Structure Audit for LearnDash

LearnDash sites accumulate structural debt. Courses get restructured, lessons get detached, quizzes lose their questions, groups lose their leaders — and none of it is visible until a learner hits a wall.

Structure Audit for LearnDash scans your site and tells you what is broken, in one screen.

The damage is quiet, which is what makes it expensive. A lesson removed from a course does not get deleted — it stays in the database, unattached, invisible in the course builder but still returned by queries and still counted in your content. A quiz that lost its questions still appears in the course outline and still blocks progression when a learner reaches it. A course whose prerequisite was unpublished simply stops being accessible, and the first you hear about it is a support ticket saying “it won’t let me in”. None of this shows up in the LearnDash admin, because the admin shows you what exists, not what is missing.

This plugin looks for the missing half. It runs twelve checks across your courses, lessons, topics, quizzes, questions and groups, and reports every item that is structurally wrong — grouped by severity so you know what to fix now and what is merely untidy. Four checks are critical (things learners are hitting today), five are warnings, and three are notices for content that is probably fine but worth confirming.

It is built to be safe to run on a live site. The scan is read-only and changes nothing. Where cleanup is offered, it moves items to the WordPress trash rather than deleting them, so anything removed by mistake is restorable from the normal Trash view. The plugin stores nothing in your database — no options, no tables, no scheduled jobs — so it leaves no trace whether you keep it or remove it.

This plugin requires the LearnDash LMS plugin, which is a separate commercial product sold by its own authors. Install and activate LearnDash first.

What it checks

• Courses with no content — enrolled learners see an empty course
• Orphaned lessons — not attached to any course
• Orphaned topics — not attached to a course or lesson
• Orphaned quizzes — attached to nothing
• Quizzes with no questions — breaks the learner flow
• Questions not used in any quiz — question-bank clutter
• Courses with no certificate — listed so you can confirm it’s deliberate
• Groups with no group leader — nobody can administer or report on them
• Groups with no courses — membership grants no access
• Steps pointing at a missing course — broken associations
• Unpublished courses with enrolled users — learners locked out
• Broken course prerequisites — can lock learners out permanently

Safe by design

• The scan is read-only. Running it never changes anything.
• Cleanup is opt-in and reversible. Where a cleanup action is offered, items are moved to the trash — never permanently deleted — so you can restore them from the WordPress UI.
• Nothing is stored. No options, no custom tables, no cron jobs, no cached report.
• Version-tolerant. Each check uses LearnDash’s own API where available and is skipped gracefully — never fatally — if a function is unavailable in your LearnDash version.
• Results are grouped by severity so you can triage: critical, warning, notice.

Who it’s for

• Site owners doing a spring clean before a launch
• Agencies and freelancers auditing an inherited LearnDash site, where nobody remembers how the courses were built
• Course creators who have restructured a curriculum and want to know what got left behind
• Support and ops teams diagnosing “I can’t access my course” tickets without trawling the database

If you have ever exported your LearnDash content and found more lessons in the file than in your courses, this is the gap it measures.

How it works

1. Install and activate. The plugin appears under LearnDash LMS → Structure Audit.
2. Click Run structure audit. The scan is read-only and takes seconds on a typical site.
3. Work down the report, worst first. Expand any check to see exactly which courses, lessons, quizzes or groups are affected, each linked straight to its edit screen.

Extending it

Developers can register additional checks with the rausa_checks filter, so agencies running the same audit across many client sites can add their own house rules alongside the built-in twelve.

Disclaimer

This is an independent add-on. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by LearnDash or its owners. “LearnDash” is used here only to describe the software this plugin works with.