The short version: an online course website is any site set up to sell and deliver lessons to paying students, usually through a platform like Thinkific, Teachable, Kajabi, Podia, or a WordPress plugin such as LearnDash. You do not need to build the whole thing before you know anyone wants to buy it, and most people get this backwards. The fastest route is a simple sales page, a handful of paying students, then a proper course platform once the money proves the idea.
What an online course website is
Strip away the jargon and it is three things bolted together: a place to take payment, a place to store and play the lessons (video, PDFs, quizzes, worksheets), and a way to track who has access to what. That’s it. Everything else, the certificates, the community forums, the drip-feed schedules, is decoration on top of those three functions.
People picture something like Coursera or Udemy when they hear “course website” but those are marketplaces, not what you build for yourself. When I talk about your online course website I mean a site you own, where the branding is yours, the pricing is yours, and Udemy isn’t taking 37% to 63% of the sale depending on where the buyer came from (that’s Udemy’s real revenue split, and it’s brutal if a student finds you through their ads).
The uncomfortable part nobody selling you a course platform wants to say
Here it is: building the website is not the hard part, and it is not the first part either. I have watched people spend three months choosing between Kajabi and Teachable, agonising over themes and video hosting, before they have asked a single human being if they would pay for the thing. Then they launch to silence.
The website is packaging. Nobody buys packaging. They buy the transformation inside it. If you cannot sell five spots on a waitlist with a plain landing page and a PayPal link, a beautifully built course site will not fix that. It will just let you fail more expensively and more slowly, because now you’ve also got a monthly platform fee.
My own course, and what it taught me the hard way
In 2018 I built a LinkedIn and social selling course for consultants and small business owners. I used Thinkific because it was the cheapest paid tier at the time (around $49 a month on their Basic plan back then, it’s higher now), and I priced the course at £197 for a six-module cohort with live Q&A calls thrown in.
43 people bought in the first launch. I was thrilled. Then I watched the analytics over the following ten weeks and only 6 of those 43 finished every module. Six. That number stung more than any refund request would have, because it meant the content wasn’t the problem, the structure was. I’d built it the way I’d have wanted to learn, in one long binge, and real people with real jobs and real inboxes needed the course chopped into smaller pieces with actual deadlines attached, not “go at your own pace.”
I rebuilt the second cohort with a weekly release schedule, a private group for accountability, and a completion badge people could put on LinkedIn (vanity works, don’t be precious about it). Completion jumped to roughly 60%. Same content, different delivery mechanics. That’s the lesson: the platform you pick matters far less than how you force people through it.
The three ways to build one
There are really only three routes, and each suits a different stage of business.
1. All-in-one hosted platforms
Thinkific, Teachable, Kajabi, and Podia handle hosting, payments, video, and student logins in one dashboard. You don’t need a developer or a separate website.
- Thinkific: free plan exists but caps you badly; paid plans start around $36 to $74 a month depending on features and how many courses you run.
- Teachable: Basic plan around $39 a month, Pro around $119 a month, and the free plan takes a transaction fee on top.
- Kajabi: no free tier, starts around $89 a month, but includes email marketing and landing pages built in, so you’re not paying for a separate email tool too.
- Podia: starts around $33 a month and is the simplest interface of the four if you’re not technical.
Pick this route if you want to launch inside two or three weeks and you don’t already run a WordPress site.
2. A WordPress plugin (LearnDash, LifterLMS, or Tutor LMS)
If you already have a WordPress site, this is often cheaper long term. LearnDash costs a one-time-ish annual licence, roughly $199 to $399 a year depending on the package, and there’s no monthly platform fee stacking up forever. You do need decent hosting and someone comfortable with WordPress, or a few hours of patience to become that person yourself.
3. Building it fully custom
This is rarely the right answer for a first course. I only recommend this once you’re doing genuine six-figure course revenue and the platform fees or feature limits are costing you more than a developer would. Do not start here. I’ve seen too many people burn £8,000 to £15,000 on custom builds for a course that had never sold a single seat.
Step by step: how I’d build one starting today
- Validate first. Write one page describing the course outcome and price it. Send it to your email list or post it on LinkedIn. Take 5 to 10 pre-orders or deposits before you record a single lesson.
- Outline the content in modules, not lectures. Aim for 4 to 8 modules with a clear task or output at the end of each one, not just “watch and absorb.”
- Pick your platform based on your current setup, not on which one has the prettiest marketing site. If you’re already on WordPress, try LearnDash. If not, Thinkific or Podia for a first course.
- Record lessons in short chunks. 6 to 12 minutes per video, not 45-minute monologues. Students abandon long videos at a rate that will depress you if you look at the drop-off graphs.
- Build a real sales page, separate from your homepage, with one job: convert visitors into buyers. This is exactly the same principle as any landing page built for a single purpose, and course creators skip this step constantly because they assume the platform’s default template will do the job.
- Set up payment and access. Every platform above handles this natively. Test the checkout yourself with a real card before you launch.
- Launch to a small group first. A cohort of 10 to 20 gives you feedback and testimonials before you push to a wider audience.
- Add a completion mechanism. A deadline, a live call, a private group, anything that isn’t “watch whenever.” Self-paced-only courses have some of the worst completion rates in the industry, commonly cited around 15% across large MOOC platforms, and your paying customers deserve better odds than that.
Writing the sales copy yourself
You do not need to hire a copywriter for your first course launch. The sales page copy is just you explaining, in plain sentences, what the student can do after the course that they can’t do now. I taught myself this the same slow way most people should, by writing badly first and editing against real feedback, which is roughly the approach I set out in how to teach yourself copywriting without a course, which is a slightly funny thing to link to inside a post about building a course, but the principle holds either way. Specific beats clever every time. “Write a LinkedIn post that gets replies in your first week” outsells “Master social selling.”
Pricing: what people pay
Course pricing splits roughly into three bands and each attracts a different kind of buyer.
- £27 to £97: impulse-buy territory, works well for a narrow, specific skill taught in under three hours of content.
- £150 to £500: the mid-tier, usually multi-week, with some support (Q&A calls, a community, feedback on work).
- £800 and above: closer to a cohort programme or mini-mastermind, needs live coaching or personal feedback to justify the price, a pre-recorded video library alone won’t hold that price point.
I priced my LinkedIn course at £197 because it sat in that middle band, enough to signal it was worth taking seriously, low enough that a solo consultant could expense it without asking a boss.
What breaks course websites
It’s rarely the tech. It’s usually one of three things: no clear promise on the sales page, content that’s too long and too passive, or zero plan for what happens after purchase. I’ve reviewed course sites for clients where the checkout worked fine, the video quality was good, and they still had a 2% completion rate because nothing in the experience nudged students to open module one.
The other quiet killer is trying to build the perfect platform before you’ve built any audience at all. If your email list is 40 people and your LinkedIn following is thin, a £2,000 custom course website will not save a launch. Growing that audience first, even slowly, matters more than the tech stack, and that’s a lesson I only learned after rebuilding my own business from scratch after several hard years, where the platforms I used barely mattered compared to whether people knew who I was and trusted me enough to buy.
Real cost breakdown for year one
- Platform (Thinkific/Teachable/Podia): £30 to £120 a month
- Basic video gear (decent webcam or phone tripod, lapel mic): £80 to £250 one-off
- Email tool if not bundled with your platform: £15 to £60 a month
- Optional: freelance video editor for polish: £15 to £40 an hour, usually 2 to 4 hours of editing per module
You can realistically launch a first course for under £400 total spend in year one if you record it yourself on a decent phone and use a mid-tier platform. Anyone quoting you £5,000 for a “done for you” course build before you’ve sold one seat is selling you the wrong thing at the wrong time.
Should you even build one right now
A course website is one of several ways to build income online, and it isn’t always the fastest one if money now matters more than a scalable product later. If you’re weighing this against freelance work or a quicker income stream, it’s worth comparing against other paths in how to start making money online from home, because a course takes weeks to build and validate whereas freelance or service work can bring money in within days. If your time is tight right now, it’s also worth reading about making money online faster with limited time before you commit to a multi-week course build, since a course is a medium-term project, not a this-week fix.
Frequently asked questions
What is the cheapest way to build an online course website?
Use a free landing page tool plus a PayPal or Stripe payment link to presell the course before building anything, then move onto Podia or Thinkific once you have paying students, both starting under £40 a month with no coding required.
Do I need my own website to sell an online course?
No. Platforms like Thinkific, Teachable, and Podia host everything for you, including the sales page and checkout, so you can launch without a separate website at all, and only add a full site later if you’re building a wider brand.
How much does it cost to build an online course website in 2026?
Most people can launch for under £400 in the first year using a mid-tier platform (£30 to £120 a month), basic recording gear (£80 to £250 one-off), and self-written sales copy, with no need for a developer or designer at the start.
What’s the biggest mistake people make when building a course website?
Building the full site and recording all the content before confirming anyone will pay for it. Presell first with a simple sales page and a handful of deposits, then build the platform once the demand is proven.
