How to Create a Movie / Video Website with WordPress

It is possible to create various types of websites with WordPress. You can also create a movie or video website using WordPress such as IMDB, Movies.com or similar to other big sites, with the purpose to review old and new movies and collect news related to the film industry.

In this article I will show you the most important steps to take before starting a WordPress website about movies. At the end will give you tips on how to monetize your move website.

Make a plan before starting your website. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, just take a big website as an example and try to replicate it. I don’t mean to copy that particular website, but use it as a guide or concept.

Beside writing reviews, statistics and personal opinion about a movie, it is also a good idea to use trailers as part of your content. You can easily find trailers on Youtube or other video sharing websites and embed them into your website.

Choosing the Right Web Hosting Service

To create a movie website using WordPress, first you need a good web hosting provider.  There are many hosting providers you can choose from, but I highly recommend BlueHost or InMotion for hosting your WordPress site. So you need a good amount of storage, at least one e-mail account, it would be great to have no limit on the amount of bandwidth you are going to use, at least one MySQL database (this is required for WordPress), FTP account to upload files to your website.

You will also need a domain name. This can be bought from the web hosting company from where you bought the hosting package or you can register it at a third party domain registrar and point it to your hosting account. If you want a movie website in English you should buy a .COM domain. Also, if you want to create a country specific movie website you should purchase a country specific domain (.DE for Germany, .AT for Austria, .CO.UK for United Kingdom). Having a country specific domain can increase the chance to rank higher in Google in the targeted country. You should choose the domain name to be suggestive for your movie website. At BlueHost as well at InMotion you will get a free domain if you purchase web hosting. Both web hosting companies offer various hosting plans, so you can easily upgrade as your website grows.

Another important aspect to consider when building a movie or video website is time. You need a lot of time to develop and improve your website create good content. Sure you can hire writers to speed up the process if you have the budget. You can also look for contributors, who will write a review on a movie for free, in exchange for a back-link.

To create a video website with WordPress, you don’t have to be a high skilled developer. But it is required to have some level of programming knowledge to be able to customize your website for your specific needs. You will also need some level of knowledge on SEO. Writing good content is essential, but is not enough. Optimizing your website for search engines such as Google, Bing or Yahoo is also important. There are many resources from where you can learn SEO, I recommend reading our WordPress SEO guide, that includes lots of useful information specific to WordPress blogs and websites.

Although it would be great to have some sort of know-how about how WordPress works, but You don’t need to be a developer. You can get a ready made theme that will be perfect for your movie website.

Choosing a Suitable WordPress Theme

There are a lot of nice WordPress themes that will suit a movie, film or video news website, but probably the best themes you will find on ThemeForest.

In the following I will show you three themes that are perfect for creating a professional movie review website.

NRGProducer – Creative Film Studio Theme

NRGProducer – Creative Film Studio Theme is a WordPress theme. It was created by NRGThemes on 25 February 2016 and costs $49.

NRGThemes is an elite author which offers 6 months of support and you can extend it to 12 months for $14.70 saving $19 if you extend it right now.

The theme is new so there are only 8 sales and 14 comments, but it is compatible with IE9+, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome and even the new browser Edge. You can use WordPress 4.3+ for this theme.

NRGProducer has 5 clean and beautiful homepage designs full responsive

• with creative animations
• visual composer
• theme customizer
• CSS3 animations
• retina ready, optimized for mobile touch and swipe

It also has 6 unique home pages and besides CSS3, it is using HTML5 and JavaScript to create a theme which provides an amazing experience for users. You can add rich content to the advanced portfolio, a modern blog, and the interactive map being also SEO friendly.

NRGThemes offer documentations and support together with

• live preview replication with one click install
• with demo content from an XML import file

NewsTube – Magazine Blog & Video

NewsTube – Magazine Blog & Video is a WordPress theme created by cactusthemes. It costs $59 and its primary purpose is to be a magazine blog where you can write news together with trailers about movies.

NewsTube was sold more than 1700 times. It has more than 700 comments and it has a 4.58 average buyer rating based on 113 ratings. It was created on 23 July 2015 and the last time it was updated on 17 February 2016.

NewsTube works perfectly with IE9+, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome. It is compatible with Visual Composer 4.7.4 and WordPress 4.3+.

The developers are offering online documentation, free support, quick installation and user guide videos. They even offer you demo access to membership area using the account demo and the password demo.

NewsTube is a mighty video theme for user generated content site being a perfect solution for a content-focused website. The theme is a modern one embedded with the latest and most popular features.

There are available more than 15 magazine, blogs, and video demos. Unlimited possibilities exist  for layouts and colors. Additionally, there are

• 7 blog layouts
• 4 navigation layouts
• 9 header sliders
• 5 article layouts
• 3 video layouts

You can import data fast and the theme is WooCommerce ready. A Video Ad plugin is included together with two importing plugins

• YouTube WordPress Plugin
• WordPress Automatic Plugin

to import video to WordPress. The theme is responsive and retina display. Usually is used as a video channel, video playlist having a mega menu, being Google AdSense optimized. Also, it has Google Fonts, shortcodes and rating plugin integrated. It offers mobile icons, RTL support and auto update as well.

Movie Reviews – Clean Simple Film Rating WordPress Theme

Movie Reviews is a cheap theme that only costs $49. It was created by RoyalTemplates but it is not supported. 54 people bought this theme offering an average 3.71 buyer rating based on 7 ratings.

This theme is very old being created on 3 September 2013, this being the reason why the developer doesn’t support it anymore.  However, it is compatible with IE8+, Safari, Firefox, Opera, Chrome and WordPress 3.6+. Its purpose is to be used as a blog where movie reviews are written.

Movie Reviews has innovative continuum style using a visual heat map to show movie reviews, dynamic review coloring using a color gradient from theme options, TheMovieDB API integration automatically fetching cast and trailer details and flexible custom widgets and shortcodes.

Monetizing your Movie Website

In one of our previous guide we have covered the top 10 methods you can use to make money from your website. I highly recommend reading this article for having a better view on what earning potentials your website has.

In my opinion a movie website can be monetized best with AdSense, but you can also use Amazon affiliate system. Try different methods to see, which works best for you and how you can make the most out of it.

Summary

My personal preference is NewsTube. It has a lot of useful features to create a movie blog as you wish, offering also a very good experience for the user.