LifterLMS does a lot right: a genuinely free core, unlimited courses and students, and a long track record. But the moment you need advanced quizzes, assignments, or continuing-education tracking, you are routed into a paid bundle, and the bundle pricing resets to full price after the first-year discount expires. A single-site Earth bundle renews at $398/year. The unlimited-site Infinity bundle, with its 15 advanced add-ons, renews at $1,598/year. That is a real, recurring cost for features that used to feel like “the LMS” and now feel like “the upsell.”
Last updated: 6 November 2026
Learnomy takes a different position: one plugin, one price, no add-on marketplace. The free plan already includes unlimited courses and students with zero platform fees. Pro, at a flat $149/year, adds AI-assisted course authoring, cohorts, learning paths, content drip, 11 quiz types, academy analytics, and Stripe Connect payouts for multi-instructor revenue splits. There is no tier ladder to climb and no per-site multiplier once you cross five sites. This guide walks through exactly how to move a LifterLMS site onto Learnomy, including the parts that typically get missed: enrollment history, in-progress student data, and certificates already issued.
Table of Contents
- By the numbers
- Why Site Owners Leave LifterLMS
- Before You Start: What to Audit First
- Learnomy’s Guided Import Wizard
- The Migration, Step by Step
- Migrating Enrollments, Progress, and Certificates
- Mapping LifterLMS Quiz Types to Learnomy
- The WP-CLI Option for Larger Sites
- Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
- A Real-World Scenario: A Cohort-Based Coaching Academy
- What the Switch Actually Saves
- Parallel-Running and Your Rollback Plan
- What to Check in the First Week After Cutover
- FAQs
- Sources
LMS platform migrations are common enough that most major players now ship a dedicated import tool rather than leaving it to manual CSV work - a sign that switching costs, not feature gaps, are usually what keeps course creators locked into a platform they’ve outgrown. A guided importer that also moves student progress (not just course content) is the difference between a weekend project and a multi-week one.
By the numbers
- The global learning management systems market was valued at USD 28.6 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach USD 123.8 billion by 2033, a 20.2% annual growth rate from 2026, according to Grand View Research.
- LifterLMS lists its bundles at a normal price of $398, $598 and $1,598 a year per the LifterLMS pricing page (checked 6 November 2026).
Why Site Owners Leave LifterLMS
LifterLMS’s free core is genuinely capable for a simple course catalog: unlimited courses, memberships, students, and teachers, no caps. The friction shows up once you need anything beyond the basics. Advanced quizzes with partial credit, assignment submission and grading, and continuing-education credit tracking all live inside the paid bundles, not the free core. And the bundle pricing is not flat forever - the common 50%-off first-year promo renews at full list price, so a site that signed up for $199/year at Earth tier is paying $398/year from year two onward.
Key reasons site owners migrate:
- Add-on sprawl: the Infinity bundle alone includes 15 separate advanced add-ons - each one is a product to track, update, and troubleshoot individually
- Renewal shock: first-year promotional pricing (often 50% off) expires, and the renewal invoice can double
- Wanting AI-assisted authoring and modern certificates without paying for a separate add-on to get them
- Multi-instructor revenue sharing that works out of the box instead of requiring a WooCommerce-based workaround
Before You Start: What to Audit First
Before touching the importer, spend an hour auditing what you actually have. This single step prevents almost every migration headache described later in this guide.
- Course count and structure: how many courses, sections, and lessons, and how deep does the nesting go?
- Quiz types in use: LifterLMS’s advanced quiz add-on supports types that don’t have a 1:1 equivalent in every competing LMS - confirm which of Learnomy’s 11 quiz types map cleanly
- Active student count and enrollment status: active, expired, and paused enrollments all need to carry over correctly, not just “enrolled”
- Certificates already issued: how many, and do you need them to remain independently verifiable after the switch?
- Custom certificate designs: these will need to be rebuilt in Learnomy’s canvas-based certificate designer, not imported pixel-for-pixel
- Payment gateway configuration: confirm whether you’re on Stripe, PayPal, or a WooCommerce-routed gateway, since this affects how Learnomy’s native checkout gets configured post-migration
- Third-party plugin dependencies: list anything hooking into LifterLMS directly (email marketing integrations, custom reporting dashboards, affiliate tracking) so you know what needs reconnecting after the switch, not discovering a broken integration weeks later
- Recent support tickets about progress or enrollment issues: if students have already been reporting LifterLMS-side bugs around progress tracking, note them specifically - a pre-existing data inconsistency can carry straight through an otherwise clean migration
This audit typically takes less time than people expect, and it’s the difference between a migration where you already know what needs manual attention and one where you’re discovering problems reactively, one support ticket at a time.
Learnomy’s Guided Import Wizard
Learnomy ships a guided import wizard that moves courses, lessons, quizzes, and questions directly from LearnDash, Tutor LMS, or LifterLMS. It is not a generic CSV importer that expects you to manually map every field - it reads the source plugin’s own data structures directly, since all three source platforms store similarly shaped course/lesson/quiz hierarchies in WordPress’s post types.
An optional “people” step in the same wizard brings over enrollments and student progress - this is the step many importers skip entirely, leaving you to re-enroll every student manually or, worse, losing a paying student’s progress on cutover day. Running this step is not optional in practice: skipping it means every active student restarts their course from zero.
The Migration, Step by Step
- Back up the live site - a full database and files backup before touching anything. This is the single most important step in this entire guide.
- Install Learnomy on a staging copy of the site first, not production. Download Free to start; you only need Pro if you’re relying on cohorts, AI authoring, or advanced quiz types during migration.
- Launch the guided import wizard from the Learnomy admin and select LifterLMS as the source.
- Review the course/lesson/quiz mapping preview the wizard generates before committing - this is where you catch quiz-type mismatches early rather than after a live run.
- Run the import on staging and manually spot-check 3-5 courses, prioritizing your highest-enrollment ones, for structure and content fidelity.
- Enable the “people” step and import enrollments, progress, and certificate records.
- Rebuild custom certificate designs in Learnomy’s canvas-based certificate designer, since visual templates don’t transfer automatically - the underlying issued-certificate records do, but the design itself needs recreating.
- Reconfigure checkout - connect Stripe and/or PayPal directly in Learnomy, since it doesn’t require WooCommerce.
- Run the site in parallel (see the dedicated section below) before pointing your domain’s live traffic at the new install.
- Cut over once spot-checks and a parallel-run period both come back clean.
Migrating Enrollments, Progress, and Certificates
This is the step that separates a clean migration from a support-ticket nightmare. The wizard’s optional people step specifically targets three categories of student data:
- Enrollment status: active, expired, and paused states need to map correctly - an expired-but-not-cancelled LifterLMS membership should not come across as a fresh active enrollment
- In-progress completion data: which lessons a student has completed, which quiz attempts they’ve made and scored, and where exactly they left off
- Issued certificates: Learnomy’s certificates carry QR verification and Ed25519 cryptographic signatures, meaning a certificate issued under Learnomy is independently verifiable even outside your own site - a meaningful upgrade if your students use certificates for professional credentialing
Spot-check this data on at least 10 real student accounts post-import before cutover, prioritizing your most active and most recently enrolled students, since they’re most likely to notice (and complain about) a progress discrepancy.
Mapping LifterLMS Quiz Types to Learnomy
Quiz-type mapping is the single most common source of migration friction, so it deserves its own pass before you run the wizard for real. LifterLMS’s core quiz engine covers multiple choice, true/false, and short answer out of the box, with the advanced quiz add-on layering on picture choice, reorder, and code-entry question types. Learnomy’s six core question types cover multiple choice, true/false, short answer, essay (with a manual grading inbox), fill-in-the-blank, and matching, with 11 total quiz configurations once you count variations like timed quizzes, randomized question pools, and prerequisite-gated quizzes under Pro.
| LifterLMS Question Type | Learnomy Equivalent | Migration Note |
|---|---|---|
| Multiple choice | Multiple choice | Direct, no changes needed |
| True/false | True/false | Direct, no changes needed |
| Short answer | Short answer | Direct, grading rubric may need rebuilding |
| Picture choice | Multiple choice with image options | Usually maps cleanly, spot-check image uploads |
| Reorder | No direct equivalent | Convert to a manually-graded essay question or matching question |
| Code entry | No direct equivalent | Route to the essay grading inbox for manual review |
The import wizard’s mapping preview will flag any question it can’t map automatically rather than silently dropping it or guessing - that preview screen is exactly where you make the reorder/code-entry decisions above, before the import actually runs.
The WP-CLI Option for Larger Sites
For larger sites, or anyone comfortable scripting the process, Learnomy exposes a wp learnomy enroll WP-CLI command specifically for scripting the enrollment-migration step. This is worth using over the GUI wizard’s people step when you have several thousand students and want the migration to run unattended, logged, and resumable rather than through a browser session that could time out.
Learnomy’s REST API, with JWT authentication and offline sync support, is the same API layer the WP-CLI command and the import wizard both sit on top of - meaning a developer comfortable with the API can build a fully custom migration script for edge cases the standard wizard doesn’t cover (a highly customized LifterLMS setup with third-party add-ons stacked on top, for instance).
Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
- Skipping the staging run: always import on staging first. A live-site-only migration gives you no safe way to fix a mapping error before students see it.
- Forgetting custom certificate designs: the data migrates, the visual template doesn’t - budget time to rebuild designs, don’t discover this on launch day.
- Not auditing quiz types first: a LifterLMS advanced-quiz type with no clean Learnomy equivalent needs a manual decision (simplify the question, or keep it as a manually-graded essay question) before the import, not during.
- Underestimating enrollment-status edge cases: paused and expired memberships are the most common source of post-migration support tickets - test these specifically, not just active enrollments.
- Cutting over without a parallel-run period: see the next section - this is the single highest-leverage step to skip the embarrassing “why did my progress reset” ticket flood.
A Real-World Scenario: A Cohort-Based Coaching Academy
Picture a coaching academy running 40 courses on LifterLMS’s Universe bundle ($598/year renewal, 5-site cap), with roughly 1,200 active students and a handful of co-instructors who each teach a subset of the catalog under a manually-tracked revenue split. The owner’s trigger for migrating wasn’t a missing feature - it was the renewal invoice jumping from the discounted first-year price to full price, plus the realization that revenue splitting required a separate add-on and manual WooCommerce order splitting every month.
On Learnomy Pro ($149/year flat, no site-count penalty until genuinely large scale), the academy ran the guided wizard on staging, imported all 40 courses and the full student roster through the people step, rebuilt three custom certificate templates, and used the cohorts feature (a genuine Pro-tier addition LifterLMS didn’t offer at any tier) to group students by their start date for structured, synchronized progress tracking. The co-instructors moved onto Learnomy’s native revenue-split payouts via Stripe Connect, eliminating the manual splitting process entirely.
The parallel-run period caught one real issue before launch: a handful of “paused” memberships (students who’d requested a temporary hold rather than a cancellation) had imported as fully expired rather than paused, which would have silently cancelled their access on cutover. Because this surfaced during the staging spot-check rather than on the live site, the fix was a quick re-run of the people-import step with the status mapping corrected, not an emergency support-ticket scramble with real students locked out of courses they’d paid for. That single catch, caught entirely because of the staging-first approach this guide recommends, is a good illustration of why the audit-and-parallel-run steps matter more than the technical import itself.
What the Switch Actually Saves
| Plan | Year 1 (promo) | Year 2+ (renewal) | 3-year total |
|---|---|---|---|
| LifterLMS Earth (1 site) | $199 | $398/yr | ~$995 |
| LifterLMS Universe (5 sites) | $299 | $598/yr | ~$1,495 |
| LifterLMS Infinity (unlimited) | $799 | $1,598/yr | ~$3,995 |
| Learnomy Pro (flat) | $149 | $149/yr | $447 |
Figures based on publicly listed pricing as of October 2026; LifterLMS’s FIRSTYEAR50 promotional pricing applies to year one only, renewal pricing applies from year two onward.
Parallel-Running and Your Rollback Plan
Don’t point your domain at the new Learnomy install the same day you finish the import. Run the migrated staging site on a subdomain or a password-protected preview URL for at least a week, with a handful of trusted students or your co-instructors actively using it - logging in, resuming a course, submitting a quiz. This surfaces edge cases (a specific quiz type that didn’t map cleanly, a certificate that looks wrong) while the original LifterLMS site is still live and nothing is broken for real students.
Your rollback plan is simple as long as you followed the backup step: if the parallel run surfaces a blocking issue, you haven’t touched production yet, so there’s nothing to roll back - you just fix the issue on staging and re-test. The risk only appears once you’ve actually cut DNS or redirected the live domain, which is why that step belongs last, not first.
What to Check in the First Week After Cutover
The migration doesn’t end when you point your domain at the new install. The first week after cutover is when real students, under real conditions, surface anything the staging spot-checks missed.
- Watch for failed login reports in the first 48 hours - this is the fastest signal that an enrollment record didn’t carry over cleanly for a specific student segment
- Monitor your payment gateway’s dashboard directly (not just Learnomy’s own reporting) for the first few transactions, to confirm Stripe/PayPal is actually routing correctly post-reconfiguration
- Check certificate verification links on a handful of previously-issued certificates to confirm the historical records display correctly even without the new QR/Ed25519 verification layer
- Ask your co-instructors specifically whether their revenue-split payouts look correct on the first post-migration payout cycle - this is the kind of error students won’t report but instructors definitely will
- Keep the old LifterLMS install (deactivated, not deleted) for at least 30 days as a reference copy in case a discrepancy surfaces that needs cross-checking against the original data
Most migration problems that actually reach a support ticket show up in this first week, not during the technical import itself - which is exactly why the parallel-run period and this first-week monitoring matter more than the import step people tend to worry about most. Treat the first week post-cutover as part of the migration project itself, with the same attention you gave the staging run, rather than treating cutover day as the finish line.
Summary
Migrating off LifterLMS is most often a cost and complexity decision rather than a missing-feature one - the free core is solid, but the features that make a course platform feel complete live behind add-on bundles that get more expensive every renewal. Learnomy’s guided wizard, with its enrollment/progress migration step and WP-CLI scripting option for larger sites, makes the actual data move straightforward. The parts that take real planning are the audit before you start and the parallel-run period before you cut over - skip either one and you’ll find out about the gaps from a support ticket instead of a staging-site spot-check.
FAQs
Will my students lose their course progress during migration?
Not if you use the wizard’s optional “people” step, which specifically imports enrollment status and completion progress alongside course content. Skipping this step is the most common cause of lost progress - it’s optional in the wizard but not optional in practice.
Do my issued certificates stay valid after migrating?
The certificate records migrate as part of the people step. Learnomy issues new certificates with QR verification and Ed25519 signatures going forward; previously issued LifterLMS certificates remain valid as historical records but won’t carry Learnomy’s cryptographic verification retroactively.
Can I migrate without touching the production site first?
Yes, and you should. Run the full import on a staging copy, verify it thoroughly, and only point production traffic at the new install after a parallel-run period.
What happens to my LifterLMS advanced quiz types that don’t exist in Learnomy?
Audit your quiz types before migrating. Most common types map cleanly across Learnomy’s 11 supported quiz types; anything unusual may need to be manually simplified or converted to a manually-graded essay question.
Do I need Learnomy Pro to complete the migration?
No, the guided import wizard and the free plan handle the core migration. Pro is only required if you want to actively use cohorts, AI authoring, or the 11 advanced quiz types after migrating.
How does Learnomy handle WooCommerce if my LifterLMS checkout used it?
Learnomy has native Stripe and PayPal checkout built in and doesn’t require WooCommerce. You’ll reconfigure payment processing directly in Learnomy rather than carrying over a WooCommerce dependency.
Is there a cost to using the WP-CLI enrollment command?
No, wp learnomy enroll is part of the core plugin’s developer tooling, available on both free and Pro installs.
What if I have a heavily customized LifterLMS setup with third-party add-ons?
The guided wizard covers standard LifterLMS course/lesson/quiz/enrollment data. Highly customized setups with third-party add-ons may need a developer to extend the migration using Learnomy’s REST API for the non-standard pieces.
How long does a typical migration take?
For a catalog of 20-50 courses with a few hundred to a few thousand students, budget a few hours for the technical import plus a week of parallel-running before cutover. Larger or heavily customized catalogs take longer, mainly for manual spot-checking, not the import itself.
Can multiple instructors keep their individual revenue splits after migrating?
Yes - Learnomy has native multi-instructor support with automatic commission splits via Stripe Connect payouts, which typically replaces a manual or WooCommerce-based revenue-splitting workaround.
Sources
Interesting Reads:
Best LifterLMS Alternatives for Course Sites That Want More Built In