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Hosting an online course is an effective way to make your services more widely available, expand your client base, and bring in more revenue. It also comes with challenges—launching a virtual course often means learning how to use a new hosting platform, and directing visitors away from your site when they register. With Squarespace Courses, you can offer rich, multimedia courses, and other gated content directly through your website—no need to direct visitors to another URL or use a new platform.
You can sell online courses with a Squarespace Business or Commerce plan, or by attaching the Digital Products add-on to any website plan. From using Courses to upload and organize content to setting up pricing and sign-ups, here’s how to sell courses online.
1. Upload your course content
The first step to creating your online course is to add a new Course page to your Squarespace website. Squarespace offers several templates with online courses already set up and ready for you to customize, but you can also add a course to any website template.
Courses are made up of a series of lessons that are organized into chapters. Start by adding your first lesson. Give the lesson a title, upload your video, and add any supplementary information you want to share with your students, like text, images, or links to products you sell.
Repeat this for each lesson in your course. If your course has several lessons, you can help your students navigate your material by organizing lessons into chapters.
2. Set a pricing structure
With Squarespace Courses, you can choose to charge your subscribers a one-time course fee or set up recurring course subscriptions. Think about your pricing structure in the context of a larger gated content strategy.
If you’re hosting online business workshops, you might offer a free, introductory guide or checklist to site visitors in exchange for them signing up for an account on your site with their email address. From there, you can send those visitors a promotional email about your upcoming workshop, or offer a special discount on course fees to further incentivize them to sign up for your paid course.
3. Enable signups
Once you’ve uploaded your online course content and settled on a pricing structure, it’s time to enable signups. Create a sales page where visitors can learn about your course, and add a subscriber sign-up section so visitors can sign up and pay for the course directly on your website.
Customize your welcome email for new students, and edit your Access Denied screen so site visitors who try to enter a gated course are directed to sign up in order to gain access.
When students sign in, you can customize your website navigation so they can view and enter the course easily. Site visitors can also click on the “Account” link in your navigation to view their subscriber details.
4. Promote your online courses
After enabling signups, it’s time to promote your workshop. You can use Email Campaigns to announce an upcoming workshop to subscribers or customers, and send reminders as the date approaches. Share your workshop signup page on social media to reach a wider audience, and drive additional traffic through an announcement bar on your site.
Once you’ve hosted your first online course using Squarespace Courses, you can duplicate site pages and easily use the framework for future courses.
This article was updated on August 21, 2023.