Before Your LearnDash Renewal: Renew, Rebundle or Move

If a LearnDash renewal notice has landed in your inbox with a plan you did not choose, you do not need to decide today. You need four facts from the email, one worksheet filled in with your own numbers, and an honest answer to a single question: is the plan you are being moved to worth more to your business than the cost of changing course?

This guide walks through that decision in order. It covers how to read the notice, what to count, the three real options, when staying put is the right call, and what a move to Learnomy actually involves if you go that way. The recent news is only the trigger. The checklist works for any renewal, from any vendor.

What changed, and what is still unknown

Nexcess, which is part of Liquid Web, now sells LearnDash, The Events Calendar, Give and Kadence as one bundled package on a single licence. The Nexcess software packages page describes it. The plan change applies at your next renewal on or after 16 November. Before that, customers get an email showing their new plan, their sites, the price and the renewal date.

Public price figures for the bundle have been inconsistent, so this guide quotes none. Your renewal email is the only number that matters, because it is the one you will be charged. Everything below is built around reading that email carefully.

Read the renewal email like a contract

Do not skim it for the price and close it. Open it and write down these items:

1. The plan name. Is it the plan you bought, or a different one?
2. The number of sites. Count the sites you actually run LearnDash on, including staging and any client sites. Compare that with the number the email says is covered.
3. What is included. The bundle covers four products. Note which ones you use today and which you have never installed.
4. The price and the renewal date. Write both down, plus the date you last renewed and what you paid then.
5. What happens if you do nothing. Look for wording about automatic renewal and how to cancel or change the plan.
6. Who to contact. Find the support or billing address in the email, and keep it.

If any of that is unclear, ask before the renewal date, in writing. A short question to the vendor costs nothing, and the reply becomes a record of what you were told.

Check your own site list first

Most owners are surprised by their own site count. Sit down with your hosting account, your agency list and your staging environments. Write each site that runs LearnDash in a column. A site you forgot about may still be using a licence, and a site you retired may still be counted.

Also note which sites are live and which are test copies. If your plan counts them the same way, a staging site you never touch might be costing you a slot.

Does the bundle include things you will never use?

A bundle can be good value or a poor fit, and the difference is what you use. Take the four products one at a time:

• LearnDash is the course engine. You use it or you would not be reading this.
• The Events Calendar matters if you run live events, workshops or in-person sessions on the same site.
• Give matters if you take donations.
• Kadence matters if you build your pages with it or would like to.

For each one, write “use”, “might use” or “never”. A bundle where you use one of four is not necessarily bad, but it is a different product from the one you bought, and you should price it as one. If the extras genuinely replace tools you pay for elsewhere, the bundle can come out ahead. If they do not, you are paying for shelf space.

The cost worksheet

Fill this in with your own numbers. Nothing on this page will do it for you, because your hosting, your add-ons and your hours are yours.

Part 1: what staying costs per year

• Renewal price from the email: ___
• Add-ons you buy separately for LearnDash (payments, certificates, drip, reports): ___
• Hours per year you spend on LearnDash maintenance, multiplied by what an hour is worth to you: ___
• Total for staying: ___

Part 2: what moving costs once

• Hours to rebuild what the importer does not bring across (see below): ___
• Hours to test, at your own hourly value: ___
• Developer or contractor cost, if you hire help: ___
• A buffer of a few extra hours for things you only find mid-move: ___
• Total one-off cost: ___

Part 3: what the new setup costs per year

• Hosting changes, if any: ___
• Learnomy Pro, if you need what it adds: ___
• Any tools you would add or drop: ___
• Total for the new setup: ___

Now compare. Subtract the new yearly total from the staying total to get a yearly saving. Divide the one-off cost by that saving to see how many years it takes to break even. A move that pays for itself in under a year is easy. One that takes four years is a judgement call, and you should be honest about whether you will really use the new setup that long.

The worksheet also shows you something else. If the saving is small, the real question is not money. It is whether you want a different product.

Your three real options

Option 1: renew as offered

This is the least work. If the new plan covers your sites and you are happy with the price, renew and spend your time on your students. Nothing about a renewal forces you to move, and a working course site is worth protecting.

Option 2: change the plan or ask questions

Before you accept, check whether you can adjust the number of sites or pick a different plan. The renewal email should say what is possible. If it does not, ask. Plans you were not told about do not exist for you, and plans you did not ask about cannot be offered. A reply from the vendor can change your numbers more than any amount of comparison shopping.

Option 3: move

Moving means choosing a different LMS and bringing your content over. That is a real project, so treat it like one. The rest of this guide is about doing it safely with Learnomy, and about knowing when not to.

When you should not move

Be honest with yourself here, because a move has real costs. Stay on LearnDash if any of these is true:

• Your business runs on its group features. If group leaders, seat purchases and manager reporting are how you sell to companies, and your staff already know those screens, moving gives you retraining and rework. The importer does not read LearnDash groups at all, as the entity list below shows.
• You depend on one integration only LearnDash has. Confirm the integration exists for the new platform before you plan anything. If it does not, that settles it.
• Your students live in a store-listed app. If your current setup depends on a branded app in the app stores, check what you would replace it with first. Learnomy’s mobile answer today is a responsive site, an installable web app mode (still marked beta) and a full REST API.
• The renewal price is fine and the site is stable. Boring is good. A migration done because of mild annoyance is a migration you will resent in the middle of it.
• You cannot afford a quiet month. Moving needs testing time. If you are in the middle of a launch, wait.

Switch when the cost, the number of moving parts or the age of your stack is the thing that hurts, and the worksheet agrees with you.

What moving to Learnomy involves

Here is how the importer actually works, because the details decide how much work you have.

It runs on the same site

Learnomy’s importer reads LearnDash directly, on the site where both plugins are active. It reads LearnDash and writes into Learnomy’s own tables. It never writes back to LearnDash, so your old courses keep working until you turn them off. That also means LearnDash has to stay active during the import. You cannot import from a file or from a different site.

The importer supports three sources: LearnDash, LifterLMS and Tutor LMS. For LearnDash it reads categories, courses, sections, lessons, topics (which become sub-lessons), quizzes, questions, enrolments and lesson progress.

Step 1: make a staging copy

Never run the first import on your live site. Back up the database, then copy the whole site to a staging environment. Install Learnomy there and leave LearnDash active. Learnomy’s free plugin is enough for the import itself.

Step 2: run the preview

The import has a dry run. In the admin, open LMS Settings and go to Import, where the wizard is titled “Import from another LMS”. You can also run wp learnomy migrate preview learndash from the command line. The preview writes nothing. It shows counts for each kind of content and warns you about question types with no Learnomy equivalent, which will be skipped or converted to a nearby type.

Read every warning. Then read the “not migrated” list that appears with it, because it tells you what to plan for.

Step 3: import the content

Run the import for content first: categories, courses, sections, lessons, quizzes and questions. You can limit the run to certain entities with a flag, and the same job can run in batches in the background, which helps on a big library.

What arrives in good shape:

• Course and lesson structure, including sections and topics as sub-lessons.
• Course prerequisites, which are resolved once every course has arrived.
• A lesson’s minimum-time timer.
• Lessons marked as free previews.

Importing again is safe. The importer remembers what it already created, and by default it skips anything that already exists. Each run has an id, and wp learnomy migrate undo <run-id> deletes exactly what that run created, so a bad first attempt is not a disaster.

Step 4: bring across students and progress

Enrolments and progress are separate entities. Run them as a second pass, once the content is in. The importer keeps each learner’s original enrolment date and completion date, so a student from 2022 does not suddenly look like they joined today. Imported learners are not emailed a welcome message, because notifications are muted for the import.

One thing to decide before this pass: marking lessons complete triggers the normal completion hooks, and those can issue a certificate automatically if you have set one up on the course. Decide whether you want that for people who finished years ago.

What does not move

The importer says this itself, in the preview and on the finish screen:

• Certificates. They are built from LearnDash’s own templates and shortcodes, so they cannot be carried over. You pick a Learnomy certificate template per course and completions issue from that.
• Quiz attempt scores. Learners who passed are marked complete, but per-question scores are not rebuilt.
• Prices, orders and coupons. Money is never touched. Imported courses arrive free, and you set prices afterwards.
• Drip rules. Learnomy’s drip is a Pro feature, and the importer carries no drip settings, so you recreate them by hand.
• Groups. Group leaders and group seats are not among the entities it reads.

If you sold through WooCommerce, note that in Learnomy it is a payment gateway only: a course unlocks when the order reaches Completed, and courses are not products.

Step 5: rebuild what did not move

This is the real work, and the worksheet’s one-off cost should reflect it. Set each course’s price, connect your payment gateway, choose a certificate template, and recreate any drip schedule. If you used LearnDash groups for company training, plan how you will handle seats before you move, because the replacement works differently.

A testing checklist

Do not skip this. Run it on staging, as a student and as an admin.

1. Open three courses of different sizes and confirm the lesson order matches the original.
2. Take one quiz of each type you use and compare question text and correct answers.
3. Check that prerequisites block and unblock as they did.
4. Open a lesson that had a forced timer and confirm it still holds the student.
5. Log in as an imported student and confirm their progress bars and completion dates.
6. Buy a course on a test payment with your gateway in test mode.
7. Earn a certificate and open its public verification page.
8. Open the site on a phone and read a lesson all the way through.
9. Check your emails: enrolment, receipt and password reset.
10. Ask one real student to try it and watch where they hesitate.

If any step fails, fix it on staging and run the whole list again. Only move to production when it passes twice.

Telling your students

Students do not care about your platform. They care about whether they can still log in and whether their progress survived. Write to them before the move, not after.

Say what is changing and the date. Tell them their progress and completions come with them, and that certificates will be reissued from a new design if that is true for you. Tell them where to log in, and how to reset a password if they hit a snag. Keep it short, with one link and one support address.

Then give people a window. Keep the old site readable for a short time after the move so nobody is locked out mid-lesson, and answer the first questions quickly. The first week is where trust is won or lost.

If you want to start new students on Learnomy while old ones finish on LearnDash, that works too, as long as you track which students are where. Bulk enrolment by pasted emails or CSV is on each course’s admin page, as the bulk enrolment guide explains, which makes onboarding a list quick.

A sensible order of operations

If you decide to move, here is a calm sequence that fits inside most renewal windows:

1. Read the renewal email and note the renewal date. Do not let it lapse by accident.
2. Fill in the worksheet.
3. Make the staging copy and run the preview.
4. Run the import, then the second pass for students.
5. Rebuild prices, certificates and drip.
6. Run the checklist twice.
7. Email your students.
8. Switch over, and keep LearnDash installed but inactive for a while as a safety net.

The renewal date is a deadline for your decision, not for the move. If you are not ready, renew for one more term and move calmly. Paying once more is cheaper than a rushed migration.

Where to go next

For a wider side-by-side, read the Learnomy vs LearnDash comparison and the LearnDash alternative page. The migration guide covers the importer screens, and Free vs Pro shows exactly which features need the paid tier, so you can price your new setup honestly.