40+ Ways of Using WordPress and BlogSites

As a matter of fact, 90% of people use WordPress only for blogs and websites.

Actually, you can do a hell lot more with it. We know that WP is extremely user-friendly, we know that it’s very flexible and we also know it’s easily customisable. Below here, I have pointed out 45+ different ways of using WordPress.

Want to learn how to start a blog? Check out our step-by-step tutorial.

Before I move on, and spread out all the endless possibilities I just have to say that you might need to

• … install special themes
• … install specific plugins
• … have light knowledge of CMS and editing WordPress

How Can You Use WordPress?

1) Personal blog

The most common reasons why WordPress is being so heavily used is because over 50% of blogs run on WordPress blogging platform. It’s extremely easy and not difficult to setup and maintain the blog later. Click here to learn more about how to start your own blog.

2) Business website

Many web designers and developers use WordPress to create webpages for both small and large companies. Again, it’s easy to set up and employees can write content without any knowledge in web creation / HTML.

3) Landing page/ Sales page

Most internet marketers use WordPress to build high-end sales and landing pages for their products and items. Mostly because you can set it up faster than a HTML page and it’s flexible as well. One of the themes that’s more popular than the others are Thesis & OptimizePress.

4) Online magazine

When you host a magazine, there is no need to print it on paper. In fact, there are more magazines online than in the real world. Salon & AskMen are good examples that have shown huge number of readers and growth. You can find some great online magazine themes from mhthemes.com.

5) News site

Again, you can start a reputable news site with WordPress. There are hundreds of thousands of them but the main problem behind them is traffic. How to gain a decent number of followers and keep them coming back. CNN, TechCrunch and many other popular websites run on WordPress platform.

6) Event blog/site

There’s an upcoming event that you really care about. However, you don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars for web developers and you don’t want to be without a site as well. What’s the cure? Get your WordPress live and get a proper event theme.

7) Portfolio

You need a space where you can “show-off” your portfolio. You don’t want to hassle with HTML and you want something neat and beautiful. OneXtraPixl has pointed out 30 best themes for portfolio – have a look!

8) Gallery

You have those awesome photos that you recently made. You want to share them with your friends and followers. Why don’t you upload all your photos to your WordPress gallery blog for everyone to see? WPBeginner has explained it all quite well.

9) Membership site

You have your own product(s) and/or video(s) uploaded to your WordPress site. You don’t want to create separate webpage for your members yet you want your products to be in safe. What are your choices? Chris Lema has made a very comprehensive comparison.

10) Resume / CV site

Sometimes you might feel that you need a bit more than a blog, twitter and LinkedIn account. For that, you can make a clean and neat Resume / personal CV site with WordPress. Jon Dipietro made a 1 hour long webinar on how to create a resume with WordPress.

11) Video blog

Want to be the next YouTube? Don’t want to spend millions on it? Here’s a solution for your – definite guide to video blogging.

12) Polling site

Interested in polls? Want to know others opinion? Just looking for a feedback? Turn your WordPress blog into polling site with PollDaddy.

13) Clone sites – Twitter, 9gag, Digg

Yeah, you can clone them all. You just need the right themes and you are good to go. How ethical it is depends on you… Here’s a Twitter clone (in case you need it).

14) Review site

I admit, I have made some “review” sites in the past. They have all been built using WordPress. The main purpose of review sites is to give detailed overview and tips about specific products. You can start a review blog within minutes on every single WordPress theme.

15) Confession blog

Confession blogs are extremely popular these days and WordPress allows to start one within minutes. Make sure you choose a minimalistic theme for your blog so your followers could concentrate on your confessions not your design.

16) Article library

Article libraries gather articles, press releases and other online texts. There are thousands of them and they’re mostly popular among people who are active or working in the search engine optimisation industry. If you’re interested in a specific topic, starting an article library in a certain niche is a great idea for two reasons. Firstly, you get a lot of industry knowledge and secondly you get to know a lot of people from that industry.

17) Online clock, stopwatch site, countdown site

Building an online clock, stopwatch or just a countdown site is easier than ever because WordPress has plugins for each of them. The variety for these types of pages is quite big. For example countdown site can be built to show the marriage time or a lot of travellers use it to show when they are back home. Feel free to choose your plugin from here.

18) Directory site

We have all seen those famous directory sites like Dmoz and JoeAnt. While they are not built on WordPress doesn’t say that you are unable to do so. Here’s a tutorial on how you can set up your own directory site: WPMU article

19) Web soapbox

Web soapbox is an opinion page. The term originates from people holding public speeches standing on a box, just like in Hyde Park or any other public speaking corner. Nevertheless, online era has made it possible to start publishing speeches and opinions online.

20) Press release site

Press release sites are in a similar to article libraries. (covered previously in point 17) Once you get going with that, you’ll have thousands of valuable resources and knowledge to use.

21) Job listing site

Internet is full sites where people publish job ads and these pages are hugely popular due to the unemployment. It may be very hard to conquer the “big players” but small ones targeted to a specific audience can do very well and also be profitable. WordPress has some good plugins to publish job adds with great design. I would concentrate more on freelancers for example HTML 5 developers.

22) E-commerce

Many E-commerce sites are built on WordPress. It’s easy to setup, easy to add new products and it’s fairly cheap (even when you outsource it). Here’s a quick overview on how to build a WordPress E-commerce site the right way.

23) Social bookmark site

Social bookmarking sites allow users to add, browse and share web content and articles. The first ones were started back in 1996 and some of them have grown into big companies, like Delicious. One of the fastest growing of them now is UpWorthy. They’ve picked video as the type of content they gather.

24) Forum

Take a look at WarriorForum, it has thousands of readers and contributors. The competition between forum websites is big but there is always room for new ones who are willing to deliver more value or better community. If you don’t want to start something huge, you could try building a small one (at first).

25) Classifieds

Yes, I know that there are thousands of well-known classifieds sites on the webs. That doesn’t hinder you from starting one with WordPress.

26) Webcomics

Comics are the part of newspapers that almost everyone reads but things have changed a bit. Artists and comics designers have moved to web. If you like drawing satirical sketches or passing on humour through pictures, webcomics site is definitely for you.

27) City guide

Internet has hugely changed the way people travel and plan their journeys. A couple of years ago people used old tourist maps and travel agencies but now a huge number of traveling sites have crowdsourced content. To name some of them TripAdvisor, LikeALocal and many others. It is easy to build city guide websites for tourists with WordPress. Moreover, the monetisation potential is quite good as when you’re building a site about Barcelona you can sell local tours, hotel bookings and many other things there.

28) Podcast

Podcast is the new rockstar of the online era. First came usual blogs where people posted stories and photos. As video cameras and smartphones became cheaper, the number of video blogs aka vLogs rose hugely. Podcasts have been the playground only for professionals but the trend is changing. There are different free softwares that help to create and manage podcasts easily and almost every laptop nowadays has a built-in microphone. So moms do weekly podcasts about cooking and family finance, starting DJ’s record their first mixtapes every week and publish them as podcasts.

29) Contest

You can also turn your WordPress blog into contest. I’m more than sure that it will bring more “buzz” when visitors can vote and add their own items to the list. All you need is proper contest theme and you’re good to go.

30) Web chat

Web chats allow people to communicate with each other. It’s a great way to keep people on your site and discussing. For example you can start weekly “chat sessions” and grow the initiative into a powerful movement. There are similar discussions taking place on Twitter but they are sometimes too spammy to follow, so here’s your chance.

31) Coupon site

Coupon sites share discount coupons for readers. There are different coupon sites for domain purchasing, fashion shopping, gaming and many others. These sits can collect huge traffic numbers and many of them are crowd-sourced meaning that the followers post the coupons or discount codes for the others.

32) WordPress Wiki

Wiki sites provide readers with useful knowledge. If you’re an app developer, feel free to build the a wiki site for beginner developers. You can create a lot of value with that because it helps to save a lot of time. The same logic can be used for cooking, investing, car sales and much more.

33) Contact book

Managing contacts for companies and consultants can be painful when the number of contacts grows rapidly. WordPress has several plugins that allow to manage contacts easily. Another plus is that when the contacts are online, the risk of losing them is smaller.

34) E-mail newsletter

You are an expert in something? Great! Start a website and send out your weekly newsletter to subscribers. It’s a great way to do business online because your subscribers are your potential customers in a certain niche. Secondly you can build your personal brand like Brian Dean from Backlinko is doing.

35) Timeline

Timeline sites help to visualize events or certain dates very effectively. For example mapping down the history of the US is quite hard with plain text, people just won’t read it. So, using timeline plugins make it easier to follow and remember. Here’s a list of timeline plugins that WordPress platform supports.

36) Google map tagging blog

Adding Google Maps to your blog allows you to mark specific locations on the map. You’re a huge fan of local cusine and would like to mark down the best eating experiences in your city or want to build a page of the best nightclubs for tourists? The possibilities are quite endless.

37) Questions and answers site

These sites help people to get answers to even the simplest questions. There are different versions of them, Quora is the best known together with WikiAnswers. The content of these sites is created and curated by the users. Additionally, there are questions and answers sites where people can ask specific questions directly from a person. We still believe that there are huge possibilities in that field, like Q&A site for beginner guitar players.

38) Ticketing system

Online ticketing helps companies gain more revenue from online sales because it is accessible 24 hours. Ticketing sites are already popular where people can select their interests (football/classical music/comedy etc), see the upcoming events and buy tickets right away. Again, we see huge potential in niche ticketing sites like standup comedy tickets site that covers the whole Europe or something similar.

39) Collaboration tool

WordPress community has developed some amazing themes that allow to use it in many creative and effective ways. With a collaboration tool you can set up your private platform for sharing data, information and everything important privately with your team, colleagues or friends privately. Here’s the tutorial how to do that.

40) Project management

Tired of using Trello, Asana or messy Excel sheets for project management purposes? WordPress platform can be used for it very easily and effectively. Here is a list of 5 most useful project management plugins.

41) Invoicing

Invoicing is an important process for every company but it may be very unpleasant for freelancers who don’t know how the system works and don’t have time to waste on administrative tasks. With some easy plugins you can set up really great invoicing system through WordPress dashboard. This way all the invoices are stored, sent out and kept in one place and you can keep your eye on financials. WP-Invoice is the best plugin for that with several customisation options.

42) Online book

Publishing books for Kindle or iPad is painful and very time-consuming. There are certain rules that have to be followed and people are willing to pay $200-500 for the services that helps them to upload books that get accepted. Alternative way to publish books and stories is to start an online book site with WordPress. You can publish the whole book or write new chapters every week. There are some great children books that use that model.

43) Help desk

Help desk support is an inevitable part of E-commerce and software products. Companies invest hundreds of thousands into custom help desk solutions while WordPress has a nice and working solution for that. The whole tutorial how to set up the help support system is here.

44) Gaming portal/site

Kids of the dot.com bubble era definitely remember places like Miniclip.com that were hugely popular with hundreds of browser-based games. Although gaming has moved more to tablets, there are still many ways to build gaming sites. For example, the popular first-person shooter game Counter-Strike has successful sites that gather all the server IP’s where people can play. If you don’t want to embed online games to your site, you can build community websites for specific games like MineCraft, Clash of Clans or many others.

45) Pitch your startup

Every startup needs to have an online identity. WordPress is the easiest way to build even the simplest landing or information page for the future users or customers. Many starting technology companies built their first minimum viable products on WordPress because the infrastructure is great. There are different plugins to quickly build payment solutions, members’ sections and others. Another very important thing for startups is blogging. Every early stage startup should blog regularly to build up content that brings in traffic.

46) RSS Aggregator

RSS aggregators are also known as RSS /news/feed readers and they help people to gather information from different sources and aggregate it into one place. For example if you read more than 25 blogs and newspapers, it’s quite difficult to visit them separately every day to check for new posts. RSS Aggregators stream the desired web content into one place. Google Reader has been the most popular one but it has been closed by now. There are different WordPress plugins for RSS feeds.

47) Courses and Schooling

Courses and schooling websites create huge value and have become extremely popular. Take a look at Khan Academy, Coursera or Udacity that teach people all around the world different subjects starting from grade school math to university biology and programming courses. These websites have millions of active followers and are leading the revolution in online education. Still, there are hundreds of niches where there are no online courses yet.