Every site in the internet exists for a purpose either to sell some products or provide free information. There are no defined way to classify the type of website. However, depending upon the purpose we have prepared a complete list covering different type of websites existing on the internet.
Related: What are different types of hosting?
Broader Website Categories
In general, you can classify websites into three broader categories based on the information it provides.
- Blog – time dependent content used for announcements, events, launch, etc.
- Forum – online communities that creates platform for users to express their opinions.
- Content website – this is a static website with not much change in the content over long period of time.
Nowadays, blog is interchangeably used as a content site to provide static content.
Static Vs Dynamic
One of the other ways to categorize websites is based on the technology it uses.
- Static websites – serve same content for all users and generally created with HTML website builders like Weebly.
- Dynamic websites – serve different content depending upon the user’s role on the site. These sites are built with complicated content management system like WordPress using PHP.
Complete List of Different Type of Websites
Besides the broader categories, you can classify all websites into one of the below type.
| Website Type | Description |
|---|---|
| Affiliate Site | A site tries to sell a product of others in order to get a commission from the owner. |
| Archive site | A site which archives all accessible websites in the internet. Archive.org is one of the best examples of archive site. It uses a crawler called wayback machine and stores website content at periodical interval. |
| Blog | Blog is platform for common people to express their views. Many hosting providers like WordPress and Blogger offer free option to create a blog. |
| Community site | Community sites are platform to help people of same interest to discuss any related topic. For example, Facebook is a community site offers anyone to create a page and allows sharing content. Interested users can like that page and comment on the posts. |
| Content site | A site provides original content on any topic. Most of the content sites are static in nature which means only the owner of the site can change the content with no option for the users to comment. |
| Classified Ads site | A site which publishes classified advertisements under various categories. |
| Corporate site | Site providing information about a corporate company. For example Microsoft.com. |
| Dating site | Site where people can find their match. Example – match.com. |
| E-commerce site | A site which sells products online and accepts online payment. Example – eBay. |
| Forums | A forum is a platform provides users to discuss any topic as a thread. Example – productforums.google.com enables Google users to discuss products offered by Google. |
| Game site | A site allows users to play games online. |
| Information site | Site provides information on any topic. Generally the content of an information site is originally written by the owner. |
| Microblog site | Sites offer users to enter a short text of limited characters and share it instantly among friends and followers. Example – Twitter. |
| Membership site | Offers user registration and allows specific action based on the user’s subscription. For example, you have to pay to read premium content which is not available for regular users. |
| News site | A site that provides news to the users like CNN. |
| Personal website | A site owned by an individual person provides personal content like pictures, videos or family events. |
| Phishing site | A fraudulent site which tries to get personal and financial information of a user with or without their knowledge and use it for anonymously. |
| Porn site | Site showing or selling pornography content. Generally these sites are identified as not safe to work sites and major source of spreading malicious content in the web. |
| Q & A site | This is a platform for users to ask questions and any other interested user can answer that question. Example – Yahoo! answers. |
| Review site | Review sites are the place where users can share their opinions on any products they bought. Users can also review other sites and share their opinion about using that site. |
| Search site | Site that allows users to search and get the useful content from millions of webpages available in the internet. Example – Google. |
| Showcase site | Sites showcasing the features of a product owned by an individual person or an organization. |
| Social bookmarking site | A site provides a facility to share other’s content and allows users to comment on the content. Example – stumbleupon. |
| Social networking site | Site that allows users to create posts with text content, videos and pictures and allows the users to share it instantly among friends. Example – Google+. |
| Video site | Site allows users to upload, view and share videos. Example – youtube.com. |
| Webmail | Site which provides email services for free or as a paid service. Example – Gmail. |
| Wiki site | A site allows users to create and edit content in a wiki format. Example – Wikipedia. |
