We’ve covered almost all of LearnDash’s core menus, and today we’re talking about Groups.
Groups in LearnDash are incredibly useful for anyone who wants to run an organized course, and you’ll actually find group menus in other plugins too, like MemberPress, BuddyBoss, and others.
Groups, as the name suggests, are collections of students in your course with specific configurations. You can have as many different groups as you need.
Practical Examples
| Use case | How groups help |
|---|---|
| School | Create groups per class (e.g. Third Grade 2026, Fourth Grade 2026). Add students to the group and move them around easily. When the school year ends, remove the students and add new ones, or create a new group for incoming students. |
| Life coach | Groups work as closed cohorts for paid training programs. Name each group to match the training: e.g. “Training X Q4 Enrollees”. |
| Companies | Create one group per department: HR, Marketing, Operations, Support. Give a manager access to add or remove people from each group as needed. |
The Groups Menu
Go to LearnDash LMS > Groups and click + Add New Group. The new page that opens will have several menus: Group Page, Extend Access, Settings, Courses, and Users. Let’s go through each one.
Group Page
This menu is straightforward. You can add the group title (e.g. “Physics Course Students 2026”) and a description. The page will automatically include an “Enroll in this group” button if the group is set to Free in the settings, and you can share that link so students can sign up on their own.
If you plan to add students manually, this page will see less use and will likely be viewed more by administrators or course instructors than by students. Keep that in mind when writing the description.
If you open this page’s settings by clicking the divided square icon in the top right corner of the Gutenberg editor, you’ll find standard WordPress options as well as the ability to add categories and tags to this group.
Extend Access
In this menu, you can schedule an expiration date for the group. Under New Expiration Date, you set the date and time. Great for training programs that need to be completed by a specific deadline, after which the group dissolves.
You can also use the Extend Access To Courses option to select specific students who will receive extended access within this group.
Settings
Under Settings, we have the Access Mode option:
| Mode | How it works |
|---|---|
| Free | Anyone can register for the group. |
| Buy Now | The student gets access after a one-time payment, similar to membership platforms. |
| Recurring | The student pays on a recurring basis to stay in the group (e.g. monthly). |
| Closed | The student can only access the group if manually added by an administrator. |
About membership
This is the closest LearnDash gets to dedicated membership plugins like MemberPress. It works fine for basic use cases, but if you need something more advanced, you’ll want to bring in additional plugins.
Start Date / End Date: here you set when this group starts and when it ends, and you can also set a maximum number of students allowed to join (a useful option when the group is set to Free).
When a group reaches its end date, students remain in the system but lose access to the courses they were receiving through that group. To remove them from the group, you’ll need to do it manually.
Display and Content Options
Group Materials: here you can add materials such as PDFs, links, shared folders, and anything else you’d like. They’ll appear on the group page.
Group Certificate: here you can attach a certificate, already created in the Certificates menu, to this group.
When does it make sense to add certificates to a group?
- Corporate training: a company purchases a group for their employees. The group covers several courses and the administrator wants members to have access to the certificates issued by those courses.
- Certification programs: instead of selling individual courses, you sell a complete program represented by a group. Attaching certificates to the group helps organize which certificates belong to that program.
- Reporting and management: Group Leaders can track member certificates within certain workflows.
Group Content: here you choose whether the group’s content is visible to all users or only to those who have been added to the group.
Custom Course Order: defines the order in which the group’s courses are displayed to students when LearnDash is using the group as the source for the course listing. In practice, this order may appear on the group page, in the course listing block for that group, and in certain LearnDash templates that display a group’s courses.
Courses
Here, you can select which courses this group will be part of, making it easier to organize and manage students. For example, if this group is “Fourth Grade 2026”, you can add all the relevant courses from this menu. The expiration option ties in nicely here: once the students graduate, access is automatically removed based on the set date.
Group Course Auto-enroll: a very useful option. You can set it so that when a student enrolls in a course, they’re automatically added to the corresponding group. A great feature for managing courses that receive online enrollments with auto-enroll enabled.
Users
In Group Users, you can see all users registered on the site and decide which ones to add manually to this group. You’ll see everyone registered in WordPress and can move them into the group. Further down, you can add Group Leaders, who will have administrative roles, such as teachers or course managers.
Group Settings (Global)
Under the global group settings (LearnDash LMS > Groups > Settings), we have the following options:
Group Leader User Settings
Managed Groups Auto-enrollment: you decide whether the Group Leader will also have access to the group as a student.
When to enable it?
- Leave it off in most corporate (B2B) scenarios, where the leader is an HR manager or supervisor who needs to track the team’s progress but doesn’t need to take the course themselves.
- Turn it on when the leader also needs to go through the training with the team, when they’re an instructor who wants to see exactly what students see, or when they’re a coordinator reviewing the group’s materials.
Course Auto-enrollment: automatically enrolls the Group Leader in the course or courses this group belongs to. The same guidance above applies here.
Bypass Course Limits: the Group Leader can access any lesson, topic, or quiz in the course, even without completing previous content. If you’ve set up linear progression as recommended, enabling this option is a good idea so they can jump directly to any part of the course without restrictions.
Manage Groups
If enabled, the Group Leader can create and manage groups. In practice, this includes:
- Creating new groups
- Editing the groups they manage
- Adding and removing courses from groups
- Adding and removing users
- Configuring group settings
At a training company with multiple instructors, without this option the administrator creates all the groups and instructors only manage the ones assigned to them. With this option enabled, the instructor can create a new group for a cohort that started today, without waiting for an admin.
Manage Courses
If enabled, the Group Leader can create and edit courses. Depending on the permissions configured, they can create courses, lessons, topics, and quizzes, and publish or update that content.
This is a fairly powerful permission. On most sites, only administrators or designated content authors should have it.
Manage Users
This option allows the Group Leader to manage users. The exact scope depends on your LearnDash version and WordPress permissions, but it typically includes:
- Creating new users
- Editing basic user information
- Adding and removing users from groups
On most public-facing course platforms, these options are left disabled. In corporate or educational environments, it’s common to enable at least Manage Groups, so that managers or instructors can handle their own cohorts without depending on a WordPress administrator.
Global Group Management & Display Settings
| Option | What it does |
|---|---|
| Group Hierarchy | Lets you organize groups hierarchically, with parent and child groups. Useful for large organizations with multiple departments or units. A rarely used feature in day-to-day setups. |
| Group Table Pagination | Sets how many groups are displayed per page in the admin tables. |
| Group Courses Order | Sets the default order in which courses are displayed within groups. |
| Public | Makes groups public and visible on the site. |
| Group Search | Enables group search on the frontend and/or in LearnDash listings. |
| Archive Page | Creates an archive page that lists all published groups. |
| RSS/Atom Feed | Generates an RSS/Atom feed with published groups. |
| Editor Supported Settings | Defines which WordPress editor features are available for groups (featured image, comments, custom fields, revisions, etc.). |
| Group Categories / Group Tags | Lets you organize groups using LearnDash-specific categories and tags. |
| WP Post Categories / WP Post Tags | Lets you use standard WordPress categories and tags on groups. |
| Supported Post Types | Defines which content types can be protected by group-based access. This lets you restrict not just courses, but also pages, posts, or custom post types, so only group members can access them. |
| Access Denied Message | The message shown to users who try to access protected content without permission. |
| Bypass User Roles | Defines which user roles bypass group-based content protection. Typically includes Administrator and Editor. It’s recommended to keep Administrator on this list to avoid lockouts during site administration. |
Wrapping Up
Phew! I think we’ve covered everything for today. We’ll revisit this menu when we talk about membership and LearnDash.
And if you need someone to organize and build out your LearnDash course, reach out to us!
