/year intro.)
• Certificate designs. Courses get a default template auto-assigned; your custom design needs rebuilding in the certificate builder. The builder itself is free; the extra template gallery is Pro.
• Anything custom. Custom code, webhook setups, reporting dashboards: you’ll rebuild those in whatever form your new LMS supports.

None of this is a reason not to migrate; it’s just the difference between a weekend project and a surprise week-long one. 😅

Final thoughts

Let’s recap the whole move:

• LearnDash isn’t dead, but StellarWP is, and portable content is job security for course creators.
• Back up, then inventory. Every successful migration is boring in exactly this way.
• Pick a destination with a real importer. Masteriyo and Tutor LMS both have free ones; LifterLMS needs third-party tools.
• Verify courses, quizzes, students, and orders before you deactivate anything.
• Expect to redo shortcodes, design, and drip settings by hand.

The bottom line: if you want the cheapest safe exit, Masteriyo’s free plugin plus its free migration tool gets you across, and you only pay if you later want Pro features like assignments, advanced quizzes, or content drip. Whatever destination you pick, don’t rush step 4.

Once you’re settled, our guide on creating an online course with WordPress will help you make the new place feel like home.

Have you migrated an LMS before? Smooth sailing or horror story? Let us know in the comments section below! 💬

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