If you have your sales pages set up on an external site and would like to use the built in Thinkific checkout, we have a few recommendations to make sure the flow is seamless for your students!
In this article:
Course Visibility Within Thinkific
Page Redirects
If you have built all of your landing pages on your external site and don't plan on using any Thinkific pages, we recommend redirecting your Thinkific pages.
Redirect Your Course Landing Page to Your External Sales Page
If you are using an external sales page, we recommend redirecting your Thinkific course landing page to your external sales page. The Thinkific course landing page is created by default when you first create your course and throughout your site, there are some areas where students can navigate to your Thinkific course landing page.
One area in particular is the Student Dashboard, which a student will see when logging into your site. The Student Dashboard will display course cards of all courses that the student is enrolled in. From a course card, students can click either See Overview to go to the Thinkific course landing page or simply access the Course Player to continue taking your course.
See Overview appears on your course cards by default and if you would like this to take students to your existing sales page instead of the Thinkific course landing page, this is easy to set up with a redirect!
Learn how to set that up here: Redirect Course Landing Page to an External Sales Page
Redirect Your Home Page to the Student Dashboard
If you don't plan on using your Thinkific Home Page, you can add a redirect to your Student Dashboard. This way, if anyone navigates to your Thinkific site, they will automatically be prompted to login to access their course. If your student is already logged in when visiting your Thinkific Home Page, they will be directed straight to the Student Dashboard.
Learn how to set that up here: Redirect Your Home Page
Branding Recommendations
We have some additional site wide branding recommendations you can check out here:
How to Link Thinkific With Your Existing Website
Course Visibility in Thinkific
If you don't want any of your courses displayed on your Thinkific site, there are a few simple customizations we recommend!
Remove All Courses from Your Site Header
By default, there will be an All Courses link that appears in your header that is linked to a default page that lists all the published and non-hidden courses available on your site. Each course will be displayed with a course card that a visitor can click to visit your Thinkific course landing page (check out Page Redirects above for additional recommendations on this).
You can remove this All Courses link to prevent visitors and students from viewing this default page. Learn how to remove links from your site header here: Customize Your Site Header
Set Courses and Bundles to Hidden
When a course is set to Hidden, the Thinkific course landing page will not be indexed by search engines and will not display on the All Courses page described above. We recommend setting your courses to Hidden if you are not using your Thinkific landing pages.
Learn how to set that up here: Private and Hidden Courses
Link Directly to Checkout
Now you are ready to link your external sales page directly to your Thinkific checkout! We recommend copying your Thinkific direct to checkout link and adding it to a buy button on your external sales pages.
Learn how to access your checkout link here: How to Copy Your Checkout Link