Overview
Speed up pages on content-heavy LearnDash sites by loading the course navigation after the rest of the page instead of blocking on it. This is for sites with a large number of LearnDash courses, lessons, topics, and quizzes, where the standard Course Navigation widget slows page loads.
This module replaces LearnDash’s default Course Navigation widget with an alternative that loads after the rest of the page’s content finishes. On sites with many LearnDash posts, deferring the navigation this way can significantly improve perceived page load speed.
The replacement navigation inherits the styles from LearnDash’s standard Course Navigation widget, so it looks the same as what your learners already see — it just loads differently.
Setup
- Enable the module in the Toolkit settings.
- Add the shortcode below where you want the navigation to appear — typically a sidebar widget area on your course, lesson, topic, and quiz pages. The navigation only renders on single LearnDash content pages that belong to a course; on any other page the shortcode outputs nothing.
[uo-course-navigation]Decide whether to show a heading
- Widget Heading — You can add an optional heading to the navigation in the module settings (the setting is labeled “Widget Heading”). In most cases we recommend leaving it blank, since the navigation is usually self-explanatory in context.
Shortcode Reference
| Shortcode | Purpose |
|---|---|
[uo-course-navigation] | Outputs the lazy-loading course navigation, styled to match LearnDash’s standard Course Navigation widget. |
Important: This module is intended primarily for sites with a lot of LearnDash courses, lessons, topics, and quizzes. Smaller installations may see little or no performance benefit and are usually better off keeping the standard LearnDash Course Navigation widget.