14 Different Types of Sites You Can Build with WordPress

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 43% of the internet running on the platform.

As a top 10 international WordPress agency, we’ve led the development of hundreds of platforms from zero to past 100 million monthly page views. What works in the early stages of a development pilot (the so-called MVP phase) scales to 10-20K visitors.

Through continuous refinements, performance optimizations, decoupling systems, and doubling down on scalability and design patterns, professional teams can bend WordPress indefinitely.

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.

1. 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.

Blogging Tools to Enhance Your Website:

SEO Optimization

• Yoast SEO: The Yoast SEO plugin revolutionizes search engine optimization (SEO) by boosting your website’s visibility and driving organic traffic. With essential tools for optimizing titles, meta descriptions, and technical aspects.
• Rank Math: Reputed as a popular option, Rank Math presents a comprehensive range of features, addressing content analysis, guidance, and advanced SEO capabilities.
• All in One SEO Pack: Another widely recognized option, the All in One SEO Pack plugin emphasizes simplicity and effectiveness. It is user-friendly and provides essential SEO features, making it suitable for a variety of websites.
• SEOPress: SEOPress seamlessly blends power and user-friendliness, offering features such as XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs, and social media integration. With SEOPress, you can refine your SEO settings without overwhelming complexity. Moreover, it is compatible with WooCommerce, making it an excellent choice for e-commerce sites.

Page Builders Plugins for Customizable Layouts

• Elementor: Elementor is a popular page builder plugin that allows users to design visually stunning and functional pages without the need for coding skills. It features an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, a wide range of design elements, and pre-designed templates, and more.
• Beaver Builder: It is a powerful page builder plugin known for its user-friendly interface and flexible design options. It enables users to craft attractive and responsive pages using its drag-and-drop functionality, extensive module library, and ready-to-use templates.
• Divi: Divi is a versatile page builder plugin that offers a range of design tools and customization options to create visually appealing and dynamic web pages. With its intuitive visual editor, drag-and-drop functionality, and extensive layout options, Divi empowers users to build compelling and unique content without requiring advanced technical knowledge.
• Thrive Architect: Thrive Architect is another notable page builder plugin that facilitates the creation of visually appealing and engaging content. Its intuitive drag-and-drop interface and extensive library of design elements and templates make it a valuable tool for building unique and compelling pages.

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 want to blog about a series, make another website for that purpose.

Discover your core expertise and blog about everything that is related to 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 headings (H3, H4, etc) as necessary. In your posts, you can also include bullets and numbered lists for simple and quick points.

Don’t forget about images. A picture is worth a thousand words and you should take advantage of that. Create visually captivating images. Websites like Unsplash, Big Stock, Pixabay, PicJumbo, make discovering affordable images easy. With additional tools such as Figma 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 who 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 use 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.

Your prospects also need to understand what your business is 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.

When building your business website using WordPress, consider the following aspects to achieve specific goals and enhance your online presence:

Increasing Online Visibility:

• SEO optimization: Implement plugins to improve your website’s search engine rankings. Optimize meta tags, keywords, and content to attract organic traffic.
• Regular blogging: Publish relevant and valuable blog posts. Consistent content creation helps boost your website’s visibility and authority.

Generating Leads:

• Lead capture forms: Use plugins such as WPForms to create lead capture forms. Encourage visitors to subscribe to your newsletter or download resources in exchange for their contact information.
• Landing Pages: Design dedicated landing pages for specific offers or promotions. These focus on lead generation and encourage users to take action.
• Facilitating eCommerce transactions: If you’re running an online store, integrate WooCommerce. It provides essential e-commerce features like product listings, shopping carts, and secure payment gateways.

Clear CTAs:

Place clear and compelling calls to action (CTAs) throughout your website. For example “Sign up for our exclusive deals!”, “Explore our product catalog.”, “Get a free consultation.” or “Buy now!”

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.

Our most powerful WooCommerce stores generate tens of millions of dollars in GMV, scaling through digital and physical products, bundles, subscriptions, BNPL mechanisms, and implementing abandoned carts and upsell funnels for maximum efficiency.

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

WooCommerce helps you get the ball rolling and luckily, scaling to tens of thousands of products and millions in sessions is quite possible nowadays.

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 the site has to look like a resume, but you should also keep your design as simple, clean, and 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.

We manage a myriad of different communities – some running bbPress or BuddyPress, others hosted with BuddyBoss, some based on Paid Memberships Pro or alternative content-driven plugins.

Different business needs can be adapted to the corresponding feature set of popular industry-grade solutions, serving any community need.

6. Multilingual Franchise

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 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, and tone, and make sure that your concepts are not damaging to their traditions.

Other platforms often pose limitations in terms of building a powerful multilingual solution. You may be required to run separate sites for each build – or exclusively use subdomains (which aren’t always an efficient SEO decision).

WordPress provides several different architectural ways to get the job done.

7. Wiki/Knowledge Base

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.

At DevriX, since 2017, we managed to scale over 10 retainer publishers from thousands to hundreds of millions of page views per month, maximizing their revenue and cutting out their costs in the process.

One of our clients Obsev (OBSessed With EVerything) was doing significant traffic (30MM+ pageviews per month) and hitting a wall with scaling challenges.

We partnered together with Pagely to help them out, and now, their traffic levels have quadrupled! You can learn more about our mutual success on this link, or watch the entire video of the case study below.

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 installation. 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.

At DevriX, 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 a 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 databases, but they don’t have their own unique server directory. However, 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.

We’ve been in charge of building 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.

Our engineers 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 to predict traffic spikes so that these can be solved straight away.

12. Podcasting Website

Building a podcasting website with WordPress is an exciting opportunity. First, define your podcast’s niche. Consider what unique perspective or value you will offer to your audience.
Next, plan your episode topics taking into account your audience’s interests and consider what topics you are passionate about. Finally, write down your podcast concept and vision. Outline the overall direction and goals for your podcast to guide your content creation.

Here are a few tips to create your podcasting platform:

Select a Podcast-Friendly Theme

Choose a WordPress theme that suits your podcast’s vibe. Look for responsiveness and customization options. Take a look at themes like Raft or explore podcast-specific themes.

Essential Plugins for Podcasters

• PowerPress: This robust plugin manages your podcast files, creates iTunes-compatible RSS feeds, and integrates seamlessly with popular podcast hosting services.
• Fusebox (Smart Podcast Player): Enhance user experience with a beautiful HTML5 player for your episodes.
• Simple Podcast Press: Easily share affiliate links and track downloads.
• Seriously Simple Podcasting: A user-friendly option for managing episodes and feeds.
• Libsyn Podcasting Plugin: Ideal for Libsyn users, it simplifies publishing directly from WordPress.

13. Event Websites

Event websites play a crucial role in promoting and managing events, whether they’re conferences, workshops, or festivals. If you’re using WordPress, you’re in luck because there are excellent tools and plugins available to create engaging event websites.

Key Features to Consider

• Ticketing: Ensure your chosen theme or plugin supports ticket sales. Popular eCommerce plugins like WooCommerce or dedicated event ticketing plugins like Tickera can handle this.
• Event details: Display essential information such as date, time, venue, and speaker bios. Use custom fields to add specific details.
• Integration: Look for plugins that integrate with popular services like PayPal, Google Calendar, and social media platforms.
• Responsive design: Your website should look great on all devices, especially mobile phones.

Choosing the Right Theme

Start by selecting a suitable WordPress theme for your event website. Some popular event-focused themes include:

• Avada: A versatile theme with pre-built event templates and integration with the Events Calendar plugin. It allows you to display event details and even sell tickets using WooCommerce or Eventbrite
• Astra: Known for its flexibility, Astra offers multiple header designs and integrates seamlessly with event management plugins like The Events Calendar and Event Espresso.

Essential Plugins for Event Management Website

• Events Manager: This plugin provides a full event creation and sharing center. It’s free and offers features like ticketing, customizable booking forms, and Google Maps integration.
• Modern Events Calendar: A powerful plugin that matches your brand’s style. It handles ticketing, RSVPs, and more.
• Tickera: Ideal for selling tickets and collecting payments. It integrates smoothly with WordPress and offers various ticketing options.

14. Learning Management Systems (LMS)

The world of Learning Management Systems (LMS) within the WordPress ecosystem is fascinating. Whether you’re an educator, trainer, or business owner, creating an effective online learning platform is essential.

Key Features to Consider:

• Course Creation: Look for plugins that allow easy course setup, lesson creation, and multimedia integration.
• Quizzes and Assessments: Ensure your LMS supports quizzes, grading, and student progress tracking.
• Monetization: Explore payment gateways for selling courses.
• User Experience: Prioritize responsive design and intuitive navigation.

Explore LMS Plugins:

• LearnDash: A robust premium plugin with features like course creation, quizzes, certificates, and drip content.
• LifterLMS: A free plugin with add-ons for advanced features like memberships, gamification, and content protection.
• WP Courseware: Paid plugin with drag-and-drop course creation and powerful integrations.
• Tutor LMS: Free and user-friendly, suitable for beginners.
• LearnPress: Free, lightweight, and extensible.

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!

In case you already have a feasible SaaS or Multisite idea that you would love to develop and discuss further, don’t hesitate to look up our retainer plans. If you are tired of constant patches and unreliable consultants, we’re here to help you!