7 Things You Didn’t Know WordPress Could Do

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You know WordPress is versatile. Big name companies and individuals — with many more use cases in between — use WordPress.

But just how versatile is it? What is it that WordPress can do that you didn’t think of yet? Or maybe you did know that WordPress does a lot but you just didn’t make that move?

WordPress is invincible when it comes to everything from hosting to setup; from themes to plugins; from launch to marketing; from customization to feature sets.

Here’s a short peek into what You Didn’t Know WordPress could do:

WordPress for Ecommerce

No. It’s not that you didn’t know that WordPress could be used for ecommerce. It’s only because you possibly went (or will opt for) for other popular options available such as Magento, OpenCart, Shopify, or BigCommerce.

All of those ecommerce platform options are powerful and they all have some great features that can help setup, run, and manage your ecommerce store.

But they also have issues such as lack of portability. Plus, if you use hosted platforms such as Shopify, you’d lose a certain degree of control since Shopify is hosted and managed by the folks at the company.

You’d thereby be limited to one of those Shopify themes and depend on Shopify for loading speed, for instance.

If you need complete control of your ecommerce store, WordPress with one of many plugins available is the best solution ever.

WordPress as a Q & A site

If you are a Quora user, you know how powerful user generated content can be. While we won’t suggest setting up a site to compete with the sheer power and popularity of Quora itself.

However, you could always take the effort to build a super-focused community website around your products and services, regardless of your business.

WordPress allows you to deploy a Q & A site to start helping you build a community around a topic, your products, or your services. There are plenty of themes available that come with BuddyPress in the box.

Or you can mix and match options to find the right combination of themes and plugins to start a Q & A site of your own.

WordPress for FAQ & Customer Support

You can streamline selling your products and services and make the sales process more efficient just by predicting possible questions and objections even before your customers make an attempt to click on “add to cart” buttons.

By answering possible questions ahead of a point of sale (your checkout page?), you can reduce friction, minimize the effort it takes for customers to send you pre-sales questions, and boost your conversions.

Using simple plugins such as the WordPress FAQ plugin makes it simple and easy to help field multiple questions, inbound inquiries, and objections from your customers.

WordPress for Marketing

WordPress websites take less than a few minutes to setup. Within a day or so, your website could be up and running. Plus, it’s possible to connect WordPress with many popular marketing tools you’d need such as Yoast SEO, Mailchimp , connect with Facebook , Google Analytics , and more.

As a business owner, you can’t afford to waste months or even years for a basic WordPress business website.

You can do all the tweaks and customizations later and you’d rather focus on the relentless effort that digital marketing really is.

WordPress, on its part, can at least help easy the technical part of the equation. We’ve written about a few irrefutable reasons WordPress is perfect for marketing.

WordPress as a Flickr Lookalike

Photos are big business on the web. You could potentially run another Deposit Photos or ShutterStock as a business model.

Maybe you just need to put up a website for your community to share photos within the community. Perhaps all that you need is something looks and feels like Flickr.

WordPress – minus some of the bells and whistles Flickr has – can be built for you to share optimized and compressed photos as image galleries, sliders, or in any other format you need with just a simple plugin like our Photo Gallery plugin.

Showcase your images, combine multiple images into albums, add descriptions, sort by tags, and let your photos be viewed either on desktop or on mobile.

If you need to, you can also use our Photo Gallery Ecommerce Add On sell your digital images and photo prints using Stripe or Paypal integrations.

WordPress as an Event Website

Do you launch multiple events as a business? Or does your business have everything to do with running events? In any case, WordPress allows you to run an events-based website with everything you’d need to launch, manage, and provide a great platform for your events?

Our Event Calendar Plugin , for instance allows you to setup a SEO-ready event website with responsive design quickly. Plus, you can host an unlimited number of events while organizing your events by categories and tags.

Serve your potential event attendees better with integrated Google Map views, social sharing buttons, poster boards, and also provide support for venues and organizers.

WordPress as a Magazine

Again, you already this point well. Some of your favourite publications online run on WordPress.

But it’s worth a mention again…

Too many bloggers and potential online publication owners place emphasis on choosing the right theme when it comes to their dream of starting another Mashable or TechCrunch.

We think that the focus should be on “content” and how consistently you could develop the kind of content that brings you traffic, lifelong visitors, and help build you traffic (and hence revenue).

Once you start publishing (like you should, especially for an online publication), you can always chisel, tweak, and tune your design later.

Want to start a multi-authored blog or publication? Just start with a magazine-style theme and start focusing on producing content for your visitors.

You can even monetize your magazine with our Ad Manager Plugin to start creating a revenue stream.
If you think about it, you could practically do absolutely anything with WordPress.

Just be sure to “not” spend too much time agonizing about the platform and focus on what you need to do to run your business.

What do you think about WordPress? What are some of those things you know WordPress could do but most people don’t? We’d love to hear from you. Please comment below.

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