LifterLMS Settings Guide: Every Tab and the Defaults to Change

LifterLMS keeps its site-wide options under LifterLMS > Settings, split across nine tabs. Most of them work well out of the box, but a handful of defaults are wrong for almost every real site, and a few settings are easy to miss because they sit on a tab you would not think to open.

This guide walks through each tab of the LifterLMS settings screen in version 10.x, quoting the labels as they appear in the plugin. For every tab you get what the settings control, the default value, and our recommendation. It is written for site owners and the developers who set sites up for them.

Course-level options, such as drip, prerequisites and access plans, live on each course rather than here. If you have just installed LifterLMS, run the setup wizard first; it creates the core pages these settings point to.

The Settings screen requires the manage_lifterlms capability, which Administrators and LMS Managers have. Instructors do not see it. The tabs are General, Courses, Memberships, Security, Accounts, Checkout, Engagements, Notifications and Integrations. Add-ons can add their own sections to these tabs, most often to Checkout and Integrations, so your screen may show more than is listed here.

Each tab is saved separately. Change one tab, click the save button, then move on; switching tabs without saving loses your changes.

General: preview access, content protection and tracked events

The General tab is short, but two of its settings affect every course on the site.

Setting	Default	What it does
Automatic Recurring Payments	Enabled on a live site	A status line, not a setting. It turns to Disabled when LifterLMS detects the site URL has changed, as on a staging copy. See LifterLMS on staging sites and recurring payments.
Unrestricted Preview Access	Administrator, LMS Manager, Instructor, Instructor's Assistant	Users with these roles bypass enrollment, drip and prerequisite restrictions for courses and memberships.
Content Protection	Off	Tries to stop users copying text and downloading images. Preview-access roles are not affected.
Frequency of Saving Tracked Events	Minimum	How often browser events are sent to the server. "Always" is more accurate and creates more requests.

Our recommendation: look hard at Unrestricted Preview Access. By default every Instructor and Instructor's Assistant can view every course on the site, not just their own. On a single-teacher site that is fine. On a site with outside instructors, remove those roles so instructors only see their own content as students would. Our guide to LifterLMS user roles explains the knock-on effects.

Treat Content Protection as a deterrent, not security. Anyone determined can still copy text from the page source.

Courses: lesson behaviour, catalog and time tracking

Course Settings

• Retake Lessons (off) lets students mark a completed lesson as incomplete. Leave it off unless your course is meant to be repeated.
• Focus Mode (off) shows lessons in a distraction-free layout, with Focus Mode Content Width (Default, 960px) and Focus Mode Sidebar Position (Left). Worth testing with your theme: it often improves lesson pages on themes that were not designed for courses.
• Lesson Favorites (on) lets students mark lessons as favorites, listed on their dashboard.
• Course Completion (empty) sets a page shown to students when they finish a course. Use it for a thank-you page with a next-course offer or a feedback form.

Course Catalog Settings

Course Catalog selects the catalog page, Courses per page defaults to 9 (enter -1 to show all), and Catalog Sorting defaults to Order (Low to High). If you have never set course order, change sorting to Most Recent or Title (A - Z) so the catalog does not look random.

Lesson Time Tracking

New in the 10.x releases. Track Time on All Lessons (off) records time even on lessons without a minimum time requirement, which feeds time-in-course reporting. Timer Display Format controls the timer text, using the placeholders {CURRENT_TIME} and {MINIMUM_TIME}. Turn tracking on if you report time spent for compliance; leave it off otherwise. Minimum times themselves are set per lesson, not here.

Memberships, Security and Integrations tabs

Memberships: site lockdown and the membership catalog

Restrict site by membership level (empty) locks the whole site to members of one membership. Visitors can still view and buy that membership. It suits a private training portal, and it is a setting to double-check if visitors report being redirected everywhere.

The catalog section mirrors the course one: Memberships Page, Memberships per page (9) and Memberships Sorting. For how memberships work, see LifterLMS memberships and access plans explained.

Security: captcha and spam protection

The Security tab, titled Website Security & Spam Prevention, protects the checkout form from card testing and fake sign-ups.

• Captcha (None): choose reCAPTCHA or Turnstile to require at checkout. Each needs a site key and secret key from Google or Cloudflare. reCAPTCHA uses v3 keys and a reCAPTCHA Minimum Score from 1 to 10, default 5. Saved secret keys are partially hidden since 10.3.1.
• Spam Protection (on): blocks IPs from checkout after more than 10 failures within 15 minutes. Keep it on.
• Akismet Spam Protection (off): checks submissions with Akismet if you use it.

Our recommendation: if you take card payments, enable a captcha. Card-testing bots go after any public checkout, and a wave of small failed charges can get a payment account reviewed or suspended.

Integrations: bbPress, BuddyPress and add-ons

Core includes integrations for bbPress (restrict forums to memberships and add forums to courses) and BuddyPress (LifterLMS information on profiles and membership restrictions for directories). Each has an Enable / Disable checkbox in its own section here, and only does anything when that plugin is active. Integration add-ons, such as email marketing or WooCommerce connectors, add their sections to this tab too.

Accounts: dashboard, registration, terms and privacy

This is the tab people most often forget, and it holds several decisions with legal weight.

Student Dashboard

• Dashboard Page: the page with the [lifterlms_my_account] shortcode or My Account block.
• Courses Sorting: order of in-progress courses on the dashboard.
• Open Registration (off): when on, the dashboard shows a registration form for new users. Off means accounts are created only at checkout or enrollment.
• Prevent concurrent logins (off): keeps only the most recent login for selected roles, Student by default. A simple answer to shared accounts.

Student Dashboard Endpoints

The URL slugs for each dashboard area: my-grades, my-courses, my-memberships, my-achievements, my-certificates, notifications, edit-account, lost-password, redeem-voucher, orders and, with favorites on, my-favorites. Clear a field to remove that area. Translate them if your site is not in English.

User Information & Privacy Options

Registration and account fields are no longer settings here; an Edit Forms button takes you to the forms editor, covered in our guide to LifterLMS registration and account forms. Below it:

• Terms and Conditions: enable it, choose the Terms and Conditions Page, and edit the Terms and Conditions Notice. Users must tick the box to register or buy.
• Privacy Policy Page and Privacy Policy Notice: an optional notice shown at registration and checkout.
• Remove Order Data and Remove Student LMS Data (both off): what happens to LifterLMS data during a WordPress personal data erasure request.

The erasure options deserve a decision rather than a default. You may be required to keep order records for tax purposes, while course progress usually has no reason to outlive the account.

Checkout: gateways, pages and currency

The Checkout tab opens with a table of payment gateways: the built-in Manual gateway, any gateway add-ons you have installed, and suggestions for add-ons you have not. Each gateway has its own section, reached from the links at the top of the tab. Below the table:

• Checkout Page and the Confirm Payment endpoint (confirm-payment).
• Force SSL (off): forces https on checkout pages. If your whole site already runs on https, which it should, this changes nothing.
• Retry Failed Payments (on): automatically retries failed recurring payments on supporting gateways, following the schedule in the automatic retry documentation. Keep it on.
• Currency Options: Country (US), Currency (USD), Currency Position, Thousand Separator, Decimal Separator, Decimal Places (2) and Hide Zero Decimals (off).

Turn on Hide Zero Decimals if your prices are whole numbers; "$199" reads better than "$199.00". Our LifterLMS checkout guide walks through the whole purchase flow.

Engagements and Notifications tabs

Engagements: email sender, certificates and achievements

• Email Settings: Sender Name (your site title), Sender Email (the WordPress admin email), Header Image and Email Footer Text. These apply to every LifterLMS email.
• Achievement Settings: a Placeholder Image for achievements without their own.
• Certificate Settings: a Placeholder Background Image, the Default Size (Letter) for new certificates, and a user-defined size.

Change the sender email. The admin email is often a personal inbox or a domain that is not set up to send mail, which pushes LifterLMS emails into spam. Use an address on your domain and send through an SMTP or transactional email service.

Notifications: what each email and popup sends

The Notifications tab lists every notification LifterLMS can send, with a link to configure each one. A notification can be a popup on the site, an email, or both. Each has its own subject, body and subscribers: the student, the course author, or custom addresses.

Defaults worth reviewing include Course Complete, which emails the course author by default, Purchase Receipt, Student Welcome, Upcoming Payment Reminder and Subscription Cancellation Notice. Read each email once and rewrite it in your own voice. Notifications are separate from engagements, which you set up from the Engagements menu to send emails or award certificates when students reach milestones.

LifterLMS settings that cause the most support tickets

• Unrestricted Preview Access left at default, so an instructor reports seeing "everything" or cannot test a drip schedule because nothing is locked for them. Test as a student account.
• Restrict site by membership level set by mistake, redirecting every visitor.
• Open Registration off while a page contains a registration form, so nobody can sign up.
• A dashboard endpoint cleared by accident, so My Courses or Orders disappears.
• Sender Email on a domain that does not authorise your server, so receipts land in spam.

Frequently asked questions

Where are the LifterLMS settings?

In the WordPress admin under LifterLMS > Settings. You need to be an Administrator or LMS Manager to see the menu item.

Do LifterLMS settings apply per course?

No. The Settings screen is site-wide. Per-course options such as drip, prerequisites, enrollment periods and access plans are edited on each course.

Can I export LifterLMS settings to another site?

There is no settings export screen in core. Settings are stored as WordPress options, so a developer can copy them with WP-CLI or a database migration tool.

Why are some settings missing on my site?

Some sections only appear in certain conditions, for example the favorites endpoint only when Lesson Favorites is on, and gateway sections only when the add-on is active.

What to do next

Go through the tabs in this order: Accounts, Checkout, Security, Engagements, then General. Those four decide whether people can sign up, pay, and receive your emails; General decides who can see what. Then test everything as a student, not as an administrator.

If you inherited a LifterLMS site and are not sure why it behaves the way it does, a settings audit is a quick, low-cost first step. Our LifterLMS support team can review your configuration, and you can get in touch with any questions.