Launching a new website is a serious project that requires careful planning. One of the first steps is choosing our software, and WordPress seems like the obvious choice for many different project types. Utilizing the right themes and plugins can turn your page into anything you want, so today, we will outline the most common types of websites you can build with WP.
Types of WordPress Websites
Being an open-source system, WordPress offers practically limitless options for customization. There are thousands of free and premium add-ons available for the CMS, and the huge community contributes to the WP evolution even more.
What started as a simple blogging tool has grown to the most versatile tool for building websites. Let’s now see what projects, in particular, can benefit from the WordPress environment.
Blogs
When WordPress first saw the light of day, it was a mere blogging platform. While it has evolved into a lot more than that, the developers haven’t forgotten where it all started. Even in its latest versions, one of the main ways of displaying information is via posts. It has also retained the categories and tags, which are essential parts of any personal blog.
With thousands of WordPress themes and plugins specifically designed for blogs, you can be sure to find all kinds of useful features for this type of website. At its core, WordPress never really abandoned bloggers, and it’s still the most preferred choice to build your own personal space online.
Business websites
WordPress wouldn’t have been so successful if it didn’t expand to serve a larger audience.
Business organizations had little other options in the past than to hire a professional developer and have their page built from scratch. Thanks to WordPress, this is no longer the case.
The CMS offers a solid foundation for professional-looking websites in a variety of business niches. You can quickly put up a page, introduce your brand, present your services, offer contacts to your company.
WordPress is flexible enough for growing projects and offers great security options to keep a mission-critical website safe and sound.
Ecommerce websites
WordPress might not sound like the first go-to choice when you’re building an online shop, but plugins like WooCommerce have certainly put the CMS among the top contenders.
Woo was released back in 2011, and according to its WordPress.org page, already has over 5 million active installations. It lets users create a fully-fledged ecommerce shop through the familiar WordPress dashboard and sell physical goods, services, or software products online. In terms of the actual sales, you have extensive control over everything – inventory management, pricing, promotions, payment methods, taxes, shipping, and more.
The plugin has attracted its own community of fans and developers who work on free and premium WooCommerce-specific themes and plugins.
What more? With automation platforms like SureTiggers, you can take your ecommerce business to the next level. It helps you connect your WooCommerce store with hundreds of SaaS applications, WordPress plugins and themes with ease. It requires no coding and one can easily create custom automated workflows.
SureTriggers has various advantages for ecommerce websites. It can send order confirmation emails to consumers, change inventory levels, and send follow-up emails for abandoned carts. The plugin supports payment gateway connectivity, allowing for real-time alerts of successful transactions and automating order fulfillment operations. This guarantees a pleasant and efficient client experience.
Overall, SureTriggers assists ecommerce businesses in streamlining their operations, increasing customer engagement, and driving sales by automating important processes, minimizing human work, and providing personalized customer experiences.
News websites
WordPress is a perfect solution for a news website, which shouldn’t really be that surprising.
WordPress’s popularity has led to the development of numerous tools and techniques to make websites based on the CMS more SEO-friendly. For a news website, this is extremely important, as it can immediately put you at an advantage compared to the many competitors online.
By default, posts can incorporate text and images, plus WordPress has a comment section, which is another essential feature for news websites. Additional plugins can help you monetize your efforts and offer premium content to paid subscribers, restricting access for the rest.
Online communities
If you have a place that attracts like-minded people, they will soon want to interact with each other. Luckily, WordPress can help you out in this respect as well.
Plugins like bbPress can easily turn your WordPress website into an internet discussion board. Other add-ons (e.g., BuddyPress) enable users to communicate between themselves in individual and group chat rooms.
Using WordPress, you can even create the foundations of a small social network with no more than a couple of clicks.
Consumer review websites
People like to express their opinion online, but they are even more interested in other people’s thoughts, especially when it comes to purchasing an unfamiliar product or service.
That’s why consumer review websites tend to get more and more popular with time.
WordPress gives you enough management options to organize content according to your specifications, and the thousands of available themes help you create a unique design for your website.
Plugins like Schema Pro are specifically designed for user testimonial websites. Such tools will help you refine how your reviews look, complete with a rating system and the ability to interact with users.
Portfolios
A few years back, WordPress themes mostly looked like they had come out of the same mold. Luckily, things have changed quite a lot since then.
WordPress themes now come in all shapes and sizes, covering almost any niche you can think of. Its extensive design functionalities have attracted artists, designers, photographers, and an army of other professionals who want to showcase their work.
But the pretty designs are not the only selling point here.
Developers have written plugins that enable all sorts of animations and visual effects. You will be able to easily enhance and manage your portfolio, and WP’s SEO advantages are just the cherry on top.
Government websites
Many government websites run on WordPress, including WhiteHouse.gov, State.gov, America.gov, and dozens of others all around the world.
There are a number of reasons for this.
Setting up and maintaining a WordPress website is more affordable than a completely custom design, which is important when taxpayers’ money is on the line. At the same time, the CMS’s flexibility lets government agencies create websites that have both news feeds for important announcements and updates and pages that showcase the identity of the organization.
What’s more, because WordPress is open-source, so its code is regularly reviewed by a huge community of developers. As a result, vulnerabilities and bugs are identified and fixed quickly, making the CMS a highly secure solution.
Podcasting websites
Podcasting projects have flourished over the last few years.
It’s a great concept, really – people with common interests gather around a microphone and discuss a topic they’re passionate about. They record the discussion and publish it online, so other users interested in the subject can hear their thoughts and insights on the matter.
It used to be regular internet users who did the podcasts, but lately, celebrities have been getting in on the action as well. Podcasting is so popular that streaming platforms like Spotify use it as an integral part of their business model.
Plugins like PowerPress Podcasting will not only let you advertise your podcast through your WordPress page but will also help you manage the actual podcast. PowerPress lets you publish episodes directly to the streaming platform of your choice, embed audio and video players, create channels where listeners can subscribe, and even operate multiple podcasts from a single WordPress site.
Restaurant websites
WordPress proves a great tool for restaurant owners looking to establish an online presence for their businesses. Once you select an appealing theme that attracts attention, you can utilize an add-on that gives you specific functionalities for this type of business.
Setting up a plugin like MotoPress WP Restaurant lets you publish your menu online and maintain a fully-functioning food ordering system.
Meanwhile, add-ons like Five Star Restaurant Reservations let you in on other useful features like an online table booking system integrated directly into your WordPress website.
Question and answer websites
The internet can be a pretty pleasant place where people help each other and share information and experience. If you want to be a part of this endless information exchange, you can strongly consider a Q&A website.
Such functionality is not included in WordPress by default, but plugins like AnsPress do the job for you. You can decide the Q&A platform to be core or just a small section from your website. The plugin also offers a number of additional extras like support for multiple languages, reCAPTCHA, push notifications, a voting system, and many more.
Event websites
Planning and managing events is another project you can easily do with WordPress. In fact, there are numerous plugin options in that aspect, and some of them appear to be quite powerful.
Many add-ons give you unlimited freedom to manage your events. For example, you can put up a Google Maps widget and pinpoint the exact location of each event, create a calendar, or even integrate the plugin with WooCommerce for ticket sales.
Job directories
A job board is another type of WordPress website that is absolutely possible with the help of the right plugins.
One good example is WP Job Manager, which lets you create an intuitive interface for businesses who want to post their job listings. Job seekers can then browse through the listings and filter them in numerous ways. Applying for a job is just as easy, and you can even monetize your services.
Integration with WooCommerce is available for some job board plugins, which means you can set up an internal payment processor and earn money along the way.
LMS websites
Quite a few people turned to online education in 2020 and became familiar with Learning Management Systems (LMS) like Moodle. But investing time and resources into learning a completely new platform is something not everyone could afford.
WordPress is again a viable alternative.
There are numerous plugins like Tutor LMS that promise to turn your WordPress website into a complete, functional LMS. It fits the needs of both individual tutors and educational organizations that are looking to host an online course marketplace.
Teachers can easily create and manage courses and track student enrollment.
Students get to get access to the materials through their own frontend dashboard and even receive certificates for courses they’ve already completed.
Knowledge base and Wiki websites
If you’re going to present a vast amount of useful information on your website, you better make sure it’s well organized and easily accessible. This rings especially true when you offer specific products/services and want to keep a rich database of tips and tutorials about them.
Maintaining proper documentation for your product is essential, and while you can do it with WordPress only, plugins like BetterDocs let you take your knowledge base to the next level. Such tools give you virtually endless customization options for how the content is arranged and categorized. Its powerful search functionality helps users find what they’re looking for very quickly, which will inevitably inspire trust in your brand and attract more customers.
ScalaHosting and WordPress
Now that you’ve seen how versatile WordPress is, you should have no problems understanding why it powers more than a third of all websites today. Out-the-box, WordPress doesn’t have any specific requirements apart from PHP and MySQL support.
Still, we’ve put all our experience into ensuring our servers are optimized to host your WordPress website regardless of the nature of your project.
To make WP fans’ lives even easier, the ScalaHosting Team is happy to equip you with the SWordPress Manager. This state-of-the-art tool helps you install WordPress with a single click and manage it via SPanel. You can also clone your WP installation, change the admin password, and even enable automatic updates.
The unique Security Lock feature allows you to restrict access to your files and directories, making your website safe from unauthorized changes.
Both SPanel and SWordPress Manager are included in your managed VPS plan at no extra cost.
Conclusion
As you can see, considering WordPress as a blog application in 2020 is far from reality. The most popular CMS offers a flexible modular environment that lets you transform a page into practically anything. We have outlined 15 types of WordPress websites in this review, but you can be sure there are loads of more options with the platform.
Ready to try WP for yourself?
FAQ
What makes WordPress so versatile?
The WordPress core has had more than 17 years to grow from a humble blogging platform to the powerful CMS that it is today. During this time, it has gathered an enormous following from people who have different needs and requirements for their projects.
To fit them all, developers have written thousands of plugins that extend the CMS functionality in many different ways. Thanks to these add-ons, WordPress can adapt to almost any scenario.
How can I choose the best plugins for my projects?
Outlining your needs, you can easily determine what functionalities are missing in your core WordPress installation. From there on, you can check the official plugin repository and see what tools are available for your project requirements.
In the general scenario, plugins with the most downloads and positive user reviews are usually a safe choice. Of courses, you can always opt-in for a more alternative tool, but make sure to test everything in a staging area before updating your live website.
Is WordPress a one-size-fits-all solution?
Although it’s incredibly versatile, WordPress might not be the best solution in all use cases. There are quite a few other website building platforms out there, and some are designed with a specific purpose.
As such, they often provide you with a wider range of options and are optimized to work efficiently for a single objective. It’s important to research all possible alternatives before you make your final software decision.
ScalaHosting – 15 Types of WordPress Websites Launching
