Most people belonging to digital industry are familiar with what WordPress offers. If you aren’t, it is a free Content Management System (CMS) that allows you to create an engaging and impressive online presence without any coding language. It could be either an online shop, company website, portfolio, or blog.
Apart from single-site functionality, there is more to WordPress – the multi-site functionality.
WordPress Multisite is a useful feature that enables you to build and run multiple websites using the same WordPress installation. In simple words, it enables you to manage multiple WordPress websites from a single dashboard. However, people are sometimes dubious about how to use this feature.
In this guide, we’ll clear all your basics related to WordPress Multisite. Let’s begin.
What is WordPress Multisite?
As we explained above, WordPress Multisite is a feature that allows you to add multiple websites to a WordPress installation. You can add this feature to your newly created or existing WordPress website.
To activate WordPress Multisite, you just need to add a few lines of code to a couple of files in your WordPress installation. Then you can add websites to your network. The existing website stays there (with its URL unchanged), while the new websites are added on top.
Advantages and disadvantages of WordPress Multisite
Before you start using WordPress Multisite, weigh its advantages and disadvantages carefully.
Advantages
- Manage all the websites from a single dashboard, through a Super Admin user.
- Install plugins and themes just once. You can then activate them across the entire network of websites.
- You need to execute the upgrade only once.
- Store all the websites in a single backup, you don’t need to backup each website
- As every WordPress installation takes a significant amount of resources on the server, you need not spend many resources (including money) and the optimization process can be effortless.
- You can configure and maintain multilanguage versions of the same website through a multisite structure and multi languages plugins.
Disadvantages
- Not all plugins work on a multisite. You need to check if the selected plugins are multisite compatible before you install them.
- The plugins and themes cannot be added or deleted by individual websites. They can be activated or deactivated for the entire network.
- If your server or website is experiencing downtime, it will affect all the websites present on the network.
- Any sudden increase in traffic on any website present on the network can affect the speed of all the other websites on the network. This may be overwhelming for a beginner to handle.
- All the hosting plans do not support multisite. Hosting needs increase for a multisite. If you’re planning to create a few websites that are more like test websites, Shared Hosting can be enough. However, if you want to add a large number of websites, especially websites with high traffic, you’ll find that you need to upgrade your web hosting needs.
WordPress Multisite user roles
When you install WordPress Multisite, you are the network administrator with administrator privileges for any website that you create on your network. You can even allow other people to create their own websites within the network. And then you can make them site admins for respective websites.
However, site admins have limited access as compared to a network administrator. You, as a network admin, can install new plugins and themes, but a site admin can just activate them for their websites. They cannot install new ones. Such limitations help you keep your network secure, as you wouldn’t want site admins to add a code that might compromise the network.
Though the site admins can add new users, those users will have access to only those individual websites to which they are added instead of all the websites on the network. As the details of users are stored once for the entire network, you can easily give them access to more websites without creating another account.
Hosting for WordPress Multisite installations
Before you create your multisite installation, consider your network size, and compare the features and prices different WordPress Hosting providers offer.
So, if you are planning to have a large multisite network, you may consider choosing between managed WordPress Hosting, VPS Hosting, or a dedicated server. Otherwise, you can go for Shared Hosting.
You can consider buying a web hosting plan from Bluehost as we offer a range of web hosting plans tailored to meet your specific hosting needs at reasonably affordable prices. If you are unable to decide an appropriate plan for yourself, you can opt for a free consultation from our experts.
Hope this article was insightful to you.
