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TL;DR (Quick Summary)
- You choose between the Classic Course Builder and the New Course Builder when you create the course, and switching later means rebuilding. The New Course Builder is in beta and does not yet support surveys, advanced quizzes, exams or assignments.
- Turn Private and Hidden on while you build, so nobody finds a half-finished course.
- Your course card is 760 x 420 pixels and your product description caps at 250 characters. That description shows up in Google snippets and on the student dashboard, so write it as a teaser.
- Turn the review prompt on at course completion only. Left at chapter completion, your students get asked for a review at the end of every module.
- Lifetime access sounds generous and stalls people. An access period from the date of enrollment gives them a reason to actually start.
- Your after purchase page is built from the course slug, not a lesson URL, so renaming a lesson later does not break it.
You have the idea. Maybe the outline, maybe half the videos filmed. So you open Thinkific, create a course, and start uploading lessons.
Then a few months in, with students already enrolled, you are back in the settings trying to work out why nobody received a certificate, why there are no reviews on a course thirty people finished, and why the page somebody lands on after handing you money is blank.
None of that is a Thinkific problem. It is an order problem. There is a set of decisions that shape what a student gets from the second they hit buy, and almost every one of them is easier to make while the course is empty.
In this week's video, I walk you through all of them. Watch it above, and follow along in your own site as we build a demo course from nothing to something somebody can buy.
Pick your course builder first
When you create a course, Thinkific asks you to choose between the Classic Course Builder and the New Course Builder. That choice is made before you build anything, so it is worth thirty seconds now.
Both work in chapters and lessons. The Classic builder gives you a lesson type, and a video lesson can still hold text and downloads underneath the video. The New Course Builder works differently: you drag components into a single lesson and stack them.
The New Course Builder is still in beta, and there are lesson types it cannot do yet. Surveys, advanced quizzes, exams and assignments are all missing. If your course needs any of those, build it in the Classic builder.
One warning on the new one. Because stacking is easy, it is tempting to put a video, a PDF, an image and three links into one lesson. Your student needs wins. They should be able to finish a lesson and feel finished, not close the tab knowing they have to come back to the same lesson tomorrow.
The settings that live in two different places
This is the part that catches people. Your course settings are split across two screens.
Under Manage > Settings you get the basics. Your course name, which is what prints on the certificate. Your slug, the bit at the end of the URL, which wants to be short. The name of the course is usually the whole answer there. Your instructor, which you can change, though you can only have one per course, and any extra instructors get created first at Courses > Instructors.
Under Access, turn on Private and Hidden while you build. Hidden keeps the course out of search on your own site, and Private stops anyone enrolling. You need both on until the curriculum and the sales page are done and you have tested it yourself. While you are there, turn off text copying so your content does not get lifted straight out of the lesson.
The second set lives under Edit Content > Settings, and it holds the settings people never find. Video autoplay, the chapter completion setting, your completion page, the course player appearance and social sharing.
Turn video autoplay off. Chrome and the other big browsers mute an autoplaying video, so your student misses the first part of a lesson while they hunt for the volume. You also want them pressing play because they are ready, not because a page loaded.
Then check the chapter completion box. Leave it and your students get a review prompt at the end of every single chapter, which is exactly how you train somebody to ignore the request. You want the review asked for once, at the end.
Your course card and the 250 characters Google shows
The course card is a real design job, and it is 760 x 420 pixels. Set that as a custom size in Canva, search the templates for "thumbnail", and start from one of those. YouTube thumbnail layouts make good course cards because they are built to read small.
Underneath it sits the product description, capped at 250 characters. That text appears in your Google snippet, on the student dashboard, and under the course card on your homepage. It is a teaser, not a summary. Say what they get and make them want it.
That same text usually works as your SEO description, so copy it across rather than writing twice.
Your SEO title is a separate field and it is worth more thought than the course name. "Dog Training 101" is a name. "Dog Training 101: Train Your Dog at Home in 10 Minutes a Day" is something somebody clicks.
Course keywords go in as a comma separated list. They do not guarantee you a ranking. What they do is give Google and ChatGPT the words a buyer would actually type, so put buyer intent in there rather than a stuffed list of everything you can think of.
Certificates, and who is actually asking for one
Before you spend an afternoon on this, answer one question: is somebody asking your students for proof?
If they need to show an employer, a board or a licensing body that they finished, you need a certificate. If they are taking your course to get a result in their own business, nobody is going to ask them for it.
If you do want one, build a master certificate you can attach to every course, since Thinkific fills in the student name and course name for you. Choose your font in Thinkific first, then match it in Canva, so the type you designed and the variables Thinkific drops in do not clash. Leave space on the design for those variables, upload it as the background image, then scroll down and attach it to the course.
Pricing, and why lifetime access works against you
Thinkific gives you four pricing models: free, a one time payment, a subscription or membership, and a monthly payment plan. A payment plan usually totals a little more than the one time price, and you can run both at once by adding a second price alongside your primary one.
The setting underneath is the one worth arguing about. Access period.
Lifetime access sounds generous. What it usually buys you is a student who bookmarks the course, files it under "when things calm down", and never opens it again. They do not finish, so they never get the result you promised, so they never leave you a testimonial and never buy anything else from you.
Give them a year from the date of enrollment and you have given them a reason to start.
The page nobody plans
Somebody has just paid you. Where do they land?
Thinkific's default is a receipt page. Welcome to the course, here is what you bought, get started. There is no reason to put that in front of a buyer when you could put them inside the course instead.
To do that, create an after purchase flow, tick every price so it does not matter which one they bought through, and set the destination to a custom URL.
Build that URL by previewing your course and taking the address from the browser bar: your domain, then /courses/take/, then your course slug, with everything after the slug deleted. Point it at the course rather than a lesson, and it survives you renaming, adding or deleting lessons later. Point it at a lesson and it breaks the first time you edit your curriculum.
Do these before the curriculum
Every setting here is one you can change later. They are all just harder to change later, because by then somebody is enrolled and the change lands on a real person mid course.
This is episode 3 of a free 13 part series where we set up a Thinkific site from scratch, in the order you actually need to build it. Episode 4 is the curriculum, and episode 5 is your course sales page.
The Canva certificate templates I use in this episode, plus the rest of the resources for the series, are in the community with the other member resources.