WordPress Multisite

WordPress Multisite is a network configuration that allows a single WordPress installation to power multiple distinct websites. Each site in the network has its own content, users, and URL, but they share a single database, theme and plugin codebase, and server install. A network admin manages the shared infrastructure, while individual site admins manage their own content.

Multisite can run as subdomains (site1.example.com, site2.example.com) or as subdirectories (example.com/site1, example.com/site2). It’s been part of WordPress core since version 3.0.

The typical use cases are organizations that run many similar sites — school districts with a site per school, franchises with a site per location, media companies with multiple publications, agencies hosting client sites on shared infrastructure.

Multisite’s Tradeoffs

Multisite works well within its design boundaries, but it can become constraining over time. Not all plugins are multisite-compatible. Updates to shared plugins or themes affect the entire network at once, which makes testing more complicated. Sites on the network share server resources, so a traffic spike on one site affects others. The database structure for multisite — with separate tables per site — can get unwieldy as the network grows.

Many teams who adopted Multisite years ago have reconsidered as their needs evolved or as the platform matured in ways that made individual installs more manageable.

Statamic and Multisite

Statamic handles multi-site use cases differently. Rather than a single shared installation, Statamic sites can be set up as separate applications sharing a common codebase through version control, or as a single Statamic install using the multi-site features in Statamic Pro. The Pro multi-site approach supports multiple localized versions of a site, which is designed primarily for localization rather than fully separate sites with separate content.

For genuinely independent sites — the school-per-district case, for example — separate Statamic applications that share a theme or starter kit are often the cleaner approach. This is closer to how a modern development workflow handles multiple sites than Multisite’s shared-install model.

Migrating from WordPress Multisite is more complex than migrating a single site. Each site in the network has its own content and URL structure, and you’ll need to decide whether to keep them together or split them into independent Statamic applications. See Does Statamic handle multisite? for more context, and WordPress to Statamic Migration for how we approach network migrations.