WordPress Website Examples: A Shop, a Job Board, a Car Auction and NASA (2026)

Most lists of WordPress sites are forty homepage screenshots and a line of praise under each. You finish one knowing that famous brands use WordPress and nothing about how to build a site that earns money.

This one is shorter. Seven sites, each a different kind of business: a newsroom, a shop, a job board, a paid membership, a directory, a car auction and a government agency. We opened all seven on 10 October 2026 and read the page source of each to confirm it runs WordPress today. A site made the cut only if we found a generator tag, a wp-json link or wp-content file paths in its own HTML.

Every price below was read on the site's own page that day.

At a glance

TechCrunch

TechCrunch covers startups and venture money, and it's the news site most people name when asked for a big WordPress example. The source backs that up. Its generator tag read WordPress 6.9.10 on the day we looked, and the homepage links to a wp-json address.

The front page is a lead story, a Top Headlines box and a Latest News feed where each item carries a topic label, the writer's name and how many hours ago it went up. The newest story was seven hours old. A menu across the top splits coverage into Startups, Venture, Apple, Security, AI and Apps.

Money comes from three places you can see without logging in. A display advert sat above the logo. The Advertise page sells event sponsorship and branded articles, and its enquiry form asks for a budget with the top option marked $50,000+. Then there's Disrupt, its yearly conference in San Francisco, which the events page says draws 10,000 founders, investors and operators. A banner for it ran across every page we opened.

Nalgene

Nalgene makes the plastic water bottles hikers clip to their packs. The US store runs on WordPress with WooCommerce. We counted more than a thousand wp-content paths in the homepage source, along with WooCommerce class names and a child theme called nalgene-twentytwenty.

The shop sorts bottles by shape and by size, so you can go straight to Wide Mouth or to 32oz. The standard 32oz Wide Mouth bottle costs $16.99 and the cheapest on the category page, a 16oz Ultralite, is $5.50. A bar across the top promises free shipping on orders over $20 in the contiguous US, which is a little more than one bottle. That nudges you to add a $4.41 cap or a sleeve.

The best part is the Customize Bottles tool. You pick a bottle and cap, choose colours, then add a name or a logo. Custom bottles start at $23 for the 16oz and $25 for the 32oz. Companies get their own Co-Branding page for bulk orders. Product pages carry long customer reviews. One describes a bottle that cracked after nine years and was replaced under the lifetime guarantee.

ProBlogger Jobs

ProBlogger is a long-running blog about blogging, and its job board is a small business bolted onto the side. The About page says the board has been going for 15 years. The board sits in its own WordPress install under /jobs/. That install reported WordPress 7.0.2 and loads a theme folder named pb-wpjobboard.

Employers see the price before anything else, because "Post a job now, from only $80" is printed in the header of every page. A standard listing costs $80 and runs for 15 days. A featured listing costs $160, sits highlighted above the others and gets a mention in the newsletter. Packs bring the price down to $64 a listing for five and $54 for ten.

Three counters sit above the search. They showed 58,784 candidates, 8,926 successful job posts and 8 active jobs in the last month. Eight is a small number, and the board is honest enough to print it. The newest ad was dated 7 October. Writers filter by keyword, location and four job types, and the FAQ page opens with a blunt warning about a phishing scam aimed at applicants.

Food Blogger Pro

Lindsay and Bjork Ostrom run the recipe blog Pinch of Yum. Food Blogger Pro is the membership where they teach other people to do the same. It has no generator tag, but the source is full of wp-content paths and it links to its own wp-json address.

There are three ways to pay for the same thing. Monthly is $35, quarterly is $99 and yearly is $350, which the page works out as less than $1 a day. Every plan gets the full course library of 350+ videos, a private forum, a monthly live Q&A and a monthly coaching call with Bjork. You can cancel any time and there's a 60-day money back guarantee.

What we'd copy is the front door. The homepage doesn't ask for $350. It offers a free traffic course of 7 lessons that takes 16 minutes, in exchange for an email address. A weekly podcast does the same job for people who aren't ready to sign up for anything. The site says it has helped over 10,000 bloggers.

Open Path Collective

Open Path Psychotherapy Collective is a nonprofit that lists therapists in the US and Canada who agree to see clients at reduced rates. A therapist named Paul Fugelsang founded it in 2012. The site says its network has passed 40,000 therapists. Its theme folder is called oppc and the homepage links to wp-json, so this very large directory is a WordPress build.

Most directories charge the people they list. Open Path does the opposite. Therapists pay nothing and get a free profile. The client pays a one-time $65 membership fee, and after that sessions cost $40 to $70 for individual therapy or $40 to $80 for couples and families. Student interns offer a flat $30. To qualify, a household has to earn under $100,000 a year.

The search has an Online and In-person switch and a More Filters panel. There are also plain browse pages by state. The Texas page is a long grid of cards with a name, a city, the two attendance tags and a View profile link. Therapists send in licence documents before they're approved.

Bring a Trailer

Bring a Trailer sells collector cars by online auction, and the page for sellers is titled "2,500 Cars Sold a Month". We didn't expect a site moving that many cars to be on WordPress. It is. The generator tag read WordPress 7.1.3, and the auction pages load their styles from a theme and a plugin both named bringatrailer.

The auctions page had 1,327 lots live. You can narrow them by location, listing type, category, era, origin, year range, time left and current bid. Each lot shows a photo, a written description, the current bid and a countdown. A 1967 Shelby GT500 stood at €180,000 with six hours to go, a few rows above a 1971 Dodge pickup at $10,500.

The fees are simple. Sellers pay $99 to list and can add professional photography for $330. Buyers pay 5% or 10% on top of the hammer price depending on the category, with a $250 minimum. The fee is capped at $7,500 on 5% auctions and $4,000 on 10% auctions. Every bid puts a hold on the bidder's card for the fee amount. Auctions usually run seven days. Cars are picked by staff from seller submissions, and each listing has a comment thread where other members ask questions.

NASA

NASA sells nothing on its website, so it's the odd one out. It's here because it shows how far WordPress stretches. Both nasa.gov and the video site at plus.nasa.gov printed a generator tag reading WordPress 7.0.7.

The homepage led with the return of the Crew-12 mission on the day we looked. Under that sits a Featured News block. Every card has a label saying whether it's a news release, a blog post or an article, plus a read time in minutes. Further down there's an Image of the Day, photo galleries with a count on each one and a newsletter form. The Hubble gallery listed 422 images.

NASA+ is the streaming section, with series, documentaries and a schedule of live events. We saw no adverts and no paywall anywhere.

A small publisher can still take two ideas from it. Label each piece by type, and tell readers how long it takes to read.

Build your own

None of these seven runs a general blog theme. You can tell from the folder names in the source. ProBlogger's board loads a theme called pb-wpjobboard. Open Path has oppc, Nalgene has nalgene-twentytwenty and Bring a Trailer has a plugin with its own name on it. Each was built for one job.

The other thing they share is a short answer to "who pays". An employer pays $80. A seller pays $99. A member pays $35 a month. On most of them the price is printed where you can't miss it.

You won't have a development team, so there are two realistic routes.

The first is a plugin for the job on top of a theme you like. WooCommerce handles a shop and has more than 7 million active installs according to WordPress.org. WP Job Manager has 70,000 or more, and Sensei LMS for courses and GeoDirectory for listings have 10,000 or more each. All four are free and were updated in the two weeks before we checked. The work is in the joins. Paid job posts, paid listings and memberships often need extra add-ons, and you style the plugin's pages to match your theme yourself.

The second route is a theme built for one kind of site, with the listings, search, member accounts and payment steps already in it. It's quicker to launch. You also accept how that theme does things.

We make themes of the second kind, and you can see them all on our WordPress themes page. Since Bring a Trailer is on this list, the Auction Theme is the fair one to describe. In the released 12.0.89 build a lot can be a timed auction, a shorter live auction or a penny auction paid for with bid credits. Bidders on timed and live lots enter a private maximum and the theme bids for them up to it. Lots can have a reserve and a buy-it-now price.

You can charge a buyer's premium as a percentage or a fixed amount, and a separate seller commission. Outbid and auction-won emails go out on their own. Bid history hides bidder names behind a masked version. There are 48 homepage designs across 16 auction niches, classic cars among them. The screenshot above is one of the car designs.

It won't make you Bring a Trailer. The auction theme has no seller payouts screen, so on a site with many sellers the winner's payment lands in your account and you pay the seller yourself. Late-bid extensions are off until you set a window in minutes. Prices update by checking the server every few seconds, which is fine for normal traffic and wrong for a packed live sale room. Stripe, PayPal and other gateways are separate plugins, and it isn't built on WooCommerce. Each theme is $99 once for unlimited sites you own, with six months of updates, then $49 per six months if you want more. Refunds run for 14 days.

Final thoughts

Planning a job board or any site that sells ad slots? Read ProBlogger Jobs first. It's the smallest business here and the easiest to copy. Its About page says every ad also goes out to the blog's front page, an RSS feed and 230,000 Twitter followers, so the board is selling the blog's audience.

For a shop, Nalgene's free shipping line and its custom builder are the two ideas to take. The first costs nothing to set up.

If you want to sell what you know, Food Blogger Pro is the model. Give away a short course, run a podcast, and charge monthly, quarterly or yearly for the same library.

Directory builders should think hard about Open Path. Free profiles got it to 40,000 therapists, and the money comes from the other side of the search. Bring a Trailer is the one to study for any marketplace, mostly for its fee cap and card holds. TechCrunch and NASA are publishing lessons. Promote one thing everywhere, and label every story.

FAQ

Sources

• TechCrunch homepage, Advertise page and events page.
• Nalgene water bottles category and Customize page.
• ProBlogger job board, its About and pricing page and FAQs.
• Food Blogger Pro membership page.
• Open Path eligibility and pricing, therapist page and Texas list.
• Bring a Trailer How it Works and fees and current auctions.
• NASA homepage and NASA+.
• WordPress.org: WooCommerce, WP Job Manager, Sensei LMS and GeoDirectory, with install counts and update dates from the WordPress.org plugins API.
• PremiumPress WordPress themes. Auction Theme features are described from the released 12.0.89 build.

Checked on 10 October 2026.