Top Website Builders for Creating a Professional Online Course Platform
Why I Stopped Using Teachable and Built My Course on My Own Site Instead
Affiliate disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you purchase through them I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend tools and resources I personally use and trust.
I spent time on Teachable.
I understand why people choose it. The setup is clean, the interface is simple, and you can have a course live faster than almost any other option.
But the longer I used it the more I felt like I was building someone else’s business rather than my own.
Every sale had a percentage taken off the top. My course lived on their domain rather than mine. My students were in their ecosystem rather than mine. And the SEO value that my course sales page was generating — the traffic, the links, the authority — was going to Teachable, not to thestrategicaffiliate.co.uk.
The moment I understood that clearly I moved everything to my own site and I have not looked back.
This article explains exactly what I use, why I made the switch, and how to set up a professional online course platform on your own WordPress site — so that every part of your course business belongs to you rather than to a platform that could change its pricing or terms at any point.
THE PROBLEM WITH HOSTED COURSE PLATFORMS
The Problem With Hosted Course Platforms Nobody Talks About
Teachable and Thinkific are not bad products. I want to be fair about that. They are well-designed, easy to use, and for someone who wants to get a course live quickly with minimal technical setup they do the job.
But there are four trade-offs that matter significantly over the long term.
The first is fees. Teachable’s free plan takes a transaction fee on every sale. Even on paid plans you are paying a monthly subscription for the privilege of hosting your course on their infrastructure. That is money leaving your business permanently on every transaction — money that could be reinvested into your content, your advertising, or your affiliate marketing.
The second is control. On a hosted platform your course lives on their servers, their domain, and their terms. If they raise prices tomorrow you either pay or migrate. If they shut down — which has happened to other SaaS businesses — your course goes with them. That dependency is a business risk that most course creators do not think about until it is too late.
The third is SEO. This is the one that matters most for affiliate marketers specifically. Your course sales page on Teachable is on Teachable’s domain. Any organic traffic it attracts, any backlinks it earns, any Google authority it builds — all of that benefits Teachable’s domain rather than yours. When you build on your own site every scrap of that SEO value compounds in your favour.
The fourth is integration. When your course, your blog content, your affiliate links, your email opt-ins, and your checkout all live on the same domain they work together as a system. Traffic from your affiliate content flows naturally into your course. Course students discover your affiliate articles. Your email list captures visitors from every part of your site. Hosted platforms break that integration by pulling your course out of your ecosystem and into theirs.
WHAT I USE INSTEAD
The Full Setup
When I moved The Strategic Affiliate Income System onto my own site I needed three things. Solid hosting, a course delivery plugin, and a payment and checkout system. Here is exactly what I use and why.
Hosting — Hostinger Business Plan
Everything starts with hosting and getting it wrong affects every other part of your setup. Slow hosting means slow course pages. Unreliable hosting means students cannot access content when they need it. And weak hosting infrastructure holds back your SEO regardless of how good your content is.
I use and recommend Hostinger for affiliate and course sites at every stage. The Business plan gives you NVMe storage — significantly faster than standard SSD — daily backups, a free CDN for additional speed, and capacity to host multiple sites on a single account. The performance at this price point is genuinely strong and the setup is clean enough that a complete beginner can go from sign-up to a live WordPress site in under thirty minutes.
Get started with Hostinger here —Grab My Exclusive Discount
If you are running an established course with significant student numbers and consistent traffic the Cloud Startup plan at $7.99 per month gives you dedicated resources and priority support. Worth considering once your course is generating consistent sales and your site is handling real traffic.
Course Plugin — Tutor LMS Pro
Tutor LMS Pro handles course delivery directly inside WordPress. You build your course structure — modules, lessons, quizzes, assignments, certificates — through a visual builder that works similarly to the standard WordPress block editor. Students get a clean, professional learning experience. Everything lives on your own site, your own domain, your own database.
The integration with WooCommerce makes the whole payment and enrolment flow seamless. A student pays through your WooCommerce checkout, access is granted automatically, and they are inside your course within seconds of payment clearing.
Payment and Checkout — WooCommerce
WooCommerce is free, deeply integrated with WordPress, and connects to every major payment gateway including Stripe and PayPal. For a digital course product the setup is straightforward — create a virtual downloadable product, set your price, connect Tutor LMS, and your checkout is live.
The combination of Hostinger for hosting, WordPress as the foundation, Tutor LMS Pro for course delivery, and WooCommerce for checkout is exactly what runs The Strategic Affiliate Income System. It works as a properly integrated system and every part of it belongs entirely to me.
HOW TO SET IT UP
A Practical Overview
You do not need to be technical to do this. Here is the practical overview of how to get from nothing to a live course platform on your own site.
Step 1 — Get your hosting in place
Sign up for Hostinger, choose the Business plan, and use the one-click WordPress installer to get WordPress live on your domain. The whole process takes about twenty minutes. Hostinger’s hPanel is one of the cleanest and most intuitive control panels in the industry — you do not need to know what cPanel is or how FTP works.
Step 2 — Install your essential plugins
Once WordPress is live install Rank Math for SEO, WooCommerce for payments, Tutor LMS Pro for course delivery, Pretty Links for affiliate link management, and a caching plugin for speed. Keep your plugin count lean — only what you genuinely need.
Step 3 — Build your course structure
Inside Tutor LMS create your course, add your modules and lessons, upload or embed your video content, and set up any quizzes or assignments. The visual builder makes this straightforward even on your first attempt.
Step 4 — Set up your WooCommerce product
Create a WooCommerce product for your course, set it as virtual, connect it to Tutor LMS so that purchase grants automatic course access, and set your price. Add your payment gateway — Stripe is the simplest option for most course creators — and test the full purchase flow with a test order before going live.
Step 5 — Build your sales page
This is the most important step and the one most people underinvest in. Your course sales page is doing the selling. It needs to cover the problem your course solves, who it is for, what is inside each module, what results students can expect, and a clear enrolment CTA. A properly built sales page on your own domain — ranking in Google, earning backlinks, building authority — is an asset. The same page on Teachable is an asset for someone else.
Step 6 — Connect your email sequence
Your course checkout should connect to your Kit email list. New students should receive an automated welcome email, be tagged in Kit so you can identify them, and enter a post-purchase sequence that helps them get started with the course immediately. This keeps your student experience strong and keeps your email list updated with accurate segment data.
WHAT YOUR COURSE PLATFORM NEEDS TO DO WELL
Beyond the technical setup there are six things your platform needs to handle properly if you want students to have a good experience and your business to run smoothly.
A clear and compelling sales page. Not a product page with a description and a buy button — a proper sales page that earns the enrolment. This is worth spending real time on.
A clean student experience inside the course. Clear module structure, logical lesson order, progress tracking, and downloadable resources where relevant. Tutor LMS handles all of this cleanly.
Fast and reliable video delivery. Host your videos on YouTube unlisted or Vimeo and embed them into your Tutor LMS lessons. Do not host video files directly on your server — the file sizes will drag your site speed down and affect your SEO.
A streamlined checkout with as little friction as possible. Guest checkout enabled, minimal form fields, clear pricing, and a payment gateway that works reliably on mobile as well as desktop.
Automatic course access on purchase. Nobody should have to wait for manual approval to access a course they have just paid for. WooCommerce and Tutor LMS handle this automatically once the integration is set up correctly.
Integration with your email platform. Every student who purchases should land on your email list in the right segment, receive an automated welcome, and be connected to your broader content and affiliate ecosystem.
HOW YOUR COURSE AND AFFILIATE CONTENT WORK TOGETHER
How Your Course and Affiliate Content Work Together as One System
This is the part that most course creators miss because they think of their course and their content as two separate things.
They are not. They are two parts of the same business and the more tightly they are integrated the better both perform.
Your affiliate content attracts search traffic from people researching tools, strategies, and solutions in your niche. Some of those visitors convert on affiliate links. Others join your email list. And some — the most engaged and most serious — find their way to your course and enrol.
Your course students are your most trusted audience. They invested money in your teaching which means they are the most likely people to act on your affiliate recommendations when you mention tools inside the course modules. The context and trust are already established.
Your email list bridges both sides. Subscribers who came through a content opt-in get nurtured towards the course. Course students who join your list stay connected to your new content.
The whole system runs on one WordPress site, one email platform, one domain. Every part feeds into every other part. That is the advantage you lose the moment you move your course off your own site and onto someone else’s platform.
The Right Choice for a Serious Course and Affiliate Business
If you are building a course to sit alongside an affiliate marketing business the answer is your own WordPress site on solid hosting. Not Teachable. Not Thinkific. Not any hosted platform that takes a cut of your revenue, limits your control, and separates your course from your content and SEO.
Your own domain. Your own hosting. Your own tools. Everything integrated, everything compounding together, everything belonging to you.
Get started with Hostinger — the hosting I use and recommend for every affiliate and course site:
Join Hostinger With My Discount Today
And if you want the complete system — content, traffic, email, course income, and affiliate commissions — all working together as one framework, The Strategic Affiliate Income System covers all of it across six structured modules.
Enrol here — The Strategic Affiliate Income System More Info & Enrol
FAQS
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Teachable or Thinkific better than building on WordPress?
For someone who wants the fastest possible setup with the least technical involvement, Teachable and Thinkific are easier to start with. But for anyone building a course alongside an affiliate marketing business, a self-hosted WordPress site is significantly better long term. You pay no platform fees, you own your data and your SEO, and your course integrates directly with your content and email systems rather than sitting in a separate silo.
What is the best hosting for a WordPress course site?
I recommend Hostinger’s Business plan as the starting point for most course and affiliate sites. The NVMe storage, daily backups, and free CDN deliver strong performance at a price point that makes sense for a growing online business. For higher traffic established sites the Cloud Startup plan is worth upgrading to.
Do I need Tutor LMS Pro or will the free version work?
The free version of Tutor LMS covers the basics and is worth starting with to test the setup. Pro adds features including advanced quiz types, certificate generation, content drip, and WooCommerce subscription support. For a course like The Strategic Affiliate Income System with multiple modules and a paid enrolment the Pro version is the right choice.
How do I take payments for my course without using Teachable?
WooCommerce with Stripe is the most straightforward setup for taking course payments on a self-hosted WordPress site. WooCommerce is free, Stripe integrates cleanly, and the combination handles the full checkout and automatic course access grant through the Tutor LMS integration. Setup takes less than an hour once your WordPress site is live.
Can I migrate my existing Teachable course to WordPress?
Yes. Your video content, written lessons, and course materials can all be moved to Tutor LMS manually. It takes time depending on how many modules and lessons your course has but the process is straightforward — create your course structure in Tutor LMS, embed your videos from YouTube or Vimeo, and paste or reformat your written content into the lesson editor. The migration is worth the effort given the long-term advantages of owning your own platform.
