In this post, we will look at some examples of enterprise-level WordPress sites. Why? Because it’s a frequent question whether the WordPress platform can accommodate websites of a certain size. In many people’s minds, WordPress is still a blogging tool or something only suitable for small business.
Today, we want to put those doubts to rest. The examples of enterprise-level WordPress sites below will show once and for all what the CMS is capable of. We will take a closer look at the traffic numbers, design, and technology running in the background of each site.
What Kind of Enterprise-Level Sites Use WordPress?
Ready to be impressed? Then let’s get started right away.
1. New York Post
Our first entry is the New York Post, one of the most popular newspapers from the Big Apple. Their website gets an estimated 118,000,000 clicks per month and ranks 126th in the US.
The site sports a pretty straightforward design. There is a small header that vanishes and reappears as you scroll up and down. The main focus is on the content that appears in a tabloid-style manner with large images and headlines, covering everything from politics to celebrity gossip.
The layout stays relatively consistent only the article previews grow smaller as you go down the page. The New York Post website also has a fold-down menu in the header that takes you to the most important site sections.
In order to make everything work and look pretty, the website is running its own custom theme. It also appears to have Jetpack and Okta active in the background and maintains its site speed via several content delivery networks. The site is hosted on WordPress.com VIP, something we will see a few more times throughout this article.
2. news.com.au
Next up is a similar type of news website as the New York Post but from down under. news.com.au is the tenth most visited website in the country of Australia with monthly traffic of 113,000,000 visits.
The site sports a classic magazine-style design. Topics like world news, politics, celebrity news, sport, and more are all delivered in a relatively compact form. You can find the main topics in the navigation menu on top together with tiny widgets for the weather forecast and current date and time.
There are also dedicated sections with the latest news for each category when you scroll down the page.
As is no surprise, news.com.au uses a custom theme for their website. Aside from that, we couldn’t find out anything else except that it’s using the WpStream plugin.
3. The Sun
England’s biggest tabloid newspaper is a another enterprise-level website using WordPress. Their monthly readership is estimated at 48,500,000. The paper covers everything from world and local news to celebrity gossip.
The theme, which was made by Human Made, looks a lot like the paper’s real-life counterpart on the newsstands.
The site lists its main topics at the top where you can easily navigate to them. There is also a drop-down menu in the header that lets you navigate to other properties of The Sun, such as its Scottish, Irish, and US edition.
The layout is quite consistent. Even when scrolling down, beside a sticky header, it continues with lots of pictures, interspersed with topical rows.
What stands out is that the homepage is very long, which encourages a lot of scrolling. It also takes care of ample lazy loading in order to not strain visitors’ Internet connections while they do so. I couldn’t find anymore technical information except for that it’s apparently hosted on WordPress.com.
4. Variety
We are continuing the theme of news sites with Variety, an entertainment magazine reporting on movies, TV, music, and other cultural mainstays. Their website handles more than 31,000,000 visitors per month, which definitely makes it an enterprise-level WordPress site.
Design wise, what stands out is the modular makeup with the main categories and headlines at the top. The site also sports a tiled layout with a sidebar above the fold. When you scroll down, it changes to columns in different numbers and sizes.
Variety also provides a has sticky header and full-screen navigation menu when you click on the hamburger icon. It gives you access to more subcategories and a search bar.
On the technical end, there is not that much to find out, only that the website theme is apparently based on a core theme for all properties of the parent company. It also uses the plugin Lazy Load for WordPress. Like other examples on this list, Variety hosts their site on WordPress.com VIP.
5. The Chive
The Chive is one of the many time-waster websites on the web and, by the looks of it, one of the more successful ones. Their 19,230,000 monthly visitors can mainly find collections of funny memes, GIFs, random facts, and women wearing fewer clothes than usual.
To be honest, the design looks a bit like it hasn’t seen a major update since the early 2000s. Lots of empty space, large images and headlines, and a lot of click-to-play content.
At the top, you can choose different categories, channels, and authors. You also get access to the shop and have the ability to log in an submit your own content.
On the technical end, the website sports a custom theme put together by X-Team and it uses Disqus to run their comment section. Plus, The Chive is another WordPress.com VIP customer.
6. The White House
Next up on our list of enterprise-level WordPress sites we have the official web presence of the president of the United States and their administration. Estimated monthly traffic: 15,000,000+.
You can probably imagine that security is a big issue for this particular website, so it’s a big seal of approval for WordPress that they went for the platform.
The site isn’t too large. It mostly consists of a handful of pages that inform about the current administration, policy goals, and current events. There is also a Spanish site version that you can easily change to and also a blog with the latest news.
In addition, you have toggles to increase the contrast and font size that change the design seamlessly for better accessibility.
I couldn’t find any information about which plugins the White House website uses. The theme is seemingly merely called “46” after the current president. Also, with 81 million backlinks, their link building specialist really deserve a raise.
7. The Cinemaholic
The Cinemaholic is a site for lists, news, reviews, explainers, and more about movies, television, and anime-related topics. More than 10,000,000 people swing by every month
The site impresses with a very simple and clean design. I especially like the slide-in menu that appears when you click the hamburger icon.
The Cinemaholic is also very congruent design wise, the layout stays true to itself throughout. Well done!
However, someone should really tell them about image optimization. Their main visual on top was a whooping 1.6MB large upon download when I first visited the site. I wouldn’t want to do that to my mobile connection.
Extension wise, they are using their own custom theme and I can detect Yoast SEO on the site. That’s about it.
8. National Review
Another news website that is more on the conservative side of things. The National Review has an estimated monthly traffic of 7,150,000 visitors.
It also comes in a familiar magazine-like design that provides an overview of news and opinion pieces in different numbers of rows and columns. The main topics are situated below the top header and there is a slide-in menu that gives you even more options.
The design has been put together by Alley in form of a custom theme. National Review’s site uses One Signal for push notifications, the WP to Twitter plugin, and WordPress.com VIP.
9. Fortune
Fortune is a monthly business magazine and source of the famous Fortune 500 and 40 Under 40 rankings (the latter of which I, at the time of this writing, still have about two years to appear in, fingers crossed!). An estimated 6,700,000 people visit the site very month.
The magazine was founded in 1929, which might be why their web presence has a pretty classic magazine design: orderly columns, lots of pictures, rows ordered by topic, and a sticky header to access the most important pages quickly.
The technical details, on the other hand, are pretty hidden. I couldn’t detect any particular plugins or themes. Heck, I couldn’t even find the theme folder path in the source code via my browser developer tools.
This makes me think that they have some sort of proprietary setup, possibly even as a headless CMS. What I can say, though, is that we have another WordPress.com VIP customer on our hands.
10. The Penny Hoarder
More than 5,620,000 people visit this website every month to learn how to save and make more money. As you would expect, The Penny Hoarder has a lot of content on budgeting, debt, banks, retirement, investing, and everything else that has to do with cash. They are also a confirmed WordPress user.
The site is made up like a magazine and very compact but with a multitude of layout elements. You find new articles on top, columns of trending topics and editor picks, community comments, then some category-specific widgets. There is also the ubiquitous sticky header with the main topics and a newsletter sign-up form that looks a bit out of place.
My spy programs tell us that the site uses Akismet (understandable, as a blog-centric website), Yoast SEO, and Wordfence Security. W3 Total Cache and TablePress also seem to be active as well as WooCommerce.
I have no information about the theme, however, with the amount of plugins, it’s definitely one of the more WordPress-centric site examples at the enterprise level we have seen.
11. The Next Web
This entry on our list is a tech magazine. It covers technology, tech business, and startups for an estimated 3,000,000 monthly visitors.
To be honest, the design is quite sparse. There is a lot of whitespace, which is usually good. However, in some places The Next Web is so minimalistic that it looked a bit abandoned.
They also use an interesting choice of colors. This is especially obvious when you hover over News at the top to get to the main channels. Once there, you also get some subtopics at the bottom of the main menu.
While the design is a bit unimpressive, the site’s loading speed is blazingly fast. When I changed from one channel to another, everything, including the images, loaded almost instantly. So, kudos for that!
One of the reasons seems to be that even on short pages with small images, The Next Web uses lazy loading. What else is there to know about this enterprise-level WordPress site? It uses Yoast SEO and lives on WordPress.com. That’s about it.
13. Venture Beat
Last in line is one of the leading sources for tech news, especially startups, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the gaming industry with an estimated monthly traffic of 2,800,000.
When it comes to Venture Beat’s design, I have a bit of the same issue as for The Next Web, it seems a bit underpopulated. This was exacerbated by fact that some of the images wouldn’t load for me
What’s great, however, is the pop-up menu that appears upon click.
It gives you a lot more access to different topics on the website and other important links. Aside from that, the layout is relatively simple, mostly a list of the latest articles interspersed with bigger images for more important posts.
This enterprise-level WordPress site is running its own theme in the background and has Yoast SEO installed. That’s about all I could find out.
Last Thoughts: Enterprise-Level WordPress Sites
Though in some circles, WordPress is still regarded as a hobby tool, enterprise-level sites based on the CMS are not as rare as they seem. Above we have looked at just 13 examples but combined they serve literally hundreds of millions of users every month, all on WordPress.
What’s the the takeaway?
Besides the fact that conservative news media seems to really like the platform, it should be that the same tool these sites are using is available to you too, for free! All of these successful websites with all that traffic are based on a piece of technology that you can download and start using right now without paying a dime for it.
And, if you play your cards right, you too might on a list like this some day.
What are your favorite examples of enterprise-level WordPress sites? Anything to add to the list? Let us know in the comments!
