How to Build a WordPress E-commerce and Course Site: The Cloudways and Flatsome Stack Behind Jason Career, Run by One Person

Jason Career is my website about careers, job hunting and studying abroad. Besides posts, it sells e-books, application document and résumé consultations, Coffee Chat courses and membership content. It is a self-built WordPress e-commerce and course site: hosted on Cloudways with Cloudflare in front, using the Flatsome theme, WooCommerce for the store and LearnDash for courses, with day-to-day operations handled by Claude Code over SSH and WP-CLI.

The short version: on 11 October 2026 the site had 65 active plugins. Checkout, subscriptions, memberships, courses and three payment methods are all put together from WordPress plugins, and the custom code doesn’t touch the theme; it is kept separately on GitHub. The alternative to building it myself was outsourcing, and the outsourcing quote was several hundred thousand. Building it myself means not paying that fee, but updates, backups and caching are all mine to manage. This is the first post in the “one-person e-commerce and course site” series. It lays out the architecture first; costs and the details of each layer will come in later posts, one at a time.

This is a record of my own website’s architecture, not a recommendation of any host, theme or plugin. Versions and plugin counts reflect the state on 11 October 2026 and will change. Tool descriptions quote each official website; the latest official information takes precedence.

What kind of WordPress e-commerce and course site is Jason Career

It isn’t just a blog. On the same site, readers read posts, buy e-books, subscribe to memberships and take courses, so the site is a content site, a store and a course platform at once. The plugin groups below show this too: the store, memberships, courses and payments each have their own plugins.

What Claude Code has actually done on this site is covered in Running WordPress Without Knowing SSH. This post is only about the architecture.

Layer by layer: hosting, system, theme and plugins

Here is how each tool describes itself (checked on 17 October 2026):

• Cloudways: its website calls it a managed cloud hosting platform, “a fast, secure, and simple cloud hosting platform, backed by 24/7 expert support”, running on a choice of cloud providers such as DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS and Google Cloud (Cloudways website). Which cloud and plan Jason Career uses will come in the post on costs.
• Flatsome: its developer, UX Themes, calls it the “Best Selling Flatsome WooCommerce Theme”, meaning a theme designed for WooCommerce stores (UX Themes website). The theme comes with UX Builder, which UX Themes describes as a drag-and-drop editor with live preview, included with the theme (UX Themes: introducing Flatsome 3.0).
• WooCommerce: its website says “the open-source commerce platform for WordPress” and stresses that merchants control “your checkout, your data, your costs” (WooCommerce website).
• LearnDash: the official FAQ defines it as “a WordPress LMS plugin that lets you create, manage, and sell online courses” (LearnDash website).
• WP Rocket: its website calls it “the caching plugin at the heart of any fast WordPress website” (WP Rocket website).
• WP-CLI: the official WordPress command-line tool, “The command line for WordPress. No browser required.” (WordPress.org: WP-CLI).

Why I chose Cloudways and Flatsome will be explained in a later post in this series; I won’t draw conclusions here.

65 plugins, grouped by purpose

On 11 October 2026 there were 65 active plugins. Only the main ones are listed below, grouped by purpose:

Customizations stay out of the theme

The site’s customizations, such as author cards, category page titles, /llms.txt and the mobile promotion bar, all live in two plugins, Code Snippets and Simple Custom CSS & JS, rather than in edits to Flatsome’s files. Their source code is kept separately in a private GitHub repo, so every change is recorded. On 2 October 2026, Claude Code exported the custom code on the live site into a Git baseline, and every change since then starts from that baseline.

Two layers of cache

Five plugins deal with performance. Of these, WP Rocket handles caching at the WordPress level, and Cloudways adds Varnish at the server level. We ran into this on 10 October 2026: a change to the site didn’t show up, because only WP Rocket had been cleared, not Varnish. Since then, both layers are cleared together on every deployment. Which caching and protection rules are actually turned on in Cloudflare hasn’t been documented yet; that will go into the post on caching.

How Claude Code runs this stack

Claude Code runs on a Linux server on Oracle Cloud, connects to Cloudways over ordinary SSH, and then uses WP-CLI to look up data, change settings and update content. It doesn’t use MCP. How that server is set up is covered in Running Claude Code Remote Control on a Free Oracle Cloud Server.

There are several checkpoints before the live site is changed: a preview plan is generated before each deployment, and only the plan just previewed can be applied; a backup runs automatically before deploying, and the deployment aborts if the backup fails; rewriting Git history or force pushing needs my approval. The full rules and what was done in 10 days are in Running WordPress Without Knowing SSH.

Building it yourself versus outsourcing

The alternative to building the site myself was hiring someone, and the outsourcing quote I received was several hundred thousand. Building it myself means I don’t pay that build fee; in exchange, I’m responsible for everything below:

The site sells e-books, consultations, courses and memberships, so a problem in any one plugin can affect checkout. Plugin updates and backup restores, the two jobs not yet handed to Claude Code, will each get their own post later.

Jason Finance, this site, takes a different route: no WordPress, a static site generated with Astro and hosted on Cloudflare, with content that is mainly posts. See Building a Website Without Reading Code and Jason Finance from Zero to One. Jason Career, on the other hand, is a WordPress e-commerce and course site with memberships, subscriptions and payments, and the two sites are run differently: changes to Jason Career go through a live-site backup and a deployment plan, while changes to Jason Finance go through Git and Cloudflare deployments.

What this series will cover next

This post only covers the architecture. The questions below, which readers usually ask, aren’t answered here; each will get its own post later in the series:

• Costs: how much the Cloudways cloud and plan, paid plugin licenses, the domain and so on actually cost each month.
• Why Cloudways and Flatsome: what I considered at the time.
• Caching: how Varnish and WP Rocket split the work, how to clear them, and which settings are turned on in Cloudflare.
• Flatsome UX Builder: how pages and product pages are laid out.
• AI operations: how plugin updates, backup restores and the other jobs not yet handed to Claude Code will be handled.

More posts on building and running sites with AI are on the AI startup topic page.

FAQ

What tools does Jason Career, a WordPress e-commerce and course site, use?

As of 11 October 2026: hosting on Cloudways with Cloudflare in front; WordPress 7.1.3 on PHP 8.4 with the Flatsome 3.20 theme; WooCommerce plus Subscriptions, Memberships and FunnelKit for the store, LearnDash for courses, and PayUni, LINE Pay and Stripe for payments.

How many plugins does a WordPress site with a store and courses need?

On 11 October 2026, Jason Career had 65 active plugins, grouped into e-commerce and payments, courses, SEO, performance, multilingual and custom code. That is the actual number for one site; it doesn't mean other sites need as many.

Are the site's customizations made in the theme?

No. Customizations such as author cards, category page titles, llms.txt and the mobile promotion bar live in two plugins, Code Snippets and Simple Custom CSS & JS. Their source code is kept separately in a private GitHub repo, and Flatsome itself is not modified.

Why does the site look the same after clearing the WP Rocket cache?

Jason Career ran into this: Cloudways has another Varnish cache at the server level. Clearing WP Rocket alone isn't enough; Varnish has to be cleared separately before visitors see the change. Since then, both layers are cleared together on every deployment.

How does building WordPress yourself compare with outsourcing it?

The outsourcing quote I received was several hundred thousand. If you build it yourself, the site, checkout and data stay in your hands, but plugin updates, backups and version upgrades are your responsibility too; as of 11 October 2026, Jason Career still had 38 plugins waiting to be updated.