Creating a website with WordPress seems easy nowadays, doesn’t it? You just install a theme and you’re good to go, right? Well, even though WordPress was initially imagined as a blogging platform, nowadays, it has become the most popular CMS and the biggest publishing stage with more than 40% of the internet running on the platform.
Now, you can pretty much use WordPress to build every possible type of website. All you need is an idea and the resources for it. The possibilities and the innovations that you can implement into your build are practically limitless, and this is why, in this article, we’ll be sharing some of the unmistakable types of sites that you can build with WordPress.
Yes, WordPress isn’t just for blogs; you can create a diverse range of sites using the web’s most popular CMS.
WordPress is a highly flexible and adaptable tool for creating websites, and one of the most popular in the world.
The proof of this is in the stats – around 455 million websites as of 2020 2Q, which accounts for around 20% of all self-hosted sites on the internet.
In addition, W3techs estimates that WordPress has a 63.2% share of websites using known content management systems. As far as content management systems go, WordPress truly is the leader.
And while it does have a reputation for hosting blogs, you shouldn’t let this fool you – it isn’t just small brands and personal blogs that use WordPress.
1. A Blog
WordPress began as a simple blogging platform and rapidly grew into the powerful CMS that we know today. During the last 16 years, the blogging and personal website components are still present and powerful.
As a matter of fact, they’ve become more refined and mature. If you want to create a blog or personal website, then you will find plenty of tools to manage and quickly scale your WordPress site.
If you want your prospects to learn more about your work, you have to blog about it on your WordPress site. The passion that you have for your work will be displayed in your blog post, and you can bet that the prospects will notice that they are in good hands.
Focus on creating relevant content. If you have a SaaS company, please don’t blog about GOT. If you really want to blog about a series, make another website for that purpose. Discover your core expertise and blog about everything that is related with it that the target readers would enjoy.
Good blog content will not be read at all if your headline is poor. You must have a great headline that will capture the attention of the readers as they are often the first impression a reader has of your site. Headlines invite readers to learn more or they can push them away. Even if the rest of your content is high-quality, if the headline is bad, only a small part of your target customers will probably read it.
Use headings to mark every section of your article. Use H2 headings for main sections with extra lover level heading (H3, H4, etc) as necessary. You can also include bullets and numbered lists for simple and quick points in your posts.
Don’t forget about images. A picture is worth a thousand words and you should take advantage of that. Create images that are visually captivating. Websites like Unsplash, Big Stock, Pixabay, PicJumbo, make discovering affordable images easy. With additional tools such as Photoshop or AdobeXD, you can enhance images even further.
Always include an alt-text when you add images to your posts. Search engines can see this and that very same image just might rank better in search engine image results which will result in increased traffic for your site. Moreover, an image alt text is vital if you want to make your WordPress blog accessible to users that utilize screen readers and voice technology to navigate the web.
2. Business Website
WordPress is an effortless way to build a professional looking business website. It is so powerful that many big-name brands are using WordPress to power their web presence.
Before you build your business website, you must have clear goals in mind according to which you’ll develop the website.
If you don’t know what you want to achieve with your business WordPress site, it will be nothing more than a waste of money. You can’t expect a business website to serve its purpose if you don’t know what the purpose is in the first place.
Your prospects also need to understand what’s your business about when they open your website. They need to know if they’ve come to the right place and if your business is the right fit. This is why you must clearly state your company vision and mission.
Don’t forget about your call-to-action. CTAs on your website are beneficial because with them, you compel visitors to take the next step towards using your service or purchasing your product.
Make sure that you include CTAs that will help users to sign up for your newsletter, learn more about your services, buy your products, and more.
Have a Strong Content
Having strong content can set you apart from your competition. Craft helpful articles, company stories and tutorials that will showcase your credibility and reflect that your team is reliable and passionate about the work. When you create content, keep in mind the following:
- Don’t exaggerate with big paragraphs of text. Most web users will quickly scan your pages to see what you offer so you shouldn’t lose their attention with too much text. Be concise and to the point.
- Merge different types of content. Don’t limit yourself to text. Instead, combine videos, images, slideshows, and text to offer richer articles.
3. eCommerce Website
WordPress became the ultimate solution for building an eCommerce website. There are incredible plugins like WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads that can transform your WordPress website into an eCommerce platform.
An eCommerce website allows visitors to make online purchases. If you’re planning to sell a product or service through your site, this is probably the type of website for you.
The potential in eCommerce is HUGE, with the industry topping 4.2 trillion U.S. dollars worldwide in 2020.
Since your main goal is sales, it’s important to offer your website visitors an excellent user experience. You’ll need your site to be fast, and it should be easy to browse products and complete transactions smoothly.
On top of building your brand, make sure your site is secure and looks legitimate – for example, by getting an SSL certificate. The easiest way to get started and meet all these needs is to hook yourself up to a reputable eCommerce platform.
Your eCommerce website must have the following essential functions:
- The ability to provide users with seamless product browsing.
- A way for users to choose products and place them in the shopping cart
- A transparent and safe payment process
4. Portfolio Website
Want to showcase your work? You can easily do it with a portfolio WordPress site that has gorgeous image galleries and sliders. It is one of the best ways to make sure that your work is noticed. A well-crafted portfolio site tells everyone exactly who you are and what you do. You’ll successfully build your presence while presenting examples of your skills and achievements in a visually-appealing way.
A successful portfolio site is a showcase of who you are and what you do.
This doesn’t mean that the site has to look like a resume, but you should also keep your design as simple, clean, and as navigable as possible. If you’re not a visual artist or eccentric, you need to stay away from unnecessary features and fonts on your portfolio site. Everything on your site needs to support your work and not thing distract users.
5. Online Community
With WordPress, you can develop any type of online community that you can imagine! If you own a business, an online community can help you stand out from the competition and engage your target market. As a blogger, you can reach out to your niche audience and build a loyal following.
It doesn’t matter whether you want to provide support, build a following, or create a place for similar-minded individuals to share their opinions, WordPress is an excellent platform for developing an online community.
A membership website requires visitors to register before they can access private content. Membership can be free, paid, or both.
Some websites allow readers to access a certain amount of content for free, but charge for full access. Like Medium – which makes you pay to read more than 3 articles a month.
Alternatively, you might let members unlock all content for a single payment.
OR, you might even charge for a subscription that needs to be renewed after a certain period of time, for example, on a monthly basis.
There’s even a type of membership site called a ‘drip content’ style, where content is released at certain points in time, rather than being available all at once.
6. Multilingual Website
WordPress can be installed in plenty of languages, but you can also develop a multilingual website as well. A multilingual website provides content, products and or services for the readers in many languages. If you want to expand your business to other territories, it’s recommended that you have on the site the home language of the specific territory.
In addition to the language of your target audience, when you configure your multilingual WordPress site, you also need to understand the cultural differences of your target audience as well. Take into account their language, tone, and make sure that your concepts are not damaging to their traditions.
7. Wiki Knowledge Website
Want to add a documentation section with a knowledge base or wiki-like articles? WordPress comes with great assets that can turn your website into an easy-to-browse knowledge base wiki site. There are three different ways you can build a wiki site within WordPress:
- By using a dedicated WordPress wiki theme to build your knowledge base.
- You can use a dedicated WordPress wiki plugin to build your knowledge base.
- You can use some custom code snippets to build your knowledge base.
8. Magazine and Digital Publishing Websites
Magazine and digital publishing can be a combination of news, stories, entertainment or another type of reporting. If you ever think about the browsing habits of users, then most of the websites that they visit are purely for news and entertainment, such as The Onion.
Of course, you can also make money from a publishing platform that is built on top of WordPress, in most of the cases through programmatic advertisements that show on the pages instead of selling products and services on the page.
In 2018 alone, DevriX managed to scale over 10 retainer publishers from thousands to millions of page views per month, maximizing their revenue and cutting out their costs in the process. One of their clients Obsev (OBSessed With EVerything) was doing significant traffic (30MM+ pageviews per month) and hitting a wall with scaling challenges.
DevriX also partnered together with Pagely to help them out, and now, their traffic levels have quadrupled!
9. Amazon-Affiliate Stores
An Amazon-affiliate store lets you sell your products through Amazon.com as an affiliate and earn a percentage of each sale. It is one of the easiest ways to start an online business with WordPress.
As the store owner, you can attract traffic to your WordPress site by including your affiliate links in your content. When the users click on the link and purchase the product, you’ll earn your commission from the purchase.
You can kickstart your Amazon-affiliate store with WooCommerce as they are the most accepted method for it. After installing and activating the WooCommerce plugin, you’ll need to sign up for an Amazon affiliate account to start selling products with your Amazon affiliate ID.
Go to Amazon’s Affiliate Program page and click on the “Join for Free” button.
Set up an account and you’re good to go. For more tips on how to successfully launch a WordPress-powered eCommerce business, visit our guide here.
10. SaaS
SaaS is the perfect method to deliver an app service. In return, prospects use the software without having to worry about maintenance and installing. They simply have it available on the Internet through your WordPress build.
A SaaS solution can be deployed in multiple areas, including B2B, HR, CRM, Management, Finance, etc. As a matter of fact, we’ve built our own CRM platform from scratch on WordPress called DX Sales CRM.
DX Sales CRM is a chief CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform that allows small and medium-sized business owners to manage their internal transactions within their WordPress dashboard.
Our team of WordPress experts excels in the development of top of the range SaaS applications that generate a big user base and serious amounts of traffic. We provide our clients with dependable code infrastructure and server levels that can scale over time, with an UX-acceptable process for subscriptions, as well as managing different roles and features.
11. A Multisite Network
With WordPress Multisite, you can create a huge WordPress-driven network of sites that share themes or plugins, but have various content tables for the data. This is an excellent solution for universities, schools and other educational institutions, as well as for premium SaaS-based projects.
For example, let’s say that you want to build a publishing platform, but you also want to build a separate project where you’ll bring in additional users to convert. Instead of installing WordPress one more time, with the Multisite option, you can use the same username and dashboard to manage them both.
The sub-sites in Multisite networks can share the same plugins, themes, and database, but they don’t have their own unique server directory. Although, they do have individual media directories and tables in the database, which guarantee you unique content for each site from the network. You can either use the same plugins or you can have specific plugins that work on a subsite X and subsite Y or have activated plugins that are available across the whole network.
At eSearch, we build WordPress Multisite networks with tens of thousands of distinctive subsites, premium custom plugins that are configured specifically for each network, and premium solutions for flexible payment plans and feature sets.
We’ve developed and maintained WordPress networks with up to 80,000 sites and successfully scaled server infrastructures for day-to-day customer traffic or product launch campaigns.
The platforms that we develop are strong and consistent with the continuous WordPress Core updates. We also manage the server infrastructure and monitor the Multisite network for the purpose of predicting traffic spikes so that these can be solved straight away.
Wrapping It Up
We hope that now we’ve provided you with several ideas that you can use to kickstart and scale your business with the help of the most powerful CMS! Whatever your niche is, WordPress has your back with endless functionalities and unlimited growth opportunities!
As you’ve seen from this article, there’s a huge range of types of websites that can be built.
We hope this article has inspired you to see some of the popular options that are available to you – and how you can hope to get started.
Be sure to browse the rest of our content to help build a strong and steady-growing site.
Good luck!
