LearnDash Joins Our Liquid Web Family of Brands

As a Liquid Web brand, Nexcess could not be more excited to have LearnDash join our family. Living under our sister brand  StellarWP, LearnDash becomes the latest addition to the one stop shop for everything WordPress. Like Chris Lema says below, “There’s no one in the online learning space that hasn’t already heard of LearnDash — they’re the strongest WordPress plugin known outside the WordPress community.”  Read on to learn more from Chris about the acquisition, including some personal news about the new role he’s taking on in our family.  

If you work in technology long enough, one thing holds true more than anything else. Over time, things get less complicated and more abstracted for the customer. Mind you, I’m not saying things are getting easier. Or less complex. 

Instead, the observation is simply that as time proceeds, more things are hidden from everyday users. What used to be complex and take months to build (like an eCommerce store) are today much easier to build. And because of that, there’s a larger market of people who can build those kinds of sites.

As one of the premiere managed hosting companies in the world, we’ve had direct experience with this dynamic. It’s rare today for someone to make a hosting decision based only on the CPU of a server, or even how much storage space a server has available. Abstraction has shifted the conversation away from the low-level details and towards more meaningful differentiation.

When we first launched our Managed WordPress and Managed WooCommerce hosting plans, we made it clear that we were focused on specific kinds of sites for specific kinds of customers. There are many great hosting companies out there. Several that can host a WordPress business site without any hassle at all.

But many of those hosting companies invested significantly in caching layers that would allow those business sites on WordPress to run quickly. It was a great strategy ten years ago. And it continues to work for sites that could easily be static.

Our focus hasn’t ever been on those static sites. Instead, we have focused on eCommerce stores, membership sites, and online learning. Sites where customers had a reason to have their stores perform quickly even if people were logged in. Caching couldn’t be the only strategy used for performance.

The other thing they have in common is that they’re the way today’s creators are doing digital commerce. There’s a difference between a business that has a website, and when the website is the business.

That’s been our constant focus — to work with and support the creators who are running their businesses online and the developers and agencies who help build those sites.

There’s no one in the online learning space that hasn’t already heard of LearnDash. They aren’t only the leader in eLearning, but they’re the strongest WordPress plugin that is known outside the WordPress community.

And there’s never been a more exciting time for WordPress and online learning. The last 18 months have encouraged everyone to build their courses online. That push was on top of an already growing industry.

WordPress makes it easy for creators to build things online. LearnDash makes it even easier to create courses and training online.

Welcoming LearnDash into this family is incredibly exciting, as we’ve known all along how important online learning and courses are to our customers.

It’s been a very full year as we have continued to make investments in key WordPress plugins and the launch of the StellarWP umbrella brand. The acquisitions of Restrict Content Pro, The Events Calendar, the Kadence theme, Iconic, and GiveWP have highlighted that we’re committed to bringing best-in-class solutions to our creators and the developers who help them build digital commerce solutions.

You can expect to see greater collaborations, integrations, and bundles as we also connect the dots between all these great WordPress solutions and our unrivaled hosting products from Nexcess.

I, for one, can’t wait to see how all of this comes together to delight everyone involved.