Thinkific is one of the top platforms for course creation, and WordPress is the web’s most popular content management system.

Many creators use Thinkific and WordPress together. They use Thinkific for their courses and memberships, and they create their blogs and marketing funnels on WordPress.

So, how can you connect these two platforms? What integration options are available for linking the two?

In this guide, we’ll discuss various options to connect your Thinkific and WordPress websites and share the steps to do it easily.

1. Link to Your Thinkific Website From Navigation

You have a website on WordPress, and you want to build your online school on Thinkific or vice versa.

You want to create a seamless transition between your main website and your course website.

So, how can you do that?

It’s very simple. Just add a link to your Thinkific website in your WordPress site’s navigation menu in the header and footer. That way, your visitors will be able to access your online courses with a single click.

To make it more intuitive, you should use an anchor, like “courses,” so that your users know where you are redirecting them to. Plus, you can create an eye-catching button so that visitors won’t miss out on your course offerings.

The image below is an example of a link from a WordPress site to the corresponding Thinkific website.

You can go one step further and add a link on your course website that will take users back to the main website.

To do that, go to Design Your Website → Site Pages in your Thinkific account and select any page. Once you’re in the page editor, click on the Header block, and here you can add a link to your WordPress site.

Apart from creating the physical linkage, you should also try to create a consistent brand experience so that the visitors can switch between your websites without getting confused or lost.

Here are some branding tips:

• Put your Thinkific website on a subdomain of your main website. The website from the example above uses the subdomain courses.kylieminteriors.ca.
• Try to match the color scheme, logo, and header style on your Thinkific and WordPress sites.
• Consider white-labeling your Thinkific website.

2. Link WordPress Sales Page to Thinkific Checkout Page

While Thinkific has a powerful page builder that you can use to create your sales pages, it doesn’t have the same level of customization that WordPress page builders like Elementor provide you.

As a result, many Thinkific websites use WordPress for their sales pages as well. However, payment processing still happens through Thinkific.

To make the process seamless for your customers, you’ll need to link your WordPress sales page to the Thinkific checkout page.

To access the checkout link for your course, go to your Thinkific account, select Manage Learning Products → Courses, and select the course for which you want to get a checkout link.

Once you click on it, you’ll open the course editor, and from there, you should go to the Pricing tab, where you’ll see the Copy Link option.

Copy the link, head to your WordPress page builder, and paste the link to the sales page buttons. That way, when someone clicks on those buttons, they’ll be taken to your Thinkific checkout page directly.

You won’t have to configure account creation and course access settings in WordPress because the payment part still happens in Thinkific.

So, when a user comes to Thinkific from your WordPress site, they’ll get access to the course you direct them to, and during the checkout process, they’ll also create an account.

3. Use Thinkific’s Sales Widgets Feature

Now, if you’d like to showcase your courses in important places on your WordPress website, you can use Thinkific’s Sales Widget feature. The widget is ideal for showing your course in your blog sidebar, homepage, bottom of blog posts, and other applicable areas of your site.

To get started, go to your Thinkific account and select Sales widgets from the Market & Sell section.

This will open the Sales Widget settings, where you’ll find a series of actions:

• Select the product for which you want to create a widget
• Choose which elements you want to be displayed, e.g., text, image, button
• Customize background, button, and text colors
• Set the button’s destination, e.g., online course landing page or checkout.

After customizing your widget, you should click on the Generate Code Snippet button and copy the HTML code.

All that’s left to do is place the code into your WordPress site where you want to show the widget.

4. Integrate WooCommerce With Thinkific via Zapier

Thinkific doesn’t include a full-fledged cart like Shopify, where users could add multiple products to their cart and buy them at once. Instead, it creates a unique checkout page for each course and bundle.

If you want to add a shopping cart functionality to your learning platform, you can do that by using WooCommerce, a robust WordPress eCommerce plugin. In this case, you’ll move payments over to WooCommerce, but your Thinkific website will still host the members portal, and you’ll integrate the two using Zapier.

To set up the integration, go to your Zapier account and create a new Zap. Make sure to select WooCommerce as the trigger app and select an event (e.g., Order).

The action will be at Thinkific’s end and select Enroll User, so when a user makes a purchase through WooCommerce, you can automatically grant access to purchased courses or bundles.

That’s it!

5. Set Up a Single Sign-on Between WordPress and Thinkific

So far, we’ve discussed the scenarios in which the user database is in Thinkific.

But what if you have an existing user database in WordPress that you don’t want to move to Thinkific for some reason? In this case, you can use Thinkific’s single sign-on functionality to allow users to access your Thinkific school using their WordPress credentials.

For this to work, you need to enable Single sign-on from your Thinkific account by going to Settings → Orders and Accounts → SSO.

Once this option is enabled, you can use WooNinja’s WordPress plugin to enable passwordless login for your Thinkific students.

Alternatively, you can hire a developer to build a custom SSO connection between WordPress and Thinkific.

Conclusion

You have several options for connecting Thinkific and WordPress, and exactly how you do it depends on your scenario.

If your existing website or blog is on WordPress, you can easily link to your Thinkific website from your menu, your WordPress pages, and other places. You can also connect Thinkific to WooCommerce via Zapier or create a single sign-on to allow users to log in to your course website with their WordPress credentials.

That means you don’t have to choose one over the other, but you can have a WordPress website and a Thinkific website working together.

If you still haven’t explored Thinkific and its course-building features, you can do so by clicking the button below.