How to Create a Yellow Pages Website with Yellow Pages Software

Looking for how to create yellow pages website? Check out this yellow pages software tutorial to learn the easiest way.

Local directories like the Yellow Pages website are very helpful to discover businesses and services. Yellow Pages has location-based listings of businesses, service organizations, etc. There you can find restaurants, dentists, business listings addresses, phone numbers, and more.

The Yellow Pages listings directory website has some inspiring achievements in helping users with information. The good news is, you can also create a website like The Yellow Pages. We’ll show you the procedures.

With a website like Yellow Pages, you get a great opportunity to help your visitors and the local businesses. Also, you can benefit from it in several ways. Here’s a big picture:

• You can help your community with the information they need.
• Let the local businesses gain a better web presence.
• Make the service organizations more discoverable.
• A Yellow Pages-like site can make you money from paid listings.
• A local directory site can earn from advertising as well.
• It has more potentials like claim listing, enhanced listing, etc.

There are many other benefits of having a yellow pages directory site. It can be a really big business if you scale your site for multiple locations.

Also, you can run niche-specific listing sites. These are good to serve more targeted communities. Even, you can charge the viewers to view some listing items.

What it takes to create a yellow pages website

Well, The Yellow Pages is a big site. They may have hundreds of developers and designers.

But don’t be afraid! We’ve got you covered. You can create a Yellow Pages-like directory site on your own. Just follow this post!

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to create a Yellow Pages website in WordPress. We’re going to use Business Directory Plugin, the best WordPress directory plugin as the Yellow Pages software. This open-source yellow pages software will offer the directory features for our listings site.

Here’s what tools we’ll use to build a Yellow Pages website:

• A WordPress website
• Business Directory Plugin

Using Business Directory Plugin is the easiest way to create any type of listings site. It has 20K+ active installs and a generous 4.7-star rating in the WordPress repository. The plugin has a great reputation in the user community as well.

The best part is, if you follow our tutorial, it will save you thousands of dollars and a lot of time. Here’s a comparison of a few core features and the time required to build them from scratch.

Feature	Time Estimation (if built from scratch)	Time Estimation (if you follow our tutorial)
Adding content	80-160 hours	5-10 minutes
Uploading pictures and videos	80-160 hours	3-6 minutes
Filter integration	300+ hours	5-10 minutes
Filter by category	40-60 hours	5-10 minutes
Geolocation	70-100 hours	5-10 minutes
Reviews and rating	80-160 hours	5-10 minutes
Readying the front-end interface	300+ hours	30-40 minutes
Adding payment methods	70-100 hours	10-30 minutes
Adding social login	30-40 hours	10-15 minutes

In this tutorial, we’ll use WordPress yellow pages software. This will save us from building all these features from the scratch. Thus, you’ll save thousands of dollars and months of time.

Features to look for in a yellow pages site

To make our yellow pages site stand out, we need to cover some basic things. Here’s a list of the core features to include in our yellow pages website built with WordPress.

• Local business and establishment listing.
• Categorized listing item presentation.
• Search and filtering options for easier discovery.
• Advertising and paid listing system.
• Rating and review system for quality and trust.
• Maps integration for easy location finding.
• Discounts and coupons for campaigns.
• Claim listings feature for making a listing official.

Business Directory Plugin has both free and premium versions. The free version is capable of powering a basic yellow pages website. It would have some minimal features only. This can be a good starting point for your Yellow Pages clone site.

Want to offer a true Yellow Pages-like experience with advanced directory features on your listing site? Get a premium version of Business Directory Plugin so that you can get all the features mentioned above. And beyond. A sweet deal, right?

How to create a yellow pages site with WordPress?

For this tutorial, we’ve selected WordPress as our web platform. That means we need a live WordPress site to begin our journey. You can get the site ready in a bunch of ways.

You'll get lots of WordPress hosting providers in the market. We have a detailed post on how to choose the best WordPress hosting provider. Your domain name registrar may offer some hosting services as well. Explore your options and choose the best one.

A hosting service provider can give you a ready WordPress site to move on. Once the website is live on your domain, you can move forward with the steps below.

Step 1: Install and activate Business Directory Plugin

It’s just like installing any other WordPress plugins. Start with installing and activating the free version of Business Directory Plugin. Then install and activate its premium version. If you need help with this step, please see how to install Business Directory Plugin knowledge base article.

After activating Business Directory Plugin premium, we need to install some of its essential addons. These are required to offer the core yellow pages experience.

From your WordPress Dashboard, go to Directory → Modules page.

Click the install button for Ratings, Google Maps, Regions, and Claim Listings modules. You can also install the ZIP Search module and others if you want.

Step 2: Create directory related pages

Your yellow pages website is basically a combination of several directory listing pages. Surprised? It's true. The main pages include the listing submission form, the listing single page, and the listings archives.

You don’t need to create any dedicated page for the listing single page. That is automatically generated from the submission data. It uses your theme styles (more on this later).

We’ll need to create the following pages for our yellow pages site:

• Directory item submission page
• Directory archive page(s)

Business Directory Plugin has a good collection of shortcodes. You’ll just need to enter the appropriate shortcodes into standard WordPress pages to create these online directory pages. All of the resulting pages work on the front-end.

Item submission page: This page will be used to add listings items to the yellow pages website. Any of your team members or the site visitors (if allowed) can use this front-end form page to submit a directory item.

Go to your WordPress Dashboard → Pages. Add a new page with the [businessdirectory-submit-listing] shortcode inside. Publish the page.

You can link it from anywhere to be used as a listing submission page. Try adding some listing items to check if it's working fine. If you want to add some custom fields, please check out our form field customization docs.

Directory archive page(s): You can have multiple directory archive pages to present the listing items. The main directory archive page can be automatically created after activating the core Business Directory Plugin.

You’ll see a dashboard prompt after activating the free version of the plugin.

Follow the prompt and it will create a universal directory page for your yellow pages site. Check out a front-end screenshot of this page below.

Want more directory archive pages with custom filters and properties? Please see our shortcodes documentation to get the necessary information.

Our WordPress yellow pages plugin offers a beautiful collection of directory templates. You can use them to look your yellow pages website more professional. Also, you can use third-party WordPress themes and plugins (including page builders) with our plugin.

Below is a directory listing view using our Modern Business Theme.

And here's the single page view (using our Modern Business Theme).

Please check out the articles below to get more styling resources and inspirations.

• Best WordPress directory themes to use with Business Directory Plugin
• How to customize Google Maps styles on your WordPress directory

Step 3: Configure the yellow pages software settings

Our yellow pages directory software offers a range of features. There is a comprehensive settings panel to configure all of these features.

You can customize the basic yellow pages directory features as well as the module functionalities from here. Just visit your WordPress Dashboard → Directory → Settings.

The default settings will work for you in many cases. But you can tweak them as you need. Please see our detailed documentation to learn everything about these settings options!

Step 4: Set the plans and payments

As we’ve mentioned earlier, you can earn money from your yellow pages site in several ways. We need to set up our yellow pages software so that it can accept payments.

Business Directory Plugin enables you to have multiple pricing plans and sell listing spaces. You can also sell listing features and attributes (more images, ratings, maps, etc.).

We have detailed docs on how to create and maintain plans on your yellow pages website. Also, set up your payment methods to accept payments on your directory site.

Once you’ve finished all of the above steps, your yellow pages site will be ready to launch. Spend some time to make it search engine friendly. Reach your target customers and start helping your community right away. Also, generate revenue from your paid offerings!

Bonus functionalities to make the site more user friendly

You can add some additional features to your yellow pages website to offer the users more perks. One of them can be a social login ability. This will let them log in to your site quickly using their social media account.

To add the social login system, you can use the Nextend Social Login plugin. It offers several third-party integrations in the free version. Also, there’s a paid version with advanced features.

Another useful feature can be web push notifications. It will let your visitors subscribe to your push notifications on their web browsers. You can then send push notifications to them any time you want.

PushEngage is a great service to get this functionality on your site. You can start for free.

Last but not the least, you can export data from the yellow pages site built with our plugin. Our online yellow pages WordPress plugin offers CSV file exports and more advanced migration features.

Wrapping up

Congratulations! You’ve just completed building your yellow pages website with all the modern features. We hope it was a great experience. If you got any questions or suggestions, feel free to let us know via comments.

With all the savings and powerful features, there’s no reason to wait. Get our yellow pages software, Business Directory Plugin now. It’s risk-free with a 14-day money-back guarantee. Enjoy!