How to Migrate From Kajabi to WordPress and LearnDash Without Losing Your Students

The decision to migrate from Kajabi to WordPress is usually made in about ten minutes, right after a renewal invoice lands. The migration itself takes considerably longer, and the part that catches people out is never the part they worried about. Everyone braces for moving the videos. Almost nobody braces for the fact that their active subscriptions do not come with them.

I have built course businesses inside Kajabi and I have rebuilt them on WordPress with LearnDash afterwards. Both sides have real strengths, and the switch is worth making for plenty of people. It is only a disaster when someone treats it as an export button followed by an import button, because no such pair of buttons exists. Here is the honest version: what actually comes with you, what you rebuild by hand, and the order that keeps paying students from getting locked out on launch day.

What Actually Happens When You Migrate From Kajabi to WordPress?

Start with the thing that reframes the whole project: this is not a data transfer. It is a rebuild that reuses your files.

Kajabi is a closed system. Your courses, offers, checkout, emails, and community all sit inside one account, and the connections between them exist only inside that account. WordPress with LearnDash is the opposite arrangement: separate pieces you assemble yourself, on hosting you control, with a database you own outright. The freedom is real. So is the assembly work.

Kajabi’s own documentation is refreshingly blunt about the limits. On the question of exporting products, Kajabi states that you can export a Course Template, but for the product properties and content you need to create a manual backup on your own computer or drive. A template is the shape of a course. It is not the course.

So the realistic mental model is this. Your raw assets come with you: video files, PDFs, images, written lesson copy, your contact list, your domain. Everything that describes how those assets behave gets rebuilt: the course structure, the drip schedule, the quizzes, the completion rules, the certificates, the upsells, the email sequences, and every automation you wired together over the years.

People who accept that on day one finish in two to four weeks. People who expect an importer spend the first week hunting for a tool that does not exist, then start the real work behind schedule and annoyed.

How Do You Get Your Course Content Out of Kajabi?

Three steps, and they all happen while your Kajabi subscription is still active. This is worth saying plainly, because the single most expensive mistake in this whole process is cancelling early. Once the account closes, the content goes with it.

Set aside real time for step 2. On a mid-sized course library this is one to three full days of clicking, and it cannot be handed to an automation. It can be handed to a virtual assistant, which is what I usually recommend, with a naming convention agreed in advance.

How Do You Rebuild Your Courses in WordPress and LearnDash?

Now you assemble the replacement. Two steps, and the first one decides how much pain the next three years hold.

One decision worth making early: where the video actually lives. Kajabi hosted and streamed your video as part of the plan. WordPress does not. Uploading multi-gigabyte MP4 files into your own Media Library is technically possible and practically a bad idea, because your hosting then serves the video and your bandwidth bill and load times both suffer. Use a dedicated video host and embed. Budget for it, because this is the cost people forget when they compare the two platforms.

Membership access, community, and email are separate choices too. If your Kajabi setup relied heavily on community and automated onboarding, plan those as their own workstream rather than an afterthought. I built exactly that combination on Kajabi for eTrek, an Enneagram based community running past 1,200 members, and the onboarding automation took longer to get right than the course content did. You can see that build and others on my portfolio. Rebuilding that layer on WordPress is entirely doable, and it is a project in its own right.

How Do You Move Your Students Without Locking Them Out?

Two things do not survive this trip, and both need a decision rather than a fix.

The first is progress. Kajabi does not export per student completion data in any usable form, so a student who was 60 percent through your flagship course arrives at 0 percent. You have two honest options: tell people plainly and let them skip ahead, or mark historical lessons complete in bulk for existing members so their dashboard looks sane on day one. Both are fine. Silence is not, because a returning student who sees an empty progress bar assumes you lost their account.

The second is purchase history. Old receipts, order records, and lifetime value data stay in Kajabi. Export whatever reporting you can before you close the account, keep it as a static archive, and accept that your new store starts its records from launch day.

What Happens to Your Active Subscriptions and Payment Plans?

This is the step that turns a tidy project into a stressful one, and it is the reason to plan the migration around your billing dates rather than your content.

If you connected your own Stripe account to Kajabi, you are in the good case. The subscriptions live in your Stripe account, they keep charging, and the work is connecting that same Stripe account to your WordPress checkout and mapping each existing subscriber to their new access. Charges continue uninterrupted and nobody re-enters a card.

If you used Kajabi Payments, the agreements sit with Kajabi’s own processing, and moving them off is not a self-service operation. In practice most people in this position run both platforms in parallel for one full billing cycle and migrate subscribers as they renew, or ask existing members to re-subscribe on the new checkout with a genuine incentive for doing it. Expect attrition either way, and price that into the decision.

While you are looking at processing, look at the actual rates. Kajabi publishes its Kajabi Payments fee schedule as 2.9 percent plus 30 cents on card transactions, with an extra 0.7 percent added on subscriptions and payment plans and a further 1.5 percent on international cards. For a membership business, that 0.7 percent applies to almost every transaction you process. On your own Stripe account through WordPress, the surcharge simply is not there.

How Do You Keep Your Google Rankings When You Migrate From Kajabi to WordPress?

The redirects themselves go on the WordPress side, which is the part that makes the domain sequencing matter. Kajabi is explicit that it is not possible to set up a 301 redirect natively within Kajabi. So the sequence is: point the domain at WordPress, and have your redirect rules already configured and tested there before the DNS change goes live. Doing it the other way round means a window where your best ranking pages return errors, and that window is exactly when Google recrawls.

Also carry across the page titles and meta descriptions you already had, keep the URL slugs identical wherever you reasonably can, update internal links to the new structure, and submit a fresh sitemap in Search Console on launch day. Then watch coverage and impressions weekly for a month. A short dip after a domain level move is normal. A dip that keeps going is a redirect map with holes in it.

How Do You Launch Without Stranding a Paying Student?

Before you announce anything, run through the whole thing as a student. Buy a course on the new checkout with a real card, receive the confirmation email, log in, watch a video, take a quiz, hit a drip gate, and trigger a password reset. Then do it again on a phone. Every one of those is a place a migration breaks quietly, and every one of them is invisible from the admin dashboard.

Tell your students what is happening before it happens, not after. One email a week ahead explaining the new login, the progress reset, and who to contact if something looks wrong will prevent most of your support tickets. The migrations that generate refund requests are almost never the technically messy ones. They are the quiet ones.

What Does WordPress and LearnDash Actually Cost Compared to Kajabi?

Cost is the reason most people start looking, so it deserves real numbers rather than a vague promise of savings.

Kajabi’s published pricing runs $179 per month on Basic, $249 on Growth, and $499 on Pro, with annual billing bringing those down to an effective $143, $199, and $399 per month. That is one bill covering hosting, video, email, checkout, and community.

On the WordPress side the same capability arrives as several smaller bills. LearnDash sells at $259 per year for Essentials, $399 for Pro, and $599 for Elite. Managed WordPress hosting suited to a course site starts around $35 per month: Kinsta’s entry plan is $35 monthly for 35,000 visits, and comparable tiers elsewhere sit in the same region.

So a baseline of roughly $57 per month against $179, which looks decisive. Read the baseline honestly, though. It covers hosting and the LearnDash licence and nothing else. Video hosting, an email platform, a membership or checkout plugin, backups, and a security layer are all real line items that Kajabi bundled. A fair fully loaded comparison usually lands between $80 and $150 per month, plus the one time build cost of getting there.

The savings are real, but they show up over years rather than months, and they grow with your list size, since Kajabi’s tiers are gated on contacts while WordPress hosting is gated on traffic. If you are weighing this purely on price, the same arithmetic applies to the other platforms in the same category, which I worked through in detail in the Kajabi price increase and alternatives breakdown.

Why Do Most Kajabi to WordPress Migrations Go Wrong?

The failures repeat, and they are not technical failures. They are sequencing failures.

The first is cancelling Kajabi too early. Someone finishes downloading the videos, feels done, and cancels to stop the next charge. Two weeks later they need the exact wording of an email sequence or the settings on an offer, and the account is gone. Nothing recovers that.

The second is treating the migration as a content project when it is a billing project. Content can be rebuilt at any pace. Subscriptions cannot, because every day of ambiguity is a day someone gets charged twice or not at all. Anchor the timeline to the billing cycle and let the content fit around it.

The third is underestimating quizzes and automations. Both are pure retyping, both are invisible until you sit down to do them, and together they routinely account for more hours than the entire course upload. If your Kajabi account has twelve email automations firing off tags, that is not a footnote in the plan.

The fourth is hosting chosen on price. I have been called in to fix LearnDash sites that were declared slow and broken when the actual problem was a shared host that could not serve logged-in pages. If your new site feels worse than Kajabi did, students notice immediately, and the migration gets blamed for a hosting decision.

The fifth is doing it all yourself while running the business. This work is genuinely doable solo, and it is also four to six weeks of attention that has to come from somewhere. If your courses are actively selling, that trade is worth pricing before you commit to it. The same evaluation questions apply here as anywhere else, and I covered them properly in how to hire a LearnDash developer and in what a Kajabi developer actually costs.

How Do You Avoid This on Your Next Platform Move?

The reason this migration hurts is that everything lived in one account that owed you nothing on the way out. You can build the next setup so that stops being true.

Keep master copies of every video, PDF, and worksheet in your own storage, uploaded to the platform rather than created inside it. Keep the written source of every lesson in a document you control. Export your contact list on a schedule, not on an emergency. Use your own domain from day one and your own payment processor wherever the platform allows it, because the account that holds your subscriptions is the account that holds your revenue.

Document your automations in plain language, one page, updated when you change them. It sounds like busywork right until the week you need to rebuild them somewhere else, and then it is the most valuable document you own.

Do those five things and any future move becomes a week of assembly rather than a month of archaeology. Owning your own WordPress installation gives you most of that by default, which is a quieter argument for the switch than the monthly price, and a better one.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is there a plugin that imports Kajabi courses into LearnDash automatically?

No. The migration add-ons in the LearnDash ecosystem import from other WordPress LMS plugins, not from hosted platforms. Since Kajabi exports only a course template and a contact list, there is no complete data set for an importer to read, so the course rebuild is manual regardless of which tool you buy. Anyone selling you a one click Kajabi to LearnDash import is selling you a service with people behind it.

How long does it take to migrate from Kajabi to WordPress?

Two to six weeks for most course businesses. A single course with no active subscriptions and a small list can be done in a week. A library of eight courses with quizzes, a community, active payment plans, and a decade of blog posts to redirect is a six week project with a dedicated person on it. The content volume matters less than the number of live subscriptions and automations.

Will my students lose their course progress?

Yes, unless you recreate it. Kajabi provides no per student progress export, so everyone arrives at zero percent. The two workable responses are telling students plainly in advance, or bulk marking historical lessons complete for existing members so their dashboard reflects roughly where they were. Choose one before launch rather than reacting to the first support ticket.

Can I keep my domain and my email list?

The domain, yes, as long as you own it at a registrar rather than through the platform. Repoint the DNS at your WordPress host once your redirects are configured and tested. The list comes across as a CSV, but the sequences, tags, and automation logic attached to it do not, so plan to rebuild those inside whichever email platform you choose.

Should I use LearnDash or another WordPress LMS?

LearnDash suits course businesses that need real structure: prerequisites, drip content, quizzes with grading, certificates, and group management. Lighter alternatives exist and cost less, and they are a reasonable fit for a simple video library with no assessment. Choose on the structural features you actually use today, not on the feature grid, because the grid is where money goes to die.

When is it a mistake to leave Kajabi?

When you have no appetite for maintenance. WordPress hands you ownership and hands you responsibility in the same movement: updates, backups, security, and performance become yours. If nobody on your side will own that, and no agency is retained to, the all in one bill is buying something real. Cost alone is a weak reason to switch. Control, ownership, and what you plan to build next are strong ones.