32 WordPress Plugin Business Ideas You Can Start Today [2023]

I wrote my first line of code at ten years old. It was part of an online game (not even a good one), and of course, at that age, I wasn’t a particularly skilled developer. Actually, I had no idea I had even written HTML, or what coding even was. Anyway, looking back - those few (badly written) lines of code actually helped develop and shape my career over time.

Fast-forwarding around 15 years on and many failed startups later, I was working at a large logistics business as their digital strategist (which basically just meant that I was the web developer, digital marketeer, and ad-hoc IT guy). At this time, I had worked in several different roles inside and out of the digital industry - web design, digital marketing, sales but I still had no real idea what my big idea would be for a business and had grown very realistic and weary of the hype around the startup space.

Despite what I thought was a relatively stable career choice, I still had an overdraft that just never seemed to disappear. I was tired, miserable, and stressed. I never really had the time or energy left for anything beyond what was quite a lot of responsibility at my day to day job.

After spending some time in the corporate world and hating it, I got laid off and was forced to either find another job or start something myself. The idea of another job didn’t interest me, as I couldn’t seem to fit in with work/corporate/office life.

Finding places where small and solo business owners hang out was a much better way to attract customers. Now as we move more into content marketing, we will be attracting the right customers.

I instead went with my passions at the time with fitness and sport and started coaching a local master (adult) swim team making $12/hour for a few hours of work a week.

This led to giving swim lessons and designing programs for triathletes (swim, bike, run) to accomplish a distance or open water swim.

I started taking this online, and I eventually got my start in the world of online business with triswimcoach.com – swimming training for triathlons. I hired VA’s, then teams, to help build and run my niche business.

And this building of teams and solving problems online led me to start Work Hero.

My original plan was to offer these three categories as a productized service, where businesses could pay monthly for the design/development/VA services, instead of having to go out and hire everyone themselves.

Ten years ago, my husband and I were working in an office set-up. Due to a mix of struggles experienced, my husband and I decided to quit our job and transition into freelancing. The transition phase was difficult since we didn't have the facilities needed like a computer and internet connection. We worked in an internet cafe for the first month of our freelancing career until we bought our personal computer and had our internet connection.

We had experience downtime in our new career at first, but we grow and learn from our mistakes as we go along. Freelancing changed the quality of our lives, our family, and so with our marriage. We embrace these benefits to realize that if mothers can work at home, they can earn while taking care of their family.

Another thing is the overseas workers. They have been working far from their family to make a living. Those who are exhausted and feel unproductive because of many circumstances like long hours of commute eat a lot of their time, endangering their work-life balance. These are a few of our realizations why we come up with putting Filipino Virtual Assistance. Because we know how difficult it is to work far from our family, we want to empower Filipino families, one freelancer at a time. We want to provide our graduates an avenue to earn dollars at their homes' comfort, without the hassle of traffic, toxicity of the environment, and an excellent opportunity for those who never got the chance to go to College.

I first heard about affiliate marketing when I was working at a digital marketing agency after college. One of my co-workers showed me a blog that he had started that was bringing in a fairly significant income.

All the blog did to make money was review vacuum cleaners.

My business is currently yielding more than half a million dollars a year in profits. And it does that with very little expense.

It was 7:00 pm, about 8 days before Christmas in 2017 when my boss sent me a text message “Can I call?”.

I’d been in the tech industry as a software developer for a while now, so a late-night chat wasn’t necessarily out of the ordinary - especially if one of our clients had an unexpected, catastrophic error that couldn’t wait until the morning.

“Of course!” I said.

The idea behind Influence Podium started back in college. I used to play NCAA basketball and we could only work a certain number of hours per week. As an immigrant who had just moved from Barcelona, I would “ghostwrite” my classmates’ papers for $10/page (money back if I got them less than a B, of course).

After I graduated, I had a short stint in finances (I lasted 30 days) until I quit and moved back to Spain. There, I went back to the one skill I knew I had -- writing.

I wrote on Quora for 6 months, got 2 million views, and a few people started reaching out to me to ghostwrite for them. They happened to be B2B CEOs, and that’s when I learned the power of content, personal branding, and inbound marketing.

We never had a moment like “Ah ha! Let’s start an online education company!”, it just naturally evolved and grew into what it is today.

But I can tell you exactly how we got here. Before we get into how we first discovered what entrepreneurship even is, I want to paint the picture of what life was like even before that.

Up until we were 21 years old, we were 2 guys just going through life on autopilot with no regard for the future. Worrying about what my next week would look like was hard enough. Then we basically “woke up” and found ourselves in a 1 bedroom apartment in Aarhus, Denmark, not showing up to our part-time job anymore and smoking pot every day. For the first time, we reflected on ourselves, what we were doing and we just felt embarrassed. We were wasting our precious time away doing absolutely nothing. I don’t want to get too into the emotions felt, but it was a rock bottom for us. Long story short, we have a private twin meeting and said to each other “this is f\cking sad, we have to change”. And because we had each other, we developed motivation and ambition to prove we weren’t useless, waste-of-space losers (but that’s exactly how we had acted).

I found the freelance writing market in 2011 after signing up to sites that offered writing work. It was a fairly new and burgeoning market at the time, even if the rates offered on the platforms I started on were abysmal. Taking a ton of low-paying gigs was how I molded my first online writing skills. As I accumulated work, continually hit my deadlines, and exceeded expectations, the work brought referral work. Within three months of starting my entire freelance writing pursuit, I had more work than I could handle. So, I started a business, created it on the spot, and named it Express Writers.

We got clients on day one and continued to get them because I went and got them. I would get up at 4 a.m. and send out 100 emails a day to new leads.

We’ve never had funding. We’ve never sought it. Everything was a day-by-day, gut-instinct, move-fast process, and we have always had to pivot and learn how to reshape and reapproach when failures happened. I went with it and found joy because I was walking in my passion (writing). What I’ve learned is that this move-fast process is behind some of the most successful businesses in the world. Success loves speed. Failure attaches to slowness. Our quick responses and agile adaptations, or the “hard-knocks life” if you want to describe it more accurately, helped us maintain and grow our place in the market.

Hey! I am Gavin, founder of ThriveWP, a WordPress Maintenance service based in the UK that provides WordPress website management, maintenance, hosting, malware removal and general WordPress support.

If essential maintenance tasks are ignored or attempted without good knowledge, you leave yourself open to being hacked or end up with a broken website. That's where a service like ours comes in.

I'm Vaibhav Kishnani, an engineer but a passionate writer by profession. I established Content-Whale in 2017 when I was in my third year of engineering. Going by the maxim that quality writing is everything, Content-Whale caters to 42 different content types that form the backstory of every company’s digital presence and marketing efforts.

I started this content agency with a mere sum of Rs. 2,500. Today, we have drawn a revenue turnover of Rs. 4 Crores! In my opinion, it is not individual progress. Instead, a start-up is about connecting with the right individuals at the right time, who keep the show running ahead with their strife for perfection.

Hi, I’m Katie from Barn2 Plugins. We sell innovative software products which add extra features to websites that are built on the popular WordPress and WooCommerce platforms.

We now have 16 products that generate over $100,000 in monthly revenue.

I’m Claudio Pires, co-founder of Visualmodo. With Jared Dias, we started an internet business to sell quality codes and share useful content to let everybody create their online space. Visualmodo started as a WordPress theme development company, but now we do media, content, plugins and are still doing WordPress themes.

We have a 360k business selling themes, plugins, and services and the market is growing, but at the start, we did 1 or 2 sales (of 49USD each) per week and things did take a lot of time to show some results.

• Jason Cohen established WP Engine in 2010, and it is a market leader and one of the rapidly-growing companies in the tech sector. They offer digital solutions for businesses of all kinds to design, manage and deliver engaging digital experiences.

• This platform offers businesses the tools people need to build outstanding WordPress sites and apps that advance their businesses more quickly.

• Jason is a serial entrepreneur with more than 20 years of experience in business and software development. He has grown four technology firms to generate more than $1 million in yearly revenue.

• Two of his founded company are bootstrapped and funded. He afterward sold his two businesses.

• They provide more than 500,000 web experiences globally and over 85,000 customers in more than 140 countries.

• WP Engine has offices in multiple cities, including Austin, Texas, Brisbane, Australia, San Antonio, and Texas. Their 1,000+ staff operate remotely in several different countries.

• Since 2007, the founder has been writing blogs about early-stage startups at A Smart Bear. The current yearly income for WP Engine is $227.2 million dollars.

Key Takeaways

• Write theories and test them
• Create a good feedback loop
• Measure what customers are doing and categorize
• Automate conversations
• Ensure proper customers support and give customers visibility

Hello! My name is Lisa Miller-Mecham. I’m a creative mom of 4 who runs a craft/sewing website called CreativeFashionBlog.com. I started out as an accessory designer, turned award-winning fashion designer, turned DIY blogger… and now a profitable sewing pattern maker.

My best month so far in 2020 has generated slightly over $15,000 while working part-time. I’m actually launching a course next month to show other creative women how to do the same!

Site Alert was acquired by the team at Southport Ventures in April 2021. Although we are not the founders, we have found a good home for this great product. We purchased the product from Frank Corso, a dedicated and vigilant developer that wanted it to end up in good hands. We liked the metrics, the customer base, and the quality of the codebase. This was an easy deal to love, and the business has only grown since we purchased it.

Since our April 2021 acquisition, we’ve continued to run it well over 50% net profit margin while also growing it 51%.

My name is Jonathan Moore and I started my own little WordPress website maintenance business called PageGuard. The main thing we offer is monthly web maintenance for your WordPress website packaged nicely in three levels of support.

At the moment most of our customers are fellow entrepreneurs running their own business or people running a side hustle of some sort. We are a very new business and as of right now we are bringing in $200/month.

Chris is a skilled web designer who has received over $80k in work via Upwork. He builds the Self-Made Web Designer website for those who want to learn about web designing. Chris works as a UX web designer full-time.

His ultimate objective with the Self-Made Web Designer is to genuinely assist those who are starting their web design journey or be a resource to those who have already started.

Read the full article on sidehustlenation.com ➜

My name is Jason Coleman, and I am co-founder of Stranger Studios. Our flagship product is Paid Memberships Pro, a membership platform for WordPress. Associations use our platform to collect recurring payments and manage their memberships. Businesses and solo entrepreneurs use PMPro to run paid blogs, podcasts, and community sites.

Paid Memberships Pro is a free and open-source plugin available for download at WordPress.org. Over 100,000 sites run Paid Memberships Pro. We have around 6000 customers who pay us for premium add ons, support, and other services. In 2020, we averaged $100k per month in revenue and are on track to grow an additional 25-50% this year.

Hi, my name is Boris and I am the founder and CEO of the software development company TRIARE based in Ukraine. We help businesses and startups to transform their ideas into accomplished digital solutions.

I want to share how personal and collective responsibility paired with patience and consistency can help you build a profitable, respected business. It’s not easy, but it shouldn’t be painful. Here’s my story.

I’m Claudio Pires, co-founder of Visualmodo. With Jared Dias, we started an internet business to sell quality codes and share useful content to let everybody create their online space. Visualmodo started as a WordPress theme development company, but now we do media, content, plugins and are still doing WordPress themes.

We have a 360k business selling themes, plugins, and services and the market is growing, but at the start, we did 1 or 2 sales (of 49USD each) per week and things did take a lot of time to show some results.

Hello, I’m David, CEO, and Founder of DesignEvo, an easy-to-use logo maker. We've been successfully focusing on graphics design and multimedia software ever since 2006!

DesignEvo logo maker is designed for business owners, entrepreneurs, agencies, website owners, freelancers, and even social media admins looking to create great logos in a breeze. Until now, we have over 29 million users worldwide, bringing us about 1 million dollars each month. Many of them are website owners or bloggers.

Hello, my name is Mohit Tater and I am the CEO and founder of BlackBook Investments. We buy and operate profitable internet businesses and also help others invest in these businesses.

In 2021 alone, we have deployed over $2m of investor capital into buying profitable Internet businesses and we are looking to double that in 2022.

My name is Nick and I’m the founder of Qoders Family. Qoders Family is a family of different services & products all dealing with different aspects of website building.

Other than that we have multiple free WordPress Plugins that have been downloaded more than a few hundred thousand times, and a coffee blog, which is my current passion project. What can I say? I love drinking coffee!

Hello, My name is Michael Borgelt and I’m the Founder & Owner of 51Blocks (Est. 2009) and BionicWP (Est. 2020), two agencies focused on helping other agency owner’s offer quality digital marketing and hosting solutions to their clients and small businesses a quality marketing experience.

Since customer service is what we’re most passionate about, we currently have a customer LTV of 2.5+ years (in an industry where it’s 6-9 months) and make 2.6M in annual revenue (216k/mo.).

Hi, my name is Boris and I am the founder and CEO of the software development company TRIARE based in Ukraine. We help businesses and startups to transform their ideas into accomplished digital solutions.

I want to share how personal and collective responsibility paired with patience and consistency can help you build a profitable, respected business. It’s not easy, but it shouldn’t be painful. Here’s my story.