WordPress Multisite is a feature that allows you to create a “network” of subsites within a single instance of WordPress.There are several distinct scenarios where a multisite would be a good option to consider. If you are a company with multiple branches, if you want to market your services separately as divisions of the same company, if you are a parent or management company and want to represent different organizations under a single shared server. These are all good options to consider. We’ve used this approach with a school system that had individual sites for each of their schools, with a management company that owns and facilitates multiple dental practices, and also with a parent company that has several separate and distinct manufacturing businesses within a family of companies.

But why would someone choose a multisite installation over traditional single installation hosting. In this post we will discuss 10 benefits to using a multisite installation for your multi-organization.

1. All sites on one domain.

All of your sites have the potential to be rooted to one domain name. This can be done as a subdomain (site.domain.com) or a subdirectory (domain.com/site). Sidenote: we also have the ability to issue unique domain names for each of your sites. Having so much valuable content under the same domain name can really help to bolster your domain authority which plays a significant roll in your organic search ranking.

2. One login, easy to switch between sites

Because users are managed on the network level, any user (that you give permission to) has the ability to easily switch between sites and/or login to all sites using the same username and password.

3. Shared content: blog posts, calendars, alerts published to all sites.

Multisite platforms allow you to share content to multiple sites at once. This can be a valuable asset, especially if will want to publish blog posts to all sites, have a shared calendar of events, or push out company-wide alerts and notices.

4. Easily copy pages from one site to another

Using available plugins we are able to easily clone entire sites or copy and update pages and posts from one site to another. No longer needing to recreate pages which can become tedious and time consuming for organizations with several sites to maintain.

5. Network-level themes/plugins – one license for all sites, updates apply to all sites.

Easily one of the top benefits. Shared theme and plugin licenses. Plus with the network dashboard we are able to update themes and plugins one time for all sites. We recommend always creating a backup of your multisite before performing any updates as restoring the backup will restore all sites. This can be cumbersome and painful if you’re not aware of the site management on the individual sites as you don’t want to overwrite any new content.

6. Combined reporting

You are able to set individual tracking code for each site, using plugins we can also pull all of your analytic data together into a more comprehensive look at how your organization is performing across all sites.

7. Consolidated hosting costs

Granted, hosting will cost more than a single installation because you are using more storage and bandwidth than a typical website, but rather than paying for multiple single host plans you can pay for one installation and scale up your cost based on usage. At BRING, our multisite plans have a base price and then increase per site added.

8. Single FTP

Accessing all of your sites files through one FTP. This one is a developer bonus but if you’ve ever worked with FTP you can understand how being able to access all of your site files through one FTP account could save you lots of time and effort.

9. Access level user permissions

Multisite platforms offer a network dashboard where users and user permissions are managed on a network level. As an administrator, or SuperAdmin, you can choose which sites users have access to and what capabilities they have.

10. Increased SEO with shared domain.

As stated in benefit #1, all of your sites have the potential to be on a single domain name. If you are a company who is looking to differentiate the many divisions of your company with unique site function and design but want your sites to reinforce each other and not compete with each other, this would be an option to strongly consider.

Are you interested in a multi-site installation? We have excellent WordPress multisite hosting options available! Contact us today for more information or find out more about our web services, here.