Account Setup and Dashboard Tour

Head to gohighlevel.com and start your 14-day free trial. The Starter plan at $97/month handles everything most course creators need. Choose Unlimited ($297/month) only if you plan to run multiple sub-accounts for clients or separate businesses. The trial gives you full functionality on either tier.

Once inside, you land on the dashboard with a temporary subdomain (like yourbusiness.gohighlevel.com). That works for building. You will want your own domain before launching.

Connecting Your Domain

Go to Settings > Domains > Add Domain. Type in your primary domain. GHL displays the DNS records you need to add at your domain registrar — typically an A record and a CNAME record. Log into wherever you bought your domain (Namecheap, GoDaddy, Cloudflare) and add those records. DNS propagation takes up to 48 hours, though most complete within a few hours.

For professional email ([email protected]), connect Google Workspace or set up email forwarding through your registrar. GHL handles outgoing email for automations and broadcasts, but a full inbox requires a separate setup.

Dashboard Tour

Here is where everything lives in the left sidebar:

Sites — Your marketing hub. Landing pages, sales funnels, website, forms, and quizzes all live here. When you build a sales page or an opt-in page, you work in Sites.

Memberships — Where your course content goes. Click into Courses > Products to build your curriculum. Communities also live here.

Conversations — Unified inbox for email, SMS, and social media DMs. Respond to student questions without switching tabs.

Automation — The workflow builder. Set up triggers (someone purchases), actions (send welcome email, add tag), and conditions (if premium, do this instead).

Calendars — Booking pages for sales calls, coaching sessions, or office hours. Bookings create contact records and can trigger automations.

Contacts — Your CRM. Every student, lead, and customer becomes a contact. Use tags to segment and pipelines to track where people are in their journey.

How It All Connects

A student opts in through a funnel (Sites), gets added to your database (Contacts), receives onboarding emails (Automation), accesses course content (Memberships), and can book office hours (Calendars) or message you (Conversations). All in one platform. No integrations needed.

Keep this map in mind as you build. Knowing where things live prevents searching through every menu when you need to make one specific change.