Multisite

Think of an apartment building. Every flat has its own furniture and its own family, but all of them share the same foundation, water lines and security guard. WordPress Multisite works in the same way.

Multisite is a built-in WordPress feature that lets you run many websites from a single installation. In this article, we will see how it works and who should use it.

What is WordPress Multisite?

A Multisite setup is called a network. All the sites in a network share the same WordPress core files, plugins and themes, but each site keeps its own posts, pages, media and settings. User accounts are shared too, so one person can be added to several sites.

A special role called Super Admin manages the network. Only the Super Admin can install plugins and themes and decide which ones each site may use. You can build the network with subdomains, like blog.example.com, or with subdirectories, like example.com/blog/.

Our detailed article on what WordPress Multisite is explains the setup in more depth.

Who should use Multisite?

• Schools, universities and companies with many departments or branches.
• Bloggers who run the same site in different languages.
• Agencies that manage a group of similar client sites.

For example, a university can give every department its own site while one team handles updates for all of them. If your sites are unrelated and need different plugins, separate installations are usually easier.

How to enable Multisite

1. First, take a full backup and deactivate all your plugins.
2. Next, add define( 'WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true ); to your wp-config.php file.
3. Now, go to Tools → Network Setup and choose subdomains or subdirectories.
4. Finally, copy the code WordPress shows you into wp-config.php and, on Apache servers, .htaccess. Then log in again.

Our step-by-step guide on how to set up Multisite in WordPress walks you through each screen.

Multisite lets you run a whole family of sites with one set of updates. That's the basics of Multisite. If you get stuck while planning your network, tell us in the comment box below.