Hi, I will be running the LMoP in the next two weeks for a group of 4-5 players. This will be my first campaign and am looking for general advice. The majority of us have played before but are new to 5e mechanics for the most part with the exception to one player that has never played at all before but has been wanting too. Any suggestions to keep everyone engaged and not too bogged down why the new player learns the ropes. Or any suggestions to pit falls I might find and how to smooth them over or things you wish were done better with the campaign. A few of the members want to shift to a more home brewed adventure but agree to play a published adventure why I get my DM feet wet so to speak so I am probably overly worried they might get bored if not challenged. But I am the type that likes to overly prepare when nervous. So any advice would actually be helpful.

I started with LMoP and it was a lot of fun, I found Slyflourish's articles very useful here a link to his LMoP guide -> https://slyflourish.com/running_phandelver.html

LMoP is a mediocre adventure, not the worst but it could be a good build up to a much more important adventure: Dungeon of the Mad Mage. 

DoMM is the most important adventure for fledgling DMs and players such as yourself because it hammers home the two most important skills in D&D by a long shot- Dungeoneering and combat.  

From the player’s perspective you learn to: Get around obstacles and traps, solve puzzles, scout effectively, manage resources, and fight tactically.  On the DM side you learn about creating and running dungeons, which is the backbone of a D&D game and something you need to learn before ever running homebrew.  

Once you guys nail this aspect of the game down, THEN add some flare and fluff!  Good luck to you. 

LMOP would be a good introduction for both DM and players.

I would disagree about following up with DoMM, since that is essentially one big dungeon crawl, rather than an adventure with lots of role-play opportunities.

Goblin Ambush:
Goblins have a really high AC for the level, and just a little bad luck can make them deadly to lv 1s.
Make the goblins goal to attack the players until some of them can grab stuff off the wagon and then run off to the caverns. 

The caves have the same problem for lv 1s, and Klarg has a reputation of have the most PC kills ever.  I'd recommend leveling them up to 2 at the start of the caverns and adding a few another wolf or goblin to the rooms.  This just makes the damage a little less spikey and give a little more of an HP buffer so 1 crit doesn't just obliterate a player.

You might also want to switch where Klarg and that named goblin are in the cave if you want the party to have a shot at doing the negotiation part.

Overall I'd recommend that you somehow introduce the Black Spider somehow earlier.  The players don't have any interaction with him until they fight him, and they don't know why he's doing any of this.  It makes for a very anticlimactic big boss fight because no one cares, no one cares that they killed a guy they don't know, and they don't even know why he was doing any of this so they don't' feel like they accomplished anything by stopping him.

Lost Mines is great, I’ve ran it for my first time DMing+am currently running it now. Like people said, the initial ambush is a killer, as is Klarg (the boss of the first cave).

The adventure doesn’t really have any gaping holes in it, but it would serve you well to prepare things for the repeated multi-day descriptions of journeying in chapter 3, which the book doesn’t give much help for on the descriptive end. I would try and introduce the Black Spider early, he’s pretty lame as-is. The initial letter isn’t enough, either have him write more letters, give half a Sending Stone to one of his allies (such as the Drow in Cragmaw Castle), or show up as an illusion earlier. Making a more impressive statblock for him would also be great, he’s really weak for a boss meant to be fought at 4th/5th level, even with his allies.

LMoP is a great intro module. There are hints and tips written right into the adventure and all of the monster stats that you will need.

For the goblin ambush, you can just reduce the number of goblins or give them less HP.

After you complete it, and you have a feel for how GMing works then yeah, try your hand at making up your own custom campaign.

Good Luck, AND...

You can play LMoP but change it and change it considerably. 

In the Redbrand Hideout, there is a goblin called Droop that will betray the bad guys.  Why not call him Garbtesh, and have him happily betray the bugbears and then join the party.  Play him obsequious to the party and deferential to the party and act as a servant, think Dobbie from Potter.  In reality Garbtesh is an anagram for Barghest.  In reality, he's going to tag along with the party in the hopes of finding the goblin king to slay and eat.  Oh there is no goblin king, then put one in place of the spider or that's the next adventure.  If the party tries to leave him in town, all of a sudden goods are being stolen, when they come to their inn room they find all the stolen goods.  Make Garby such a pain they have to bring him along on adventures.  If they find a goblinoid who won't talk have Garbtesh awkwardly ask for a minute or two alone with the goblin to get the information, then have the goblinoid scream bloody murder as Garbtesh dismembers him behind closed doors, have fun.

Put in a friendly potion vendor in town, whose actually a hag who sells really low  cost healing potions with some unlikely but unpleasant side effects.  Have the townsfolk die or priests disappear, children become monsters etc, its the hag, its always the hag.

Maybe the town has enslaved a tribe of kobolds and are using them to mine ore and the Redbrands are actually freedom fighters coming to free the goblins.

Just don't go with the default LMoP, everyone knows it now.  Change it up, and it will slam the metagamers who think they know what to do, but it has opposite effects.

I did my first time DM'ing with LMoP, like many others, but from the beginning I changed some details about it. Swapped some character races around, gave different motivations to some enemies, etc. If you're interested in homebrewing, try just changing some of the details of the world... nothing major. Just changing Sildar Hallwanter into being Gorthug the Half-Orc can change the feel of the story. Near the end of the adventure my players and I had decided we wanted to use those same characters to play through Tyranny of Dragons, and I adjusted some of the details about the game to lead into this new adventure.

Overall, though, it's a pretty easy adventure to run. The Adventure has a few pre-generated characters you can use, which would be helpful for anyone completely new to the game... even if they want to come up with their own personality and character name, at the very least the race/class/background are already figured out and they won't ahve to figure out stats unless they want to.

I can't help but think of The Adventure Zone, which started out as a play through of LMoP, but quickly became its own homebrew game as all the players got used to the system and got bored of such a straightforward fantasy adventure story.

How do you guys run encounters? Do you send out the encounter link so everyone can keep track of hp and turn order, or do you keep it for your eyes only? I am in a game, and the DM sends us the encounter link so we can follow along, which can be fun and all; only if you click the monster you can see all the info about it as well, which is kind of meta gamey to me unless they have a reason to know said knowledge. But our group is already used to this method, so casing around for ideas.

Quote from Farling >>

LMOP would be a good introduction for both DM and players.

I would disagree about following up with DoMM, since that is essentially one big dungeon crawl, rather than an adventure with lots of role-play opportunities.

 Precisely Farling, precisely.

But I would argue that is why it is so important.  DoMM is just pure, undiluted D&D, the core of what the game actually is.  I think it is very important for new players to get a healthy dose of that before they move on to the more fluffy stuff.  A lot of new players nowadays are coming to the game having watched Critical Role and this and that, and have little idea about how to fight or explore effectively, while new DMs are sweating about this "plot line" and that NPCs accent when they should be nailing down their dungeon creation process and learning the monsters before any of that.   

Now don't get me wrong, the fluff is definitely a nice touch, there is plenty of it in the games I run myself.  But it is built on a bedrock foundation of "Dungeons" and "Dragons". 

Quote from Angelbeearpuppy >>

How do you guys run encounters? Do you send out the encounter link so everyone can keep track of hp and turn order, or do you keep it for your eyes only? 

 I tell the players "You see an XiXY, what do you do?" The only thing I might share is a hex map with icons.

It is up to the GM to keep track of turn order and monster HP. It is the players responsibility to keep track of what they will do when their turn comes up and how many HP they have.