WordPress Multisite – A Simple Guide for Beginners to Follow

Today, WordPress is the most popular and powerful publishing platform with more than 8 million websites worldwide using this platform as Content Management System (CMS), according to BuiltWith.com. It is one such platform that adopted by lots of businesses worldwide to make their website exceptional for their visitors.

Moreover, the increasing popularity of this platform crosses over the other CMS like Drupal and Joomla as per the Google Trends. Day-by-day, the platform is gaining huge popularity as it offers range of features, including easy to use, active development, great community support, lots of pulgins with wonderful functionality, numerous themes and more.

However, one of the best features of this platform is its ability to develop multiple websites with one WordPress installation. WordPress multisite facility is not something that most of the users know about it, but it is worth getting the information to determine whether it is right for your website as well. Here, you can a complete guide on WordPress multisite, so interested users can follow this guide and know what multisite can do:

An Introduction to WordPress Multisite

WordPress multisite is a feature or we can say mode within WordPress, allowing users to develop a network of multiple websites that all run on a single installation of WordPress. Previosly, WordPress multisite was completely separate version of WordPress that known as WordPress MU.

Then, with the launch of WordPress 3.0, the company introduced a major feature WordPress multisite as WordPress MU was amalgamated with regular WordPress and it is renamed “WordPress Multisite”. Currently, it is one such feature that can be turned off or on.

Some Examples of Appropriate Uses

There are lots of WordPress users, who do not know when to use this feature, so one of the best ways to illustrate this by considering some real-world examples:

WordPress.com – Possibly, one of the best uses of WordPress multisite is WordPress.com as it hosts blogging service where users can easily and quickly develop their own personal blog. At WordPress.com, each developed blog is another website that added to the big multisite network.

Edublogs.org – WordPress multisite is open to the public, but very limited to education purposes. This is one such company that runs wpmu.org and wpmudev.org. And it is the second biggest WordPress multisite example on the web.

TeachForUs – Being a blogging network for Teach For America, Teach For Us is the best example of WordPress multisite as teachers and alumni of Teach For America can easily develop their own blogs to share ideas within the organization and with the public.

Advantages of Using WordPress Multi site

Using WordPress multisite is completely best for businesses as it offers a complete range of benefits to them. To know what type of benefits you can enjoy, let’s go ahead:

- Unlimited site-creation for one user

- Users still have the ability to place things like menus, headers, widgets, backgrounds onto their websites and more.

- Automatic site/blog creation for any user

- Websites can be completely separate from each other or they can be integrated in different ways

- Limit the amount of uploads.

- Activating themes on a site-by-site basis.

- Different themes on different parts of your websiteUsers are allowed to develop and manage multiple sites For limited set of users, automatic blog creation for instance email or with a special code.

Disadvantages of using WordPress Multisite

- WordPress multisite’s some plugins might not always work wonderfully.

- Users of this feature need to access to their server – must be able to edit core WordPress files.

- There are some themes that are not working well with multisite.

- All the websites in your network may be affected if you have any problem with the core installation.

- The admin of it needs to learn how to manage the network that is little more involved than a regular WordPress install.

What’s the Difference?

Many of you all may have used WordPress, but do not use WordPress Multisite so it is most likely that what’s the different between in these two? Let’s have a look on main differences:

Network Admin – Along with the dashboard for single individual website on a WordPress multisite network, there is another admin dashboard that called the network admin. It is one such place, where one needs to manage settings on a network-wide basis and only super administrators can access this area.

Themes as well as plugins – Another essential difference between WordPress as well as WordPress multisite is themes and plugins like how they are managed. When it comes to WordPress multisite, plugins and themes are installed in the network admin and are obtainable for use across any website in the network. Mainly, there are two ways to activate a plugin or theme – first you can network activate a plugin or network enables a theme at the network admin level. As it makes the plugin active and make the theme obtainable for use across every website in the network.

Set-up & Installation

In WordPress, WordPress multisite is just a mode that can be enabled or disabled as per the choice; however, it is not as easy as it sounds. For setting-up, you need to follow below steps:

First, you need to read the documentation in the WordPress Codex on developing a Network as it offers complete guide instructions for setting up Wordpress multisite.

You will want to be sure your web server is capable of running WordPress multisite before you start. To users, a shared-hosting account is not recommended as multisite needs more server resources compare to typical WordPress website. It is good idea to check with your host beforehand as some hosts don’t support WordPress multisite.

In order to start with setting-up Wordpress multisite, the codex instructs users to drop a snippet of code in wp-config.php that allows the network setup screen.

It is one such point the on-screen instructions shows in the Network setup screen and continuing to follow along with the step-by-step guide in the Codex.

While going this process, you have to make decision to use subdomains or sub-directories for single developed website on your network.

Your WordPress multisite network is up and running and ready to add websites within some minutes after you follow the instructions that provided in the Codex.

So, what’s your plan to use WordPress multisite? You can share your experience and let us know whether this guide helps you out or not. However, you can also contacts Experts for WordPress website development or any other support for WordPress.