Not sure whether to use WordPress multisite or separate WordPress installations?
Both approaches can be viable solutions if you need to create more than one WordPress site. However, each approach has its strengths and weaknesses, so it’s important to choose the best option for your specific situation.
In this post, we help you make the right decision by covering everything you need to know about WordPress multisite vs multiple WordPress installations, including the pros and cons of each approach, some questions to help you choose, and some real-world examples of when to use each.
How does WordPress multisite work?
WordPress multisite allows you to create a network of sites all powered by a single WordPress installation. Each network site shares the same set of user accounts and installed extensions (plugins/themes), which can be helpful in some situations.
To help you manage your network of sites, you get a special Network Administrator user role and dashboard. You can also assign different users as the site administrator for specific sites in your network.
Can each multisite network site have its own domain name?
With domain mapping, you can give each network site its own unique domain name, which lets you make them look like distinct sites from the outside.
In total, multisite gives you three options for controlling the URLs of individual network sites:
- Subdomain: Each site gets its own subdomain on the same domain name, like site1.yoursite.com, site2.yoursite.com, and site3.yoursite.com.
- Subfolder: Each site is placed in a subfolder of the same domain name, like yoursite.com/site1, yoursite.com/site2, and yoursite.com/site3.
- Domain mapping: Each site can have its own unique domain name, like site1.com, site2.com, and site3.com.
WordPress multisite: Pros and cons
With that background out of the way, let’s look at the pros and cons of using a WordPress multisite network.
WordPress multisite pros
- Easier site management: You can manage all of your sites from a single WordPress dashboard and easily switch between different sites.
- Easier user management: You can share user accounts across multiple sites and manage them from a centralized dashboard. A user can also access multiple sites using the same account, which eliminates the need to log in separately to each site.
- Simpler updates: Instead of needing to apply core, plugin, and theme updates for each individual site, you can just update once in the network admin, and every network site will benefit from the updates.
- Easier extension management (plugins and themes): If network sites are using similar extensions, extension management is a lot easier because you only need to install the extension once (instead of installing separately for each site).
- Fast site creation: You can add new sites with just a few clicks, or even let users create new sites from the frontend.
WordPress multisite cons
- Single point of failure: If anything happens to the network, every single site will crash or slow down because the entire network is powered by one WordPress installation.
- Difficult to migrate a single site: While it is possible to convert multisite to a single site, the process is a lot more complex than migrating a single WordPress install.
- Plugin compatibility or license issues: Not all plugins are compatible with WordPress multisite. Even if the plugin is compatible, you might need to purchase a more expensive license to use it on multisite.
- Reliance on network administrator: Individual site administrators have less control over sites. For example, site administrators cannot install their own plugins. At the same time, you could consider this an advantage if you intentionally want to limit the power of single-site administrators.
- All-or-nothing backup restores: It’s difficult to restore the backup of just one network site. This can cause problems if one network site has recent changes that aren’t contained in the most recent backup.
Multiple WordPress installations: Pros and cons
Next, let’s look at the pros and cons of using multiple WordPress installations.
Multiple WordPress installations pros
- More control over individual sites: Having separate installs just generally gives you more control over individual sites when it comes to installing plugins or customizing themes.
- Option to provide dedicated resources to individual sites: You can host sites on separate hosting accounts, which prevents one site from slowing down others and lets you optimize each site’s resources.
- Multiple points of failure: If one site goes down, the others will still be fine as long as they’re properly isolated.
- Site administrators have full control: Individual site administrators have full control over their own sites, which eliminates the need to rely on the network administrator for important tasks.
- Simple migrations: You can easily migrate a single site if needed.
- Better plugin compatibility: Every plugin is designed to work for a single site install, which isn’t always the case with multisite.
Multiple WordPress installations cons
- Separate WordPress dashboards: Each site will have its own separate dashboard and login credentials, which can make it more time-consuming to manage multiple sites.
- User accounts are unique to each site: While there are ways to share users between separate WordPress installs, it’s a lot more complicated to set up and not a core feature like it is with multisite.
- More time-consuming updates: You need to apply updates for each site separately.
- Plugin licenses can cost more (sometimes): Some plugins might require a separate license for each site, which can add complexity and cost in some cases.
It’s important to note that you can mitigate some of these cons by using other tools. For example, you can use a plugin like MainWP to manage multiple installations from one unified dashboard.
Or, if you host with Kinsta, you can more easily manage separate installations using the MyKinsta dashboard and other tools. For example, Kinsta Automatic Updates lets you automate plugin and theme updates across individual sites in a safe way.
Questions to answer when choosing between WordPress multisite vs multiple installations
Let’s look at some questions you should answer to determine whether to use WordPress multisite or separate installations.
These questions cover the following areas:
- Purpose of the site
- Plugin usage
- Theme usage and design customization
- User access
- Traffic and resource usage
- Primary site stakeholders
- Future migration chances
Will the sites have similar purposes?
While this is not a hard rule, it generally makes more sense to consider WordPress multisite if each site will have a similar purpose.
For an example of what we mean by “purpose,” let’s say that you’re creating a university website with WordPress and you want to have a separate site for each college or department. All of these sites share the same fundamental purpose of displaying information about that college/department within the context of the university, which is why many universities use multisite.
If the sites share similar purposes, the answers to a lot of the other questions below might also trend toward pushing you to multisite. That is, sites with similar purposes also have a higher chance of needing similar plugins and themes, and having similar resource usage.
Will the sites use similar plugins?
Because every site in a multisite network will share the same pool of installed plugins, you should think about whether each site will generally use the same set of plugins or if each site will use a different set of plugins.
You’ll need to install new plugins from the network admin dashboard. You can then force the activation of a plugin on individual network sites with “Network Activation” or let site admins choose whether or not to activate a plugin.
While the latter approach does let you activate different plugins on different network sites, it can still get complex quickly if network sites are using completely different sets of plugins.
You also might run into issues with multisite compatibility or licenses. If each site is using different plugins, trying to keep track of compatibility and license terms across all of those various plugins can be difficult.
Will the sites have similar designs?
Everything that we said about plugins also applies to themes.
However, for multisite networks, themes can also bring additional considerations when it comes to customizing the same theme for individual network sites. Any customizations that you make directly to the theme itself would apply to every network site using that theme.
This can make things a bit trickier if you want to have network sites use the same base theme but then customize the design from there.
There are ways to get around this. For example, you could use a plugin that supports custom CSS for each individual network site. Each network site can also have its own settings in the Customizer or Site Editor.
Overall, this situation could be another factor pushing you to use separate WordPress sites, but there are ways to solve these issues if the rest of your situation fits with multisite.
Will similar users need access to the sites?
Another important consideration is whether the different sites need to share the same set of users.
There are two considerations here:
- Backend users: Backend users will access the administration dashboards of sites, such as individual site admins, authors, and editors.
- Frontend users: Frontend users will interact with the frontend of sites. With the default configuration, the user role would typically be “Subscriber,” but you might create your own custom roles.
By default, a user who subscribes to one network site with the Subscriber user role will automatically be a subscriber to every site in the network. That is, if they log in at “Network Site 1” and then visit “Network Site 2,” they would still be logged in as a Subscriber at that second site unless you disable this.
However, users do not automatically retain higher privilege roles across multiple network sites unless you choose to give the user a higher privilege role on each site. For example, if you register a user as an Editor at “Network Site 1,” they would not have Editor privileges if they visit “Network Site 2.” They would still be logged in to their account, but they would only be a Subscriber at “Network Site 2” by default.
If having the ability to share accounts and privileges across sites like this would be helpful to your use case, that would be a big reason to consider multisite.
Will the sites have similar traffic and resource usage (now and in the future)?
With separate WordPress installs, you can choose whether to host all of your sites on the same server or deploy them across multiple server instances.
However, because multisite network sites use a single installation, you have to use the same server for every site in the network.
This can be problematic if sites within the network have radically different resource needs. If one site receives two million visitors per month and another receives two thousand visitors per month, that might push you toward using separate WordPress installs so that you could optimize each site’s hosting environment for its situation.
In addition to assessing the traffic and resource consumption of sites right now, you should also think about whether these needs are likely to change in the future. If there’s a high chance that some sites will need to scale more than other sites, having those sites as separate installations will give you more flexibility for scaling them in the future.
If you do choose multisite, make sure to choose hosting that can handle multisite.
Will the sites have different primary stakeholders?
Beyond considering the actual user accounts on your site, you should also consider whether each site in your network will have a different primary stakeholder.
A typical example would be a freelancer creating WordPress sites for clients. To simplify things, some freelancers will host all of their client sites in a single multisite network.
However, this approach can cause significant issues when each network site belongs to a different stakeholder. Your client would be rightfully frustrated if they ever learned their site experienced downtime because another client’s network site went viral and overwhelmed the entire network.
As a general rule, you should probably use separate WordPress installs for each primary stakeholder to avoid these types of situations.
Is there a chance of needing to migrate one of the sites?
You should also think about whether or not there’s a chance you might need to migrate one individual site in the future (rather than the entire network of sites). This is most likely to happen if the sites have different primary stakeholders, but it can also happen in other situations.
While it is possible to migrate a single site from a multisite network, it’s difficult to achieve, and it’s easy for things to go wrong.
If there’s any chance you might need to migrate a single site in the future, it probably shouldn’t belong to a multisite network.
Real-world examples of when to consider WordPress multisite
Let’s look at some real-world examples of when you might want to use WordPress multisite or separate installations.
These examples are not meant to be a comprehensive list of every single situation. Rather, they’re just trying to give you some ideas as to how the questions and pros/cons above might play out in the real world.
Here are some common situations in which you might want to use a multisite network:
- Businesses with multiple locations or service providers: If, for example, you ran a gym with three different locations, you could use multisite to create a dedicated site for each location. Another example would be a real estate firm that wants to create a separate site for each agent within the firm.
- Universities: Multisite is common among WordPress university websites. You can create a network site for each department within an institution. Some universities also let students create their own sites within the network.
- School districts: You could create a network site for each school in the district, or even for individual departments within each school.
- Website-as-a-service (WaaS): You could let users create their own sites in your network, either for free or for a fee. We have a guide on using WordPress multisite as a WaaS solution.
- Multilingual websites: While you can use a regular install to create a multilingual WordPress website, using WordPress multisite gives you a bit more control over the localization of each version of your site. You can use a plugin like MultilingualPress to help you manage things.
- Corporate intranets or networks: You can give each team or department its own site on your company network.
- Clubs/associations: You could give each local chapter its own site to post content and updates specific to that chapter.
- Blog networks: If you have a network of closely related blogs, multisite can work great. For example, something like the individual guides to cities around the world found at Spotted by Locals. Each city guide (like this one for Montreal in Canada) has its own team of bloggers and unique content.
Real-world examples of when to consider WordPress multiple installations
Here are some specific situations in which you might want to use separate WordPress installs. Again, this is not a complete list — these are just some examples to help you think through things.
- High-traffic or high-resource websites: If a site will receive a lot of visitors and/or consume a lot of resources, it often makes sense to use an optimized hosting environment tailored to that site’s needs.
- E-commerce stores: While WooCommerce is compatible with WordPress multisite, it’s generally a bad idea to use this approach for “regular” e-commerce stores because they have more unique needs.
- Client websites: While some freelancers do use WordPress multisite to manage client websites, this is can be a bad idea for many of the reasons we discussed above, such as having a single point of failure for all of your client sites, or the difficulty of migrating a single site if a client wants to move to a new hosting service.
- Websites with unique plugin needs: If each site will use a different set of plugins, multisite probably isn’t the best solution.
- Sites with strict organizational or regulatory compliance needs: Because user data will be shared across the entire network, it might be more challenging to comply with privacy laws like Europe’s GDPR.
Summary
Overall, choosing between WordPress multisite vs multiple sites comes down to your unique situation. By answering the questions above and considering the pros and cons, you can figure out which approach will work best for your needs.
If WordPress multisite is the right solution for your situation, you can follow our WordPress multisite tutorial to get started.
Regardless of whether you choose multisite or separate sites, Kinsta hosting can help you achieve success. For more information, you can check out Kinsta’s Managed Hosting for WordPress or browse specific information about Kinsta’s multisite hosting.
Steve Bonisteel is a Technical Editor at Kinsta who began his writing career as a print journalist, chasing ambulances and fire trucks. He has been covering Internet-related technology since the late 1990s.
