WordPress Multisite isn’t for everyone. Two of our oldest and still popular posts are about not using Multisite. One is about how to disable Multisite when you decide to quit using it after it’s been active. Another explains when to use it and when not to. Sometimes “Minisite” is what you really want instead, a still under-supported concept in WordPress. But when the suggestion to “kill” Multisite was floated recently, its users came out in force to defend it.
While this conversation was happening in the WordPress community, David Bisset asked on Twitter and Post Status Slack how people use or have seen WordPress Multisite being used. Of course, there’s WordPress.com and WordCamp.org. We’ve written about the Modern Language Association‘s Humanities Commons in the past.
The responses that rolled in illustrate how diverse Multisite’s use-cases can be…
- John Jacoby mentions Jetpack “cloning user-sites to shadow-sites on WordPress.com network… for backups and indexing.”
- Topher DeRosia sold subsites offering BuddyPress with them.
- Angie Meeker built a school’s network where each teacher and club had their own site, grade book, etc.
- Dave Ryan built a paid freelancer network.
- Mike Little notes that imascientist.org.uk is multisite and after 10 years is still adding new features.
- Marko Heijnen uses Multisite for content delivery to mobile apps. Every site is a new clone of the app for a different person.
- Kathy Zant said “We use it at KadenceWP primarily to give customers the same login and maintaining state across numerous service.”
- Ross Wintle noted “a talk on WordPress.tv covers an emergency food bank in the UK using Multisite.”
- Mark Root-Wiley said he built the site of Communities in Schools of Washington (ciswa.org) and included all their affiliates on Multisite.
We maintain a couple of WordPress Multisites:
– Most of them run multilingual websites, using the MultilingualPress plugin by Inpsyde. In my opinion, it’s the best way to run a multilingual website, as it’s all very clean, and you don’t have any mishmash between language versions. It’s not for everyone, but if you have a lot of content to manage, it’s definitely worth it.
– We also maintain a Multisite for a large organization that represents different “branches” via different websites. Their webmaster is able to easily create an additional website within the Multisite, add one of the themes we adapted for their needs, and use all the plugins he is already familiar with. This way, it is really easy for him to create new sites, and he is pretty content with it.
– Last but not least, we use a Multisite ourselves for developing/learning/testing purposes. Just add a new site, try out whatever you wanted to try, have a collection of “most used” plugins ready to go… Makes it real simple to set up a quick learning or testing environment.
Thanks for sharing this Elisabeth. I have very little experience with Mutisite myself, and it’s been a long time since I took a look at it. Is there a need for resources that describe appropriate use-cases and how they might be set up? I haven’t run across many, but I also haven’t been looking. 🙂 Some of the recent complaints about Multisite included code bloat and performance issues — I wonder if that has to do with general core WP issues and/or specialized hosting needs Multisite may have more than any intrinsic defect…
Well, there was that time we built an entire SaaS app on it, making use of its isolation between subsites and its domain mapping capabilities.
And then there was the time we built a Fringe Festival site where each individual company had their own subsites to promote their shows and collect reviews.
Then there’s a local university here that uses it to give each faculty department its own subsite isolated from the others, or the network of travel agents that uses it.
Then there’s the niche social site I built with it using BuddyPress. Of course, that was prior to the code merge at version 3.0 in 2010. I’ve literally been using WordPress since it was called b2, and trust me, there are many very good use cases for it, despite many people in the community never having needed it. It’s not going away, thanks to the GPL. It had its own development community prior to the code merge, and in the unlikely event it were dropped from core, it would inevitably be forked back to that user community, which one would expect to have major support from Automattic, who runs .com on it – which, for those paying attention, means it’s easier and less costly to keep MU as a single code base with WP for compatibility and reduced maintenance costs (for starters).
What I find somewhat disconcerting is the amount of uproar caused by someone who wrote an article claiming multisite was a new feature in 2010, clearly not knowing his WP history nor understanding the myriad use cases that other people have for it.