Set up a tutoring website to share your knowledge in 6 simple steps

Are you an expert in your field and want to start online tutoring? Looking for a guide to create your own tutoring website?

A tutoring website serves as a great platform connecting eager learners with knowledgeable tutors. It not only allows you to teach students from around the world, but also opens doors to passive income opportunities through selling courses, memberships and eBooks.

In this article, we’ll guide you through the process of creating a tutoring website from scratch.

We’ll also show you how to add subscriptions, allowing you to sell online courses and memberships.

This is how your tutoring website will look once we’re done.

Let’s get started!

Private tutor website examples to inspire you

Here are some professional tutor websites examples for you to use as inspiration:

Kirsty

Kirsty launched her tutoring website to teach the English language to global students. The website has the essential pages that a tutoring website should have for displaying course content, contact information, about, blog and other essentials.

The homepage gets you into the learning frame of mind with an interactive two-column banner section.

Kirsty understands the importance of social proof, which is why she proudly shares her student testimonials.

Laurent Bouty

Laurent Bouty has a great tutoring website. The banner has a background image of Laurent that helps to build a connection with his students. The heading with an interactive CTA button in the banner easily hooks the learner to take action.

Like his website header, you can design yours to showcase your pages and apply the outlined ‘contact me’ button for better engagement.

The website has sections for adding his latest blog posts, an Instagram feed and a carousel slider for sharing ‘inspirations for marketers. To sell his marketing services, he designed a page with multi columns layouts for showcasing his process and engaging the reader.

James Hunkin

James Hunkin’s website is a good source of inspiration for those looking to make their own tutoring website. With a modern design, handy navigation and organized content, it provides a great example for readers.

The website has a visually appealing hero area, dedicated sections for about and testimonials which are must-have features for any tutoring website.

Create your own tutoring website to build a strong online community of global learners.

How to create your own tutoring website

Now we have got you in the mood with those examples, it’s time to show you how to create your own tutoring website from scratch.

To make the tutorial easy to follow, we’ll break down the whole process into 6 easy steps.

The steps for creating tutoring website are:

• Step 1: Getting everything together
• Step 2: Install and activate the Astra theme
• Step 3: Install and activate Spectra
• Step 4: Select a tutoring template
• Step 5: Convert your tutoring website into a membership platform
• Step 6: Enhance your videos

Let’s dive into the guide.

Step 1: Getting everything together

You’ll need to get a few things together before launching a WordPress website:

Domain name

A domain name is the website address or name that people use to visit. We recommend choosing a domain name similar to your niche so it’s easily identifiable.

For example, ‘suremembers.com’ is our domain name.

Hosting

Web hosting is where you store all of your website resources so visitors can access your website.

You can buy a hosting plan for your website from any hosting provider. We recommend using Cloudways. It’s very popular!

WordPress installation

Once you’ve successfully purchased your domain name and hosting plan, you need to install WordPress.

WordPress is a free content management system (CMS) that people use as a platform for their websites. Many hosts install it automatically while others offer one-click installation.

“43% of global websites are made with WordPress.”

Check this handy article on how to install WordPress if you prefer to do it yourself.

Step 2: Install and activate the Astra theme

Astra is a lightweight and highly customizable WordPress theme chosen by over 2.4 million people all over the world.

It’s a popular theme on the WordPress repository and compatible with popular page builders like Spectra, Elementor and Divi.

Let’s install the Astra theme.

Navigate to Appearance> Themes in your WordPress dashboard.

Hit the Add New button to visit the WordPress themes directory.

Type ‘Astra’ into the search bar and press the Install button.

Now, hit the Activate button.

You’ve successfully installed and activated the Astra WordPress theme on your website!

Step 3: Install and activate Spectra

Spectra is a drag and drop page builder that is very easy to use and highly customizable.

It also comes with readymade tutor website templates that will help you create tutor websites in no time.

Let’s install the Spectra page builder on our website.

Go to Plugins > Add New.

Use the search bar to find Spectra and hit the Install Now button.

Once it’s installed successfully press the Activate button.

That’s it. You’ve installed and activated Spectra.

Step 4: Select a tutoring template

Spectra has a couple of pro-quality templates for tutoring websites there too. If you don’t want to use one of the Astra templates, use one of these.

Let’s have a look at some good looking tutoring website templates and choose one for your website.

Language Tutors

The Language Tutors template provides a range of features to help you create a professional and engaging tutoring website. When you first land on the homepage, you’ll see a clean and modern design with vibrant colors and high-quality images.

It has a simple navigation menu, dedicated section for courses, testimonial area and a contact form for inquiries. It’s a great website for language tutors to showcase their courses and attract global students.

Of course, it’s flexible so you could make it work for any type of tutor!

Online Cooking Course

If you’re an expert in cooking and looking to build a website, try the Online Cooking Course template. It offers different design layouts to display featured courses, testimonials for students and features.

The template includes a visually appealing full-width banner and a beautiful footer section. It’s a multi-page website template so you’ll get the necessary pages for the about, all courses and contact.

Learn Oil Painting

Learn Oil Painting is another great example of a private tutoring website. The use of color and its modern design ensures an amazing user experience.

The homepage is beautifully designed and has sections for sharing tutor details, exhibitions and experiences and courses. The template is very customizable so you’re able to change its layout in your own way.

For this tutorial, we’re going to use the Online Cooking Course template.

Let’s import it so we can customize it a little.

Visit Pages > Add New.

Write the name of your page title. Click the ‘eye’ icon to hide the page title on the live site.

Use the Spectra blocks if you would like to create your website using blocks.

Building a website is much faster if we use a template, so let’s do that.

Hit the blue Templates Kits button to open the Spectra templates library.

Use the search bar to find a suitable template.

Click the Import Template button and the system will import all the essential files.

As you can see, the template offers multiple pages so you can import a template for a particular page as you build.

Hit the Update button to save your changes.

Let’s have a quick look at your website.

Now all you need to do is add your individual content, service sections, lesson plans and everything else you need to each page to make your tutoring website.

As everyone’s needs are different, we’ll leave that part to you!

Once you’re done, let’s move on to the next step.

Step 5: Convert your tutoring website into a membership platform

A membership website lets you protect content and allows only registered members to access it.

We’re going to use SureMembers to manage student access for different courses. Almost every tutorial website will use something similar.

SureMembers helps you manage memberships with ease. You can sell online courses, create content paywalls, drip feed content, create and set access rules, protect specific content based on access groups and more to grow your membership site.

As SureMembers is a premium tool so you need to purchase a suitable plan for your website.

After completing the purchase, you’ll receive a confirmation email with the suremembers.zip file for download and the license key.

Let’s install and configure SureMembers on your website.

Navigate to Plugins > Add New.

Click the Upload Plugin button.

Choose the suremembers.zip file and hit the Install Now button.

Now, press the Activate Plugin button.

SureMembers is now activated on your website!

Now, time to activate the license.

Go to SureMembers from the dashboard and hit the Unlicensed button from the top right.

Paste the license key into the field and click the blue Activate License button.

You should now see a ‘This site was successfully activated’ message.

That’s all there is to installing SureMembers!

Create an access group in SureMembers

Time to create your first access group. Access groups are like membership tiers that let you control what content members see, how and when.

Click the Add New button.

Write the name of your access group.

Here, we would like you to create an access group for our regular users.

Select the content you want to protect

You can protect your entire website, all blog posts and pages and protect specific content based on taxonomy.

First, select the protected content type from the select field.

Then specify which content you want to hide for this particular access group.

You can also exclude content according to pages, posts and taxonomies.

Here, we exclude the post called ‘Hello world!’ as an example.

Now it’s time to redirect unauthorized users, those that aren’t a member of the access group we just created.

You can do it two ways.

First, select Redirect from the dropdown and insert the Redirect URL.

For example, you could create a landing page promoting membership and redirect users to there.

The second way is to select the Message option. Then write a message for unauthorized users.

Finally, add the button text and URL for redirection.

In this example, you could write a message telling the visitor content is for members only and add a subscribe button to help them sign up.

If you want to redirect unauthorized users to the login page, you need to activate the Enable Login Button.

Check out the following video tutorial to learn more about that.

Sell courses

Time to set things up to sell your courses. We recommend using SureCart as it’s a free eCommerce solution for WordPress.

It’s part of the same family as SureMembers and the two work together seamlessly.

SureCart provides a collection of advanced features to sell digital products online.

Key features of SureCart include:

• Seamless integration with WordPress
• Hassle-free payment processing
• Create different subscription plans and pricing
• Design custom checkout form and customers dashboard
• Detailed reporting and analytics

SureCart installs in exactly the same way as any other WordPress plugin. Find it in the plugins list, install it and then activate it.

Once done, walk through the setup wizard to set up the store and you’ll then be ready to add a product, your course.

Let’s add a new product.

Go to SureCart > Products.

Click the Add New button.

Type the name of your product.

Set the price.

You can set different payment types like one time, installment and subscription and also allow customers to pay what they want.

Hit the Create Price button once you’ve completed setup.

Now, we’re going to integrate SureCart with Suremembers so you can link a price with membership and provide access to that premium content.

Click the Add New Integration button.

Select SureMembers from the list.

Select the access group we created with SureMembers a little while ago.

Now, you need to copy the buy link so you can add it to your website.

Press the Copy Link button under the Price section.

Copy the Buy Link.

Now, open the page in the WordPress editor panel where you store your course content.

Click the course content page where you want to add the buy link. Use the right-side block setting to paste the URL into the Link area.

Finally, hit the Update button to save the changes.

Let’s visit your website to see how users can enroll in your course.

That’s all you need to do to sell memberships or online courses using SureCart and SureMembers!

Step 6: Enhance your videos

Presto Player is a popular WordPress video player plugin. If you use a lot of video for your tutorials, it has a whole bunch of tools that can help.

It comes with advanced features like creating video chapters, securing videos by making them private, a sticky video player and more.

The saved position and preferences feature helps viewers to continue watching the video where they last stopped it, which is ideal for courses.

You can also track students to learn which videos they’ve watched and how long they watched them for.

Key features of Presto Player include:

• Create video chapters
• Multiple hosting location option
• Student viewer tracking
• Enable focus mode
• Seamless integration with LMS and membership plugins

If you want to provide a better user experience and take your course videos to the next level, we highly recommend trying Presto Player!

Now we have built a tutoring website, let’s discuss what comes next.

The benefits of starting a private tutoring website

These are some direct benefits of having a private tutoring website:

Passive income opportunity

According to the report of the University of Michigan, users are more likely to complete paid courses than free ones.

Your private tutoring website helps you generate passive income. You can sell courses, eBooks, study materials and membershipss to make money.

Reach out to global customers

Data from Class Central says over 180 million learners use massively open online courses. That’s a very lucrative market to get into!

Save valuable time and effort

Managing online tuition is very time efficient and easy to do. You can pre-record and prepare lessons and your website takes care of the rest for you. All you need to do is be around for marking, conversation, feedback and to help students if they need it.

Reduced operating costs

Online tutoring courses easily save a lot of money compared to conventional learning. Web hosting is cheap, WordPress is free, Astra and Spectra are free and SureMembers and SureCart are very cost-effective!

High demand

According to Wiley, 55% of students say affordability is a top 3 factor in choosing a place for online education. The statistic clearly shows the high demand for online education that can be satisfied with your own tutoring website.

Wrapping Up

Creating a website for starting online tutoring is not difficult as you may have thought. Tools like Astra and Spectra provide free resources for making good looking professional websites, making the entire process simple.

In this article, you learned how to create a tutoring website following a step by step guide. You also learned how a membership plugin like SureMembers can take your site to the next level by selling membership with SureCart.

In addition, you may want to consider Presto Player to level up your online course videos.

It’s your turn to establish yourself as an online tutor creating your website. Do you want to offer membership plans for your students or do you just want to sell courses?

Share your thoughts below!