We present a new approach, based on graphon theory, to finding the limiting spectral distributions of general Wigner-type matrices. This approach determines the moments of the limiting measures and the equations of their Stieltjes transforms explicitly with weaker assumptions on the convergence of variance profiles than previous results. As applications, we give a new proof of the semicircle law for generalized Wigner matrices and determine the limiting spectral distributions for three sparse inhomogeneous random graph models with sparsity $ω(1/n)$: inhomogeneous random graphs with roughly equal expected degrees, $W$-random graphs and stochastic block models with a growing number of blocks. Furthermore, we show our theorems can be applied to random Gram matrices with a variance profile for which we can find the limiting spectral distributions under weaker assumptions than previous results.