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My client has a wordpress website and wishes to add a membership, online shop, create live courses, self paced courses, merch and selling a book, 1:1 art therapy sessions online, so she needs a booking system, group workshops, Therapuetic art workshop membership and cohort groups because she wants passive income and variety. Now this is a lot of plugins for a wordpress website and it might cause her website to run slow.
Any advice is how I should approach this and meet her needs? I am sure it’s possible but thought I would ask a bit more experienced crowd.
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Are you sure you’re up to this? This isn’t a simple job and requires an experienced dev to pull it all together.
You need to use a good hosting and caching system. Reputed plugins load their resources only when their features are being used. So, one wouldn’t create a problem with the other. Good caching configuration can also help increase the speed.
You can do a load test with free versions for all plugins and see how they play along. I have worked for Tutor LMS for 3 years and tested these kinds of environments at least 40-50 times. Some of them started with shared hosting and moved to AWS after 1 year.
I have a client using MemberPress and it works.
They set up is a bit technical but worth it.
I would advise using a powerful VPS and scale when needed.
I’ve set this up with LearnDash, restrict content pro and woocommerce.
The client is responsible for setting up their own online classes and quizzes. It will print a certificate of completion when they pass the final test.
You need to start by investing plenty of time on the front end of this project, mapping out each feature and doing discovery. Break it down into the individual parts, how they would ideally interact with one another, and then build up a detailed feature map. This isn’t the type of thing where you want to go all the way down a singular path duct tapping on features as you go.
DM me and I’ll send you the contact info of someone who built this exact thing including mobile app. All off the shelf stuff.
Last year a total computer novice who was good with following YouTube built most of this with LearnDash, WooCommerce, and the free version of Elementor. I helped them clean up some responsive issues, activate their Stripe payments, and get caching going.
Their site looked great and performed very well on a basic Kinsta hosting account.
I’ve built several similar sites with all those features like this for authors and public speakers — it’s a pretty common setup.
Depending on how deep you need membership to go LearnDash has good LMS features if you don’t need much member management. MemberPress obviously has membership management under control and has a simple Blocks-based LMS. It also integrates with LearnDash.
WooCommerce works with both. You might have to buy some connector plugins or higher levels of MemberPress though.
I’d strongly recommend a cloud based scheduling service for one on one coaching. Calendly isn’t too expensive and it works fine. For live courses Calendly and Zoom can work pretty well though you can use The Events Calendar and Zoom too. I don’t recommend trying to do one in one on the site though.
They generally run on small-droplets Cloudways / Digital Ocean or even SiteGround.
It can all be done for less than Kajabi’s $120-$160 per month. But not a lot less. They’ll be able to get a lot more from their WordPress site, except maybe for the contact management / newsletter bits.
The key to hosting costs is that *if* they’re an author but unhappy paying Kajabi they may not be getting enough traffic to really tax their server. You don’t want to scrimp, so obviously don’t use GoDaddy or EIG. But have an upgrade path if demand ends up warranting it. Don’t start them on high-end hosting they may never end up needing.
God, tell her to use Kajabi. You don’t want to code this.
I’m using MemberPress on a site now to do a lot (but not all) of the things you mention. Its relatively straightforward too for how powerful it is
Do not reinvent the wheel.
* 1. **WP as presentation site plus shop** you ~~do~~ can go without WOO if there are just few books https://wpmudev.com/blog/create-free-payment-forms-with-forminator/ demo at https://online-store.wpmudev.host/
* 2. **Kajabi** for the rest; your client will be grateful if just for mobile app
EDIT: Are you aware that you are trying to make Kajabi clone? With patchwork of plugins. Is your client aware of that?
I presume she’s startup and savvy on initial costs, but 2000 bucks a year for Kajabi is far less than costs in site developing. If you do it for less, both of you will sweat, and some tears can be expected. I can not see how you can avoid to pay for Membership, booking (be it Calendly, Amelia or Woo-commerce add-on), video streaming (OK, maybe with integration of PeerTube), etc…
She already has a site, add book shop to it, integrate Kajabi and everybody is happy.
Anyhow – do not spare on hosting. Go for industry standards (Kinsta, WPEngine, Cloudways, DigitalOcean, Linode). Wish you all luck.
Definitely would recommend a decent host like Wpengine, with a dev, staging and production environment. Maybe break the project down with the client into priorities and stages. As delivering the whole thing at once will be difficult.