Wordpress Multisite Network to replace 3 seperate Wordpress installations

Question

I am hoping that someone with experience with a similar issue may be able to help me with this and inform me as to whether or not I am correct in assuming this is the best approach for what I want to achieve.

I'm going to be doing a bit of work for a company with 3 different wordpress sites for each country/region it operates in which at this moment in time is Ireland and the UK. At present they have pretty much the same content/plugins on both there .ie and .co.uk site as well as a .com site which serves Europe.

It is very difficult to maintain this structure and update content as you are updating the same content across 3 sites and it's just an absolute waste of time in my opinion. Now, I've never really had an issue like this before but I began to look into the concept of creating a Wordpress Multisite which would bring all of the 3 sites together into one .com domain.

In doing so the super admin could manage plugins, themes and various other admin users and things would be so much tidier and easier to manage as well.

I drew up a diagram of what I was proposing:

As you can see the installation would sit on www.mymultisite.com and this would act as a base. When users visit this page they are redirected to the appropriate subdirectory based on their IP address and their location. This way they are served content that is relevant to them.

There would also need to be a blog which wouldn't be geoip restricted but rather have categories which would indicate the posts that are relevant to each individual region.

The idea behind it then is that common pages such as a "contact us" or "about us" page are shared among all the sites on the network but region specific pages such as "pricing" or "events" are unique to each subsite on the network which would enable me to deliver the relevant content.

My question is aimed at more experienced Wordpress developers, is this a viable solution to my problem of 3 seperate sites? Would you do things differently? Would you recommend any other considerations I may have overlooked?

I'd appreciate as much help as possible on this. Also I did look at using WPML however, I don't think it suits my needs entirely. From what I understand this plugin is more for multilingual sites as opposed to multiregional sites, all of the sites I'm working with would be in English so I don't think the need is there. Although maybe I am wrong...

Answer 1

It's fairly difficult to share content between sites in a multisite network so this will buy you some efficiency by making things easier to maintain, but you will still have to find a way to share or copy content around.

To share content between sites you can look at RAMP by Crowd Favorite (getting a little long in the tooth, but we use it with some customization), or WP Site Sync (a new one but coming along rapidly), or keep an eye on VersionPress as they plan to address this need at some point. It can be done (the sharing) but it is not always simple and straightforward on a site with a lot of interdependencies between pages, so consider carefully before you commit to this approach.

Another approach would be to have one site and structure the pages so the content that is unique to a region is under a parent page for that region, which would give the appearance in the URL of a subdirectory, eg, if the URL for the UK events page should be mysite.com/uk/events/ then make the events top page a child of the uk page.

That way if you want one central blog, you can just use the posts for your mysite.com as the blog and it only has to be in one place, you don't have to ship it around between multiple site, put it in a separate site, or cross link or redirect between the three sites to get people to the blog.

There is a great post on how to determine when to use multisite by Mika Epstein called "Don't Use WordPress Multisite" that would be worth reading, and a little more from when Mika talked to the Director of Engineering at Wired about why they don't use multisite.

Answer 2

From what I read your issue is mainly updating your site: have you looked into Infinite WP - it allows you to manage all your WordPress sites under one platform.