When legacy platforms were born, online learning wasn’t as popular and had particular use cases. Since eLearning has become ingrained in our daily lives, the demand for platforms that can scale, adapt, and integrate seamlessly with modern tools is higher than ever.
Many institutions and businesses are opting to migrate from their custom-built, in-house legacy systems to WordPress-based LMS solutions. This capable, more affordable option provides course creators greater control over their learning environments.
WordPress powers over 40% of the web and offers many LMS plugins, such as LearnDash, LifterLMS, and TutorLMS. These platforms provide an open-source, user-friendly, and flexible environment for creating online courses without the high costs and limitations of a Legacy LMS.
This migration, however, is not without its challenges. From data migration to preserving all custom functionality and workflows, there’s much to consider to ensure a smooth transition. In this article, we will help you determine whether migrating to a WordPress LMS is right for you, the pros and cons of making this shift, and key considerations to keep in mind.
What is a legacy LMS?
A legacy LMS is an older system for creating and delivering online courses. Legacy learning management systems were often built before cloud technology and modern LMS solutions became popular and tended to involve extensive custom development. Since many of these systems are built in-house or heavily customized to meet specific needs, they are more challenging to update or integrate with newer technologies.
Institutions’ main issue with these learning management systems is that they are rigid, limited, and more complicated to scale, especially when compared to modern, off-the-shelf solutions.
Should you get rid of your Legacy LMS?
A custom legacy LMS, while possibly tailored to a company’s initial needs, often comes with a host of pain points that become more evident as time passes. One of the most pressing issues is the high maintenance and operational costs. Since these systems are often built on proprietary or outdated technology, keeping them functional requires ongoing support from specialized developers. This not only drives up costs but also slows down progress, as making even minor changes can be time-consuming and expensive.
If you want to take advantage of newer technologies, improve user experience, and reduce maintenance challenges, it might be time to retire your Legacy LMS.
Signs it’s time to move on:
- The system no longer supports your needs, and adding new features involves extensive custom development.
- Your website is struggling with performance and security.
- You need to integrate modern third-party solutions or services.
- You are highly dependent on your developer for website maintenance.
Migration Pros
Better User Experience
Scalability
Unlike custom-crafted systems, WordPress websites can seamlessly scale as your needs change and your courses grow.
Cost Savings
One of the platform’s biggest advantages is its cost-effectiveness. WordPress LMS solutions come with lower setup and maintenance costs, and countless free and affordable plugins allow organizations to expand functionality without breaking the bank. Even when businesses need to tailor their websites, custom development can be used strategically, minimizing costs overall.
Security and Compliance
Older platforms are more susceptible to security breaches, especially if they haven’t been updated regularly. Without access to a larger community of developers or frequent updates, these systems can quickly become a security liability. WordPress, on the contrary, has a large development community that continually improves the platform with regular updates, new features, and security enhancements, ensuring that the system stays current with modern demands.
Flexibility and Advanced Features
Custom code and outdated frameworks make it challenging to introduce new functionalities, leaving users stuck with a system that fails to keep up with modern demands. On the other hand, WordPress’s open-source nature offers tremendous flexibility. Organizations can easily customize and extend their LMS without being locked into expensive proprietary solutions.
This flexibility also applies to integration with popular tools. WordPress LMS plugins like LearnDash and LifterLMS work seamlessly with widely used platforms such as WooCommerce for eCommerce, Zoom for video conferencing, and MailChimp for marketing automation. This level of integration enables organizations to create a unified, efficient ecosystem.
Migration Cons
Data Migration Complexity
Custom legacy systems often store data in formats that aren’t easily compatible with modern platforms like WordPress. Migrating course content, user data, progress tracking, and other important information can be complex and time-consuming. We have often had to build custom migration scripts for our clients to facilitate this process and adapt to their specific systems.
Customization Needs
While WordPress offers incredible flexibility through its open-source nature, organizations coming from a highly customized legacy LMS might find that recreating certain unique features in WordPress requires substantial effort. WordPress offers a wide array of plugins to extend functionality, but in some cases, businesses may need custom development to fully replicate or improve their previous system. This represents some additional time and costs.
Training and Adoption
While WordPress is generally user-friendly, it’s still a different system from what users are accustomed to. Technical staff managing the backend and end-users interacting with the platform will likely experience a learning curve. On our projects, we offer our clients written documentation, create video tutorials, and offer live training/demo sessions to help them adapt as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Initial Cost of Migration
While WordPress LMS solutions are cost-effective in the long run, the upfront costs of migrating from a custom legacy system should be considered. The initial investment includes hiring LMS experts for data migration, training, custom development work, and any necessary downtime (however minimal it may be) during the transition. Although the long-term savings from reduced maintenance and operational costs are significant, organizations must be prepared to cover the expenses of the transition.
Key WordPress LMS Plugins to Consider
LearnDash LMS
LearnDash is a comprehensive WordPress LMS plugin for building dynamic and highly customizable online learning experiences. It provides advanced features for course creation, including multi-tier courses, lesson timers, and the ability to control the flow of learning with prerequisites or drip-fed content. LearnDash also gives you access to quizzes, assignments, and some gamification elements to enhance learning.
Course creators can benefit from LearnDash’s intuitive course builder, allowing users to structure courses easily into lessons and topics, and pack them with a variety of content types. Monetization options are abundant, with built-in support for selling courses as one-time purchases, subscriptions, or memberships and seamless WooCommerce integration. Additionally, it offers reporting analytics, and certificates, making it a complete solution for online education.
LifterLMS
LifterLMS is another WordPress LMS plugin designed to help you create, manage, and sell online courses. With LifterLMS, you can build courses that include multimedia lessons, quizzes, assignments, and certifications. The plugin also allows for course prerequisites and content dripping to guide students through their learning journey at a pace that suits your curriculum.
LifterLMS also offers many monetization and membership features. It integrates with payment gateways to allow course purchases, subscriptions, or bundled offerings. Additionally, you can set up course cohorts so groups of learners can enroll and progress through a course together or even set up course tracks for programs that require several courses to be completed to be awarded a certificate.
TutorLMS
TutorLMS is another WordPress LMS plugin that provides the groundwork for building your online learning site. It allows you to create an entire hierarchy for your online learning content, creating multiple courses that can contain lessons, assignments, and quizzes. You can even determine the order in which your students consume their elearning content by setting pre-requisites or using the content-drip feature.
TutorLMS is fairly easy to use, offering course creators a visual drag-and-drop interface to build courses with a variety of content types, including video, text, images, files, and more. It also offers online course certificates, monetization features, and grading analytics out of the box.
The Migration Process
Selecting The Right Partner
When migrating from a custom legacy LMS to a WordPress LMS, choosing the right LMS development partner is critical to ensuring a smooth transition. Migrating from an old or highly customized system involves technical challenges that can be difficult to tackle without the right resources, such as data migration and integration of custom features, avoiding gaps between the old and new systems. Collaborating with an experienced team can make all the difference, facilitating the process for both your team and your users.
Ideally, you should work with a development partner specializing in LMS migrations and development for WordPress-based Learning Management Systems. The development team should have experience specifically in LMS architecture and customizations.
Planning and Assessment
Since Legacy LMS platforms often have highly specialized features or custom-built components that may take time to be replicated in an off-the-shelf WordPress LMS plugin, it is vital to start by clearly defining which features must be maintained or rebuilt during the migration.
Our team typically starts with a Discovery phase, during which we create a comprehensive list of the features and workflows that are essential to your current system. This is also the time when we focus on finding areas of improvement, such as finding WordPress solutions to streamline or replace old systems. We also determine which features should be prioritized during the migration to best adapt to our clients’ time or budget constraints.
WordPress Configuration and Customization
Once you’ve completed the planning and assessment phase, the next step is to set up your WordPress LMS. To get started, we help them set up their WordPress installation, find the ideal hosting solution, and select the best plugins to power their online courses, including LMS, eCommerce, and reporting solutions.
However, this process goes beyond just installing plugins—a lot of thought goes into making sure the system is robust, scalable, and customized to your unique requirements.
Customization work is often a significant part of the WordPress LMS setup, especially for organizations migrating from highly tailored legacy systems. While WordPress offers many pre-built features, organizations with complex or niche requirements may need to invest in custom development.
Some examples we have worked on in the past include:
- Integrating third-party solutions where integration is not readily available,
- Tweaking the LMS workflows and features to add specific functionalities,
- Implementing custom certification rules,
- Adding SCORM and xAPI content or iFrames into course pages.
Customization also extends to adjusting the look and feel of your new LMS site. From the branding and user interface to how courses are presented and how users navigate through them, custom UIX design ensures that the platform feels unique to your organization. This is particularly important if your legacy LMS has specific design elements that must be maintained.
Data migration
Data migration is one of the process’s most critical and challenging aspects. Ensuring that all your legacy data is securely and accurately transferred to the new system is essential for preserving user records, course content, and progress.
The first step in this process is exporting data from the legacy LMS. This includes all course materials, student information, grades, progress tracking, certifications, and other key data points. Depending on the legacy system, this may require custom scripts or specialized export tools to ensure the data is extracted in a format compatible with WordPress.
Once done, you’ll have to import and precisely map all data into WordPress. This involves recreating user profiles, progress tracking information, and course enrollment data within the new LMS.
Quality Assurance
One of the most essential parts of migration is ensuring that the new WordPress LMS works flawlessly before launching. We continuously iterate on the importance of thoroughly testing all workflows on your new site before launch to avoid problems when your students are onboarded into the new platform.
Preparing For A Succesful Migration
Overall, migrating from a legacy LMS to a WordPress-based LMS can transform your organization. With plugins like LearnDash, LifterLMS, and TutorLMS, you gain a flexible, scalable, cost-effective platform to manage and grow your eLearning offerings. However, navigating the complexities of migration requires careful planning and technical expertise to avoid potential pitfalls.
If you’re considering a migration or starting from scratch, our expert LMS development team is here to guide you through every step of the process. We’ll ensure a smooth transition, preserving your custom features and workflows while building a robust, future-proof platform.
