How to Build a Multi Site as WordPress Subdirectories on InMotion Hosting
There are several reasons why you might want to host multiple sites under the same roof. Maybe you run a news site that you want to replicate on a couple of other domains. Or maybe your company sells products online and you want to drive more traffic to your site through multiple stores. Or maybe you just want to experiment with multi-site architecture and see how it works.
In our last blog post, we discussed multiple ways in which you can speed up your WordPress site. Today, we’ll share five more reasons why you might want to host multiple sites on InMotion Hosting. Just like last time, these tips will help you get the most out of your WordPress hosting package without having to pay extra for more resources.
1. Higher Conversions
One of the first things that will come to mind when you think about multi-site architecture is increasing your sales. If your main site is located at http://www.example.com and you want to replicate it on other domains, for instance http://www.example.com/blog and http://www.example.com/store/, you’ll want to make sure that each domain has its own copy of the blog and store pages so that when a visitor lands on any of these pages, they don’t see a “shared” blog or store. This can potentially lower your conversion rates since every visitor will see a slightly different experience depending on the domain they’re on. For example, if you have product reviews on your main site, but not on the blog or store copy, you’ll lose out on a lot of potential sales since most people won’t realize that the reviews exist. You can easily fix this by including a small review section on each of the other domains or creating mini-reviews for each product that can be linked to from each domain.
2. Test New Product Ideas
If you’re the type of person who likes to experiment with new product ideas, building a multisite WordPress architecture on InMotion Hosting is the perfect way to do so. You can keep one site active while testing out new products on the other. When you finally decide which products work best and create an online store for them, the other sites will be able to continue operating independently without any interference from the main site. This is a great way to test out new product ideas without risking any of your regular sites’ traffic.
3. Independent Testing Grounds
Another advantage of having multiple sites within the same hosting account is the ability to test new product ideas and see how they perform on separate domains. You can also use the extra sites to compare products and see which one performs best without the need to continuously go back and forth between pages on a single site. When you have a site that’s up and running, you’ll want to use this as your baseline for comparison purposes. While this approach might work well for certain products, it can be a challenge to implement across the board since you’ll want all of your sites to be independent from one another and you can’t always be sure that the products you’re testing will behave in the same way on all domains. This is where using a CDN (content delivery network) comes in handy since they can provide the same content to all of your sites no matter where they are located. Having a CDN also allows you to use one domain name for all of your sites (i.e., example.com) which can improve your SEO (search engine optimization) significantly since all of your sites will be linked to the same domain. When you have a CDN, you don’t need to worry about any of your sites’ performance since whatever content is on the CDN will be available to all of your sites.
4. Scalability
One of the things that made WordPress so popular in the first place was its scalability, or the ability to easily increase its power. Today, scalability is even more important because so many people are building larger and larger websites and trying to squeeze every last bit of performance out of their web hosts. If you’ve ever upgraded your site’s hosting plan only to discover that you’re now at the maximum capacity of your chosen plan, you’ll understand why scalability is so important. When you reach this point, you either have to choose a different hosting plan or upgrade your account again. This either/or scenario makes scalability more important than ever because you don’t want to be caught with no backup plan when the servers start to overload. Even when using a CDN, your sites’ scalability is still limited by the speed of the internet connection between your websites and the CDN’s servers. This can be improved upon by using a separate (your own) server for each of your sites which is something that most reputable web hosts will charge you extra for. However, having your own servers comes with its own set of challenges since you’ll have to maintain consistent performance regardless of whether you’re having a busy or quiet day. Fortunately, there are automatic tools that you can use to monitor and optimize the performance of your WordPress sites which you can find out more about in our previous blog post. This is one of the main reasons why multi-site architecture is so popular among people who are building larger websites with more complex performance requirements. Owning your own servers doesn’t mean that you have to go through life as a hermit, doing everything online either – you can get help from the experts if you need to.
5. Increased Security
One of the main reasons why people use WordPress for their websites is because it’s one of the most popular and secure content management systems around. Even if you’re not the type of person who wants to keep your website’s content totally private, you’ll still want to protect it from hackers and other bad actors. Thankfully, WordPress comes with a built-in content security firewall which protects your site from certain attacks. Still, you might want to go a step further and use a dedicated IP (internet protocol) which provides you with additional security and anonymity. Having a dedicated IP also makes it much easier for you to set up multiple sites since you don’t have to worry about IP conflicts or anything of the sort. It just works!
In summary, you can increase your WordPress sites’ performance and efficiency by using the right plugins, creating mini-reviews for products, and caching. In addition, you can improve your sites’ security by using a dedicated IP, registering your domains with an online security company, and installing a content security firewall. Finally, if you’re looking for a way to test new product ideas without risking your regular site’s traffic, building a multisite WordPress architecture on InMotion Hosting is the perfect solution. Just make sure that you have the necessary backups in place in case anything goes wrong. And when you’re finally ready to launch the products from your independent sites, make sure that you register the new domains with an online security company and install a content security firewall.