GoHighLevel Tutorial for Beginners 2026 - How to Use GoHighLevel

Hey, I'm Dan, and in this tutorial, I'll show you how to use GoHighLevel, even if you're a complete beginner. GoHighLevel combines your CRM, your marketing, payments, websites, and more, all into one single platform. And I'll walk you through it all, step by step. Because GoHighLevel offers so much functionality, it's normal to feel overwhelmed at first. But by the end of this video, you'll know what GoHighLevel is capable of, and where to find all the features that matter most for your business, all in just 15 minutes. The first thing we're going to do is sign up for a free trial of GoHighLevel. Now, normally, there's only a 14-day free trial when you sign up, but if you click the first link in the description, you'll get our exclusive Menex Media offer, which gives you a full 30-day free trial instead. Once you click that link, you'll join me here on the exclusive sign-up page. When you're ready to get going, click start an extended free trial. Enter your business details here in step one, then click here to go to step two. On step two, I'd recommend going with the HighLevel Starter Plan at $97. That'll give you access to all the core features we'll cover today. You can always upgrade to the unlimited plan later if you need it. Click here to enter your card details, and then click complete order to start your 30-day free trial. From there, you'll create your password and complete a short onboarding survey asking about your business, your industry, and how you plan to use GoHighLevel. After that survey, you'll see an option to join a free onboarding call. The GoHighLevel team will actually help you set up the platform for your specific business. So, I'd recommend taking advantage of that after this video. After you create your account, you'll land on the launchpad, which is sort of like an onboarding checklist. You don't need to complete all of these items now, because we'll cover the major features in this tutorial, and you can come back to the launchpad later. Now, in the top left, you'll see your business name, and this is what's called a sub-account. You can think of the sub-account like a separate profile, and you can have up to three of these on the starter plan. One could be for your business, and the others could be for other businesses you run, or for helping clients manage theirs. If you ever need to create a new one, switch to agency view, go to sub-accounts, and then you can click create sub-account here, and follow the setup. Switch back to your sub-account by selecting it in the top left, and below the launchpad, the main dashboard here on the left, will give you a quick overview of your business. Things like your opportunities, tasks, and conversion data. It only shows the sample data right now, but it'll start to fill in as we work through the platform, and you can edit it to your liking once we have your data in. Let's start with the foundation of GoHighLevel, and that's your contacts. Contacts are the heart of your CRM, and everything else in GoHighLevel connects back here. You may see some sample contacts that you'll want to remove, but for now, it's helpful to leave them for the tutorial. To add a new contact, click the add contact button in the top right. Fill in your contact details, and click save. This will open the contact view, where you have their information on the left. You can message them directly in the center with email, or if they have a number, you'll see WhatsApp or SMS here. And on the right, you'll see their activity, tasks, notes, and more. If you're coming from another system, or you have a full list of leads to add, you can also import contacts. Click the back arrow or smart lists to return, and then click the import button, and follow the four-step process. In step two, GoHighLevel provides a sample CSV file that makes it easy to arrange your data. And once you upload your sheet, you'll map your columns to fields, which is pretty straightforward if your column names match up. After you verify and start the import, your new leads will be added to the platform. If it's taking a while, you can check the process of long-running imports under bulk actions. You can also show the list of contacts that you imported in this file by clicking the three dots action menu, and show imported. Now that you have contacts in the system, let's look at how you actually communicate with them. Click the conversations tab over on the left. This is your all-in-one inbox, where emails, texts, calls, and web chats are all managed together. Instead of jumping between Gmail, your phone, and a chat tool, everything is right here in one place. Up at the top, you'll notice a few tabs, and I want to walk you through two useful features, and show you how they work together. First, trigger links let you place trackable links inside your emails, so you can see how many contacts click through. To create one, open the trigger links tab, click add link, give it a name and a URL, and save. Next, snippets are reusable blocks of text that you can quickly insert when composing a message, and this saves a lot of time if you're sending similar emails regularly. Let's create a snippet, and embed the trigger link that we just made inside it. Go to the snippets tab, click new snippet, and add email snippet. Give your snippet a name and a subject, then write your message in the snippet's body. You can also insert custom values like your contact's name to personalize the email. To insert the trigger link, click the trigger links button in the toolbar, and select the link that we just created. Don't worry that this doesn't show as a hyperlink yet. I'll show you how to link that later. When you're happy with your snippet, click save. Now, let's see this in action by sending it as a real email. Go back to the conversations tab, click new, then direct message, and select a contact. Choose email, then click the insert snippet button to select and insert your snippet. The snippet will populate the email with everything we set up, including the trigger link. To give it a hyperlink, click add link, then trigger link, and you can select that here. I'll open this in a new window, and save. Then click send, and your contact will receive the email with the trackable link inside. To see how your trigger links are performing, come back to the trigger links tab, and then click analyze. And that will give you a breakdown of the total clicks over time. Once you're having conversations with leads, the next step is usually booking a meeting, and that's where calendars come in. GoHighLevel has a built-in calendar tool for scheduling appointments and connecting with clients. To create a calendar, click calendars on the left-hand side. You won't have a calendar yet, so go to calendar settings to create one. Assuming you want to create a personal booking calendar for yourself, there's something we need to set up first. In HighLevel, every calendar has to be connected to a team member, like a staff person who will take the bookings. But you are not a team member inside of your sub-account yet, even though you just signed up. When you signed up, HighLevel created your user at the agency level, but we need to add you at the sub-account level before we can continue. So, let me show you how to do that now. Click the business name in the top left, and switch to agency view. Go to settings at the bottom. Click team, find yourself in the list, and click the pencil icon to edit. Under roles and permissions, assign yourself to your sub-account here, and click save. Now, switch back to your sub-account using the drop-down in the top left, and go back to calendars, and then calendar settings. Click new calendar, choose personal booking, and now you'll see yourself available in this team member drop-down. This is why we needed to assign you a sub-account from the agency level. Fill out your calendar details, then click confirm. Once you confirm, you'll get a booking link, and you can preview the booking widget to see what your contacts will see when they book. I'll close this tab for now, and assuming that you already use a Google or an Outlook calendar, you can sync them here under the connections tab, so that everything stays in one place. Just click add new, and sign in to the calendar that you would like to connect. Now that you can book meetings with your leads, you'll want to track where each deal stands, and that's what the opportunities tab is for. Over on the left, click go back, and then click the opportunities tab. Here, you'll see that GoHighLevel already has set up an example pipeline called the marketing pipeline, and it's complete with a couple of sample deals. Pipelines let you track your deals visually as they move through the different stages, from new lead all the way to closed. And this default marketing pipeline comes with six stages. To customize this pipeline, click pipelines at the top, then click the three-dot menu next to your pipeline to edit. From here, you can rename the pipeline, you can rename the stages, you can add a new stage by clicking the add stage button, or you can remove any ones that you don't need as well. You can also choose how your stages display, and I like this mode here, and then you can set up the stage colors individually. If the default pipeline doesn't work for you, or if you want to add another, simply click create pipeline, and configure a whole new one. To add an opportunity, go back to the opportunities tab, and click add opportunity. Here, select your primary contact, and enter an opportunity name. Select your pipeline stage, add an opportunity value, update any other fields you would like, and then click create. Back in the pipeline, you'll see your opportunity in the new lead column, and you can interact with your opportunity by dragging and dropping as your deals progress. And if you click and hold onto a card and drag it, you can categorize the opportunity as won, abandoned, or lost down at the bottom. By default, only your open opportunities are shown. So, to see your won and lost deals, click advanced filters, and then click the edit button under status to see what's being displayed. You have the option to import many opportunities at once, just like we did with contacts. And as your deals move through the pipeline, don't forget to check your main dashboard, as it will start to become more useful as you add more opportunity data. GoHighLevel offers so much more than just CRM, conversations, and calendar features. So, let's take a look at some of those next, starting with payments. Click payments on the left, and you'll land in the invoices and estimates tab. Before we can start sending invoices, we need to set up a payment gateway and add a product. To integrate a payment gateway, you may see this banner here, or you can click on the integrations tab all the way on the far right, and that will get you there directly. Here, you'll see a list of supported payment providers, like Stripe, PayPal, and more. To connect Stripe, for instance, click connect, then connect with Stripe, and follow the prompts to link your account. Once your gateway is connected, the next step is to add a product. Click the products tab at the top, and then click create product. On this screen, you can enter your product information, configure your pricing, add any variants, and fill out details in your search engine listing. When you're done, click save. Once you have at least one payment gateway connected, and you have one product, you can then send your first invoice. Click the invoices and estimates tab, then click new, and new invoice. Up top, you can give your invoice a name. You can select a customer. You can add the product that you just created. And you can fill out any of the other details that you would like. When you're ready, you can send this off, and you can start collecting revenue. There's a lot more that you can do in the payments tab, including subscriptions, contracts, coupons, and payment links. And it all connects back to your contacts and invoices. Now, let's take a look at AI agents. This is the area of GoHighLevel where you can build AI bots to handle things like live chat, appointment booking, and even phone calls, so that you can capture leads around the clock without leaving business on the table. To create a chatbot, click conversation AI. Then, click create bot. You'll see a few options here, but I'd recommend the guided form setup. It's quick, and it's recommended if you're just starting out. Click create new bot, then pick a bot type, like general Q&A or appointment booking, and continue. From here, you'll walk through a short onboarding that configures your brand voice, your bot settings, and your bot goals. Setting up an effective AI bot takes some time and some tweaking, and if you have the type of business where you want to capture leads around the clock, I'd strongly recommend booking a live session with the GoHighLevel team to help you tailor this to your business. And if it's not a fit for right now, you can always come back to this later. Next up is the marketing tab, which is packed with tools to help you grow your business. At the top, you'll see tabs for social planner, emails, snippets, countdown timers, trigger links, an affiliate manager suite, brand boards, and ad manager. The social media planner lets you connect all of your social media accounts, like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and more. You can schedule and publish posts across multiple platforms all in one place. Under emails, you can create new marketing campaigns, you can build templates, and you can track your opens and clicks, all without needing a separate email marketing tool. The affiliate manager is a whole suite of functionality that lets you set up your own affiliate program, so that other people can promote your products and earn a commission. And brand boards give you a place to store your logos, your colors, and fonts, so everything stays on brand. There's a lot of power here, and this is where a lot of the day-to-day work of marketing your business lives inside GoHighLevel. And marketing gets even more powerful when you combine it with automation. Workflows are simple logic that says, if this happens, then do this. By using workflows, you can put repetitive tasks on autopilot and focus on the work that matters. Click automation on the left, and you should land on the workflows tab. HighLevel recently added a new AI feature in beta that lets you build a workflow just by describing what you want in plain language prompting. You can pick an example, like lead nurturing, form automation, or email campaigns. You can describe your goal, and the AI will draft a workflow for you automatically. Let me show you what that looks like. You'll see that the AI assistant is featured here on the left-hand side, and on the right-hand side, you'll see the builder, and this is filling in the steps in the workflow. If you don't love the AI starting point, you can return to workflows, and you can start with a template by clicking create workflow, and selecting one of the templates. There are lots to choose from, and you can narrow them down by searching through the categories. And if you want to learn more, the HighLevel support portal offers many resources for understanding automations and workflows. After automation, we have the sites tab, and this is where you'll build your online presence inside GoHighLevel. At the top, you'll see tabs for funnels, websites, stores, blogs, and much, much more. First, it's worth understanding the difference between funnels and websites. Funnels are step-by-step conversion paths, like a landing page that leads to a checkout page, and then to a thank you page, designed to guide visitors toward a single action. Websites give you more room to move, with menus, multiple pages, and the freedom for visitors to browse your business. The great news is that you can create both really easily in GoHighLevel. You can pick and customize templates, and you don't need any design or coding experience. Under stores, you can sell the products from your payment section with a built-in e-commerce option. This can replace tools like Shopify for simple use cases. You can also create blogs to publish content. You can host a WordPress site directly inside GoHighLevel. You can run webinars. You can collect leads with forms, surveys, and quizzes. So, there's a ton that you can do here under sites, and it really ties together the rest of the platform into one place where your customers can find you. And that's a quick intro to GoHighLevel. If you've only been following along so far, remember to click the first link in the description to get our exclusive 30-day free trial of GoHighLevel, so that you can get a few more weeks to try it out. And don't forget to book a kickoff call, because the GoHighLevel team will help you set up the platform for your specific business. I can only cover so much in 15 minutes, so watch my full-length beginner's guide next, where I cover every feature in even greater detail.