I’ve been watching the StellarWP situation unfold for months now, and honestly, last week’s news was not a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention. But it still landed hard.
If you’ve tried visiting LearnDash.com recently, you’ve probably noticed it redirects to LiquidWeb. That’s not a glitch. On April 22, 2026, LiquidWeb put out an annonce officielle confirming what the WordPress community had been bracing for: StellarWP is being dissolved.
The entire portfolio of plugins they spent years acquiring has been collapsed into just four products, all rebranded under “Liquid Web by Nexcess.”
StellarWP owned LearnDash, KadenceWP, GiveWP, SolidWP, Restrict Content Pro, MemberDash, Iconic, and The Events Calendar. Most of those brands are now gone or rolled into something else.
If your course business runs on LearnDash, you deserve a straight answer about what this means. Here’s what I know.
What happened to LearnDash?
LiquidWeb acquired LearnDash back in 2021 and tucked it under the StellarWP umbrella. At the time, StellarWP was growing fast and had real momentum in the WordPress space. That changed.
As of April 2026, StellarWP is gone as a brand. LearnDash.com redirects to LiquidWeb’s site. LearnDash still exists as a product, but it’s now one of only four things that survived the cuts. The team and organization that built it look very different from what they were a year ago.
Here’s the timeline:
- September 2021: LiquidWeb acquires LearnDash, adding it to the StellarWP portfolio alongside KadenceWP, GiveWP, The Events Calendar, Restrict Content Pro, SolidWP, Iconic, and others.
- October 2025: Nexcess, LiquidWeb’s managed WordPress hosting brand with 20+ years of history, is fully absorbed into LiquidWeb and loses its independent identity.
- November 2025: LiquidWeb and StellarWP lay off roughly 25% of the StellarWP team, about 36 people. Among those let go: Taylor Walden, LearnDash’s Product Owner, and Ben Meredith, Director of Customer Service for GiveWP. Sixteen combined years of experience, gone.
- Late 2025: Benjamin Ritner, founder of KadenceWP, leaves StellarWP. Matt Cromwell, co-founder of GiveWP, gives notice. Devin Walker, another GiveWP co-founder who had already left, wrote publicly: “Private equity often takes a hard edge, putting profits over people and disregarding morale. The truth is that happy teams create great products.”
- April 22, 2026: LiquidWeb publishes “Introducing the new software by Nexcess,” officially folding roughly 10 StellarWP brands into 4 core products: Kadence, LearnDash, The Events Calendar, and Give.
The StellarWP brand that WordPress users knew and trusted has been shut down. LearnDash survives as a product name, but under a completely different corporate structure, with a much smaller team and no independent brand.
Is LearnDash going away?
Not entirely, but the LearnDash that most people know and trust is already gone.
The plugin will still get updates. LiquidWeb has promised critical security patches for retiring features through April 2027. But a lot has already changed:
- The StellarWP team that built and maintained LearnDash has been largely disbanded or departed.
- LearnDash’s own Product Owner was laid off in November 2025.
- LearnDash.com now redirects to liquidweb.com. The independent brand is gone.
- MemberDash, StellarWP’s membership plugin, has been killed as a standalone product and folded into LearnDash.
- Several add-ons and features are being retired. Critical security patches only through April 2027.
For anyone who built a course business on LearnDash, the real question isn’t whether the plugin will still activate on your WordPress site. It’s whether the roadmap will stay on track, whether support will be responsive, and whether LiquidWeb will actually invest in a product that’s now just one of four in a trimmed-down portfolio.
Based on what I’ve seen from private equity plays in the WordPress space, I wouldn’t bet on it getting better from here.
What happened to StellarWP?
StellarWP is done as a brand. LiquidWeb’s April 2026 announcement retired the umbrella entirely. Here’s where everything landed:
- SolidWP: absorbed into Kadence as “Kadence Security”
- Iconic: absorbed into Kadence as “Kadence Shop Kit”
- Restrict Content Pro: absorbed into Kadence as “Kadence Memberships”
- MemberDash: absorbed into LearnDash, membership features bundled in
- LearnDash, Kadence, The Events Calendar, and Give: the four that survived
Old portal links like my.solidwp.com now redirect to a new unified portal at software.liquidweb.com. The reaction from the WordPress community has not been positive.
The Post Status Slack and WordPress Twitter filled up with job posting threads as former StellarWP employees tried to help laid-off colleagues land somewhere new.
What does this mean if you use MemberPress + LearnDash?
You’re running a split setup where one side just got a lot more complicated.
MemberPress handles your memberships, subscriptions, content protection, and payments. That’s not changing. We’re independent, we’re focused, and we’re not subject to the kind of portfolio rationalization that just wiped out half the StellarWP catalog. Your membership side is solid.
But your LMS is now inside a reorganized company with a smaller team, a less certain roadmap, and a parent company that has already shown what it does with acquired products when it needs to cut costs.
The good news is you don’t have to stay there. MemberPress Courses is a full-featured LMS, it’s already included in your plan, and it takes one click to activate.
We also built a LearnDash migrator directly into MemberPress that moves your content over automatically.
Already a MemberPress customer? You may be paying for a LearnDash license you don’t actually need anymore. MemberPress Courses is already part of your plan.
What does this mean if you only use LearnDash?
If you’ve been running LearnDash without MemberPress, maybe with MemberDash handling your membership layer, the situation is more pressing.
MemberDash is gone as a standalone product. Existing customers can keep their current plan at current pricing for now, but new customers can’t buy it separately anymore.
If your subscription ever lapses, you may need to buy into one of the new LiquidWeb bundled plans to get access back.
This is a good time to ask whether you want your whole course and membership setup sitting on a platform that’s being managed by a team focused on trimming costs, not growing a product. There are better options.
MemberPress gives you both sides covered: the most trusted membership plugin for WordPress, with a robust LMS built right in.
The best LearnDash alternative for WordPress
Il y a other LMS options out there. But if you’re already on MemberPress, or if running memberships and subscriptions is central to what you do, MemberPress Courses is the obvious move. Here’s why I think so:
1. It’s already included in your MemberPress plan
MemberPress Courses isn’t a separate purchase. It’s a free add-on that comes with every MemberPress plan. If you’re already a customer, you turn it on with a single click.
2. It covers everything you’d expect from a serious LMS
- Drag-and-drop Curriculum Builder
- Progress tracking for students and admins
- Built-in quizzes: multiple choice, true/false, short answer, essay
- Certifications with expiration and completion dates
- ReadyLaunch templates so your course pages look great out of the box
- AI Course Generator that builds full curricula through a conversation
- AI Lesson Assistant and AI Quiz Builder
3. Everything lives in one place
With MemberPress and Courses together, your memberships, subscriptions, content protection, and LMS are all in one ecosystem. No separate license keys, no mismatched renewal dates, no splitting support tickets between two companies.
4. Voted #1 Membership + Courses plugin
MemberPress was recognized as the #1 Membership and Courses plugin at the WP Awards and has earned High Performer badges on G2. Our customers voted for us, and we take that seriously.
5. We’re independent, growing, and not going anywhere
MemberPress is not owned by private equity. We’re not cutting our product team or folding brands into each other to hit a quarterly target.
And here’s the thing: while LiquidWeb has spent the last year consolidating, eliminating, and rebranding, we’ve been shipping. We launched ClubSuite™ in Q4 2025, a major release that pushed MemberPress well beyond what any single plugin can offer.
Then last month we launched ClubConnect™, a significant update to ClubSuite™. MemberPress is a complete creator platform now, and it keeps growing.
That contrast matters. Private equity shops are under pressure to extract value from the assets they already own. We’re under pressure from our customers to keep building things they love. Those two motivations produce very different roadmaps.
I’ve been at MemberPress long enough to say with confidence: we’re here for the long haul, and we build for the people who use our product.
How to migrate from LearnDash to MemberPress Courses
I know “migration” sounds like a big project. In this case, it’s genuinely not. MemberPress has a LearnDash Migrator built right in. It’s not a third-party tool or a workaround. It’s native, it’s one click, and it handles:
- Cours
- Lessons and Topics
- Quiz
- Course Categories and Tags
- User Progress
- Tentatives d'interrogation
- Matériaux
Your LearnDash content stays untouched during the migration, so you can check everything before you make the switch official. Nothing gets deleted.
Step 1: Install MemberPress and activate the Courses add-on
If you’re not already a MemberPress customer, choose a plan here. Every plan includes the Courses add-on and the LearnDash Migrator.
Step 2: Run the LearnDash Migrator
Inside MemberPress, go to Courses and open the migration wizard. Choose whether you want to bring over user progress and quiz attempts, then hit Start Migration. Stay on the page while it runs.
Step 3: Set up your rules and memberships
Once the migration finishes, set up your MemberPress rules to protect your courses and connect them to your membership levels or products.
Want the full step-by-step? Read the migration guide here.
What I’d do if I were you
LearnDash the plugin still works. But the team that built it with care, the founders who believed in it, and the brand identity that gave people confidence in it are gone.
What’s left is a product being managed inside a cost-cutting restructure by a company whose actions over the last year have not inspired a lot of trust in the WordPress community.
Your courses are your business. The content you’ve built, the students who’ve enrolled, the progress they’ve made, that’s all worth protecting, and it deserves to live on a platform with a stable team behind it.
We’ve built MemberPress Courses for exactly this situation. And we keep building. ClubSuite™. ClubConnect™.
A platform that grows with you. If you’re ready to move, we’ve made the migration as painless as we could.
Obtenez MemberPress dès aujourd'hui !
Start your migration from LearnDash today.
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