This is a set of 35 Types of Web Pages to Choose From When Building a Business Site on WordPress.
Let’s take it from the top:
A custom homepage is an excellent opportunity to present the main information about the business, the offering, and everything else that’s important from a business standpoint.
Let’s not get into the details of homepage copywriting, but you get the drift.
Now, what I mean by custom? Basically, a homepage doesn’t necessarily need to have the same layout that’s used throughout the rest of the website. A homepage that’s its own thing is completely acceptable as long as it caters to the target visitor effectively.
For example, check out how Lewis Howes does this on his site. The homepage is a custom creation with individual content blocks one after another, while the “Podcast” page is a standard WordPress listing.
How to build it:
- Dissect your client’s goals, and pick the main, most important goal.
- Design the homepage in a way that’s meant to make this one goal a reality.
- Don’t mind anything else. You can take care of the side goals on other pages.
- Either build a custom page template by hand, or use a starter theme that provides a ready-made, customizable homepage out of the box (like Parallax One).
That being said, there are different schools when it comes to creating a quality About page.
Some say that the page should be built around the visitor and their needs – talking about what the website can do for the visitor. Others say that it should present “you” – the business behind the site – and focus on making the visitor more familiar with the site itself. Then, there’s the storytelling approach that mixes up the two methods (Neil Patel does this quite well, and he even uses a custom graphic created specifically for that page to make it even cooler).
No matter what the copy will end up being, the About page should remain simple, design-wise. A one-column or two-column layout is a safe choice as it’s not distracting and gives sufficient focus to the main content block.
How to build it:
Here are two great guides on how to craft quality About pages:
- by Derek Halpern (DIYthemes.com)
- by Tom Ewer (ManageWP.com)
Also, About pages are usually created as standard WordPress pages, so they rarely require any additional design work on top of what you’re already doing anyway.
You could argue that it’s just another version of the About page, but the real difference is all in the execution and what information you choose to put on the About vs. Getting Started page.
To get a good idea of what this is about, check out Pat Flynn’s site and his Getting Started page.
How to build it:
- From a technical point of view, the Getting Started page is usually a standard WordPress page. No additional design work needed.
I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what a Contact page is, so let’s just focus on the individual blocks of content that you can include in it:
- Intro. Things like general information about the website and who’s taking care of it.
- Your address, phone number and other “real world” info.
- A nice Google map of where the business is located. This can be done with the Intergeo Maps plugin.
- Contact form. No contact page on WordPress can exist without this element. Contact Form 7 seems to be the most popular solution.
- Email address. Display it or not, your call.
- Links to social media profiles.
Just to bring some hard data into the picture, according to eMarketer, 40 percent of US companies use blogs for marketing purposes, and 82 percent of marketers who blog daily acquired a customer using their blog. Whoever you’re building the website for should certainly be aware of these stats.
How to build it:
- If the website uses a custom homepage then you need to assign a separate page to serve as the main blog listing. In the current WordPress implementation, to do this, you need to create a blank page and then assign it as the “posts page” in the Reading Settings section of the wp-admin.
The idea is simple, people trust other people’s opinions more than they trust any traditional sales materials.
The must-have placement for testimonials is on the sales page itself, next to the buy button perhaps, but a separate page – a wall of testimonials can also be a good idea for some types of businesses.
A page like that provides overwhelming proof that whatever the website is selling does indeed work and is appreciated by a number of people.
How to build it:
- Use a full-width page template (with no sidebar) and present each testimonial in its own separate block.
- If you don’t want to design things by hand, you can use a plugin like Shortcodes Ultimate. With it, displaying testimonials is a breeze:
The design of a Portfolio page will depend largely on the type of work that the business is doing. If the profile is slightly more visual then you can safely go with a waterfall-like design borrowed from Pinterest.
For consulting businesses or any other scenario where showcasing the thing that has been done is a bit more challenging, you can go with a company’s logo and some text description on what was done.
How to build it:
- Either take advantage of one of the free portfolio plugins, like: Portfolio by BestWebSoft or Portfolio Gallery.
- Or, go with a portfolio starter theme and use it as the base of the whole website (if the portfolio itself is an important enough element).
Not just my words. Data confirms. According to HubSpot, businesses with over 40 landing pages generated 12 times more leads than those with just one to five landing pages. And a little company you might have heard of, Dell, has seen conversion rates increasing as much as 300 percent when comparing landing pages to standard web pages.
In simple terms, landing pages are single-purpose, distraction-free pages. They usually don’t have a sidebar or a footer, and sometimes even lack a header. This is all done to give the visitor just one possible point of exit from the page – to click the main buy button (or subscribe button, depending on the offer).
In a way, the purpose of a landing page can be similar to that of the homepage. However, while you have only one homepage, you can create a handful of landing pages and use them for different marketing goals.
How to build it:
- See this step-by-step guide: How to Create a Landing Page in WordPress.
Depending on the business you’re building the website for, such a page might be a good way to present the overall range of goods that the business has to offer to the customers. Particularly, if the products are straightforward and can be easily grasped, or if they all fall into the same category (like books). Every entry on such a page can then link to individual sales pages for each product or service.
How to build it:
The biggest challenge here is to create a page that would take each product on the site and then display it automatically on the listing page.
- You might be tempted to handle this via WordPress categories and category listings. Although technically possible, this approach might cause some problems during development. For instance, you’d need to handle the WordPress loop in a custom way and probably complicate things unnecessarily.
- A better solution is to create a whole new custom post type and then build a custom listing page for it. It does require some coding, but it leaves you with an overall better result that won’t interfere with the standard content types that are already in WordPress. You can find out how to do it here: Creating Custom Content in WordPress: Custom Post Types.
In other words, they are often the pages that were the sole reason someone wanted a website in the first place. That’s why building a sales page requires extra care and thought.
Now, what I’m about to say might sound a bit counter-intuitive:
The most effective way of building sales pages is to not build a fixed framework for them.
The thing is that every sales page that the site needs or will need in the future might be very different. In that scenario, creating a single template that will then be used for all sales pages doesn’t have legs.
How to build it:
- Create a very general, even blank page template, and then integrate the whole site with a drag-and-drop content builder plugin. Or even use a drag-and-drop builder theme as the base of the whole site.
- Then, create the individual sales pages that are needed right now.
By doing things this way, you will be able to step in later on and build new sales pages without having to rebuild any previous page templates.
(I also encourage you to check entry #8 on this list – landing pages. Very often, the concept of both is very similar.)
The difficulty with such things is that presenting them as simple blog posts doesn’t work that well. There’s simply too much content, which would make the whole publication difficult to read. Forcing the visitor to scroll endlessly without giving them any visual diversity won’t take you far.
How to build it:
The way Neil Patel does it at QuickSprout is rather expensive. He simply has each guide created by hand. An alternative that’s a bit more universal, especially if you’re handing over the site to someone else is to do two things:
- Create a simple full-width post template along with a drag-and-drop content builder plugin. Through a setup like that, you will be able to craft each part/chapter of the master resource.
- Then, use a plugin like Organize Series to tie all the parts of the resource together.
Check out these examples of two great Team pages:
They go for somewhat opposite approaches to team presentation, but both are excellent.
- Ahrefs focuses on presenting each team member individually and telling a quick story about them.
- Basecamp displays just fun doodles of each person and links directly to their Twitter profiles, with minimal text on the page itself.
How to build it:
- The key to building a great Team page seems to be the presentation itself.
- Make the page fun to look at and in tune with the company’s brand and culture.
- Technically speaking, can be done on top of the default page template in WordPress.
- They help the audience make up their minds about certain common issues. For instance, if the site is about design, the Tools page can mention the top design tools according to the owner of the site (plus why those tools and not the others).
- They give the site owner an opportunity to promote either their own products (among the other ones featured on the page), or to earn affiliate commissions when visitors hop over to some of the third-party tools.
Now, the key point here is to make the list actually useful to the visitors. The tools can’t be just a random set of things.
How to build it:
- Using a standard page template is perfectly fine. Here’s how ProBlogger does this:
Here’s a great example by WinningWP:
How to build it:
- The blocky style looks really good on a Coupons page. The individual coupons usually need to be designed by hand, and the page itself can be a standard page template in WordPress.
A much better solution is to handle archives manually, and especially if the website you’re building will host a lot of content.
How to build it:
- Here’s (my) guide on SmashingMagazine. It explains all the whys and hows of custom archive pages on WordPress.
(Custom archives page built on top of Twenty Fifteen.)
How to build it:
A good Support page needs to provide mainly two things:
- An explanation of what the page is and how to get support.
- Some form of submitting a support ticket. This can be achieved with a plugin like Awesome Support – WordPress Support Plugin.
There is a handful of ways in which you can integrate some form of newsletter sign-up on a WordPress website.
The first and the most straightforward approach is to use the homepage. You can also get the sidebar to work, or utilize any of the other empty areas throughout the site’s layout. There’s a number of plugins that can help you with that.
Then, there’s also the option to create a separate Newsletter Sign-up page – a page built specifically to convince the visitor to subscribe.
Apart from that, your selection of available solutions is also dictated by the email newsletter service that’s going to be used on the site. If it’s MailChimp, a popular choice, then there’s a number of plugins you can use, both free and premium.
If it’s one of the more cost-effective alternatives, like SendinBlue, then you can either go with their official plugin or work with the standard embed code.
(Additionally, if you want to look into the topic of cheaper MailChimp alternatives some more, here’s a nice comparison.)
How to build it:
- Under the hood, a Newsletter Sign-up page is a type of landing page. Please check entry #8 on this list for more info.
As a side benefit, such a page can also be used for promoting new content that the site owner sees as exceptionally valuable.
Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income does a great job at this:
But there’s an elephant in the room…
You can’t really build such a page until the site is running for a while. How else would you know what content is truly the best?
How to build it:
- Feel free to go with anything from a standard template for WordPress pages to completely custom creations.
The idea behind such a page is that not everybody will immediately know that the person running the site is available for work.
From my personal experience, I can tell you that placing a “hire me” link in my site’s main menu has brought the number of people reaching out to me from 0 to at least a couple a week (on the average; sometimes there’s nothing for a week, sometimes multiple a day).
The most important part here is the name/title of the page. It’s not “services” or anything vague like that. It should be direct and to-the-point. Hence “Hire Me/Us” or “Work With Me/Us.”
How to build it:
- The structure of the page? Make it a landing page. Please refer back to entry #8 on this list.
An important characteristic of a good Careers page is that it shouldn’t necessarily assume that the visitor is knowledgeable about the business behind it. Therefore, it needs some of the same information that’s published on the About page, and only then should talk about open positions or other important aspects.
A great example of a Jobs page is the one used by Buffer:
It starts with a block titled “What is Buffer?” Even though it’s likely that most people wanting to work at Buffer already know what the main product is, it’s still worth emphasizing what the company is and what some of the important details about it are from a future employee’s perspective.
How to build it:
- Standard WordPress page template will do, or a full-width template.
- Additional custom content blocks linking to sub-pages presenting open positions.
I’m talking about pages like:
- Privacy Policy.
- Terms of Service.
- Affiliate Disclosure.
- General disclosures and other similar pages.
It’s best to consult with your local authorities to find out what is required of business sites in your area, and what kind of information needs to be presented on those pages.
How to build it:
- Most often done on top of a full-width page template.
This sort of page is simply made to present why the thing that the business has to offer indeed is better than the competitor’s. This achieves two things when done right:
- It convinces the visitor that they are dealing with a better alternative.
- It has the possibility to rank for highly profitable keywords for the business. Even though “we vs someone” certainly doesn’t have the best volume, it’s a pure buyer’s keyword because the searcher is actively looking for someone to convince them.
For example, the aforementioned email marketing service/tool SendinBlue uses this concept to compare their offering to MailChimp’s:
On that page, they showcase all the numbers that work in their favor.
How to build it:
- Custom page template with modular or standard layout.
- Testimonials block.
- Buy button or subscribe button.
That being said, embedding a live demo isn’t always possible (when dealing with a desktop software, for example). In that case, simple screenshots or demo video will do as well.
An additional tip for WordPress theme stores or any other business offering visual products:
Use the demo of your product to expose the visitor to additional copy convincing them to get/buy the thing.
For example, here’s one of our – Themeisle’s – theme demos (click the “live demo” link):
Instead of using some standard “lorem ipsum,” there’s actual copy in the demo itself. The split testing software tells us that this copy-rich version delivers better conversions (statistically significant). I can only imagine that the same thing should be true for demos of other similar products.
How to build it:
- Embed live demo if possible. If not, use screenshots or videos on a standard WordPress page.
You’re a lot better off creating something custom and actually good-looking.
For instance, take a look at some of these pages:
How to build it:
- Use attractive imagery. Give the visitor a next step. In other words, don’t leave them right there, tell them where they can go next.
- For the technical how-to, visit this post.