Best way of creating a website with multiple themes/languages

Question

I am building the website for my startup, I have limited knowledge of WordPress but managed to build some decent websites using premade themes. I now face this problem I need to build a website that basically holds 4 WordPress websites in one and I don't know where to start with.

The structure would be something like

company.com/lang1 
company.com/lang2 
company.com/site2/lang1
company.com/site2/lang2

The main site and site2 would have a different theme as site 2 is about a company branch that does something completely different than the main business. Is this workable?

I was planning on using Astra + elementor, is there a way to do this?

Side question: Do you think a landing page that links to the two websites would work better thana large side button on the main site.

thank you very much!

Answer 1

AFAIK there's a one-to-one relationship between a Wordpress installation and a theme - you can only have one theme per install.

As you say site2 is 'completely different' then it probably makes sense to make it a completely separate Wordpress installation. The only reason to think about something else would be if it shared a lot of content or configuration with site1 where you'd save time integrating them.

The site structure you suggest is possible, but it means that the site2 directory is 'inside' site1's Wordpress installation which creates some problems. It would be a much better idea if you can do it this way to put the Wordpress installations like:

company.com/site1
company.com/site2

Then you could use an .htaccess in the root of your webhosting for company.com/ to immediately redirect people to site1, so that visitors who type company.com go straight to that Wordpress.

EDIT: I missed your note about a landing page. The above site structure would work great with a landing page at company.com/ which then sends people off to the right site. If you can make the landing page simple and in HTML only (i.e. not generated from Wordpress), that's great. If you need to make it a Wordpress page from one of the two sies that's also doable but a bit more tricky.

For the language settings, check out the excellent WPML multilanguage plugin, which might help you out here to give you a nice language switcher feature.

HTH, reply here if you need more info.

Answer 2

In WordPress the typical architecture we see is the single site instance. But WordPress has an underlying architecture that supports Multisite instance - unlimited (?) websites under the same WordPress installation. Typically, for bi-lingual WordPress sites, it's the best architecture to use Multisite.

Multisite as Multilingual

With multisite, both the sites are detached, but they are in the same WordPress installation. That means you don't have to maintain two (or more) different WordPress installation, but you can maintain them like separate installation. So plugins like Multilingualpress will help you to bind the contents while managing content in all the different languages.¹

With multisite and multilingualpress, you can manage sites like below:

example.com/
example.com/lang2
...

Single Site as Multilingual

But as you want to maintain multilanguages in multisites. You can use Multisite architecture with Polylang plugin. Polylang enables you to have multilingual in single site instance. It's not recommended, and not a good architecture, but sometimes it's better to get bi-lingual site in single site instance instead of a huge multisite architecture. With polylang, content management could be a bit messy, because contents for both (or all) the languages are in the same place.

With Multisite you can have your branch and parent company website:

example.com/ (parent site)
- example.com/ (default lang)
- example.com/lang2 (secondary lang)

example.com/branch (branch site)
- example.com/branch/ (default lang)
- example.com/branch/lang2 (secondary lang)
...

Both the Polylang and MultilingualPress has their own Pros and Cons. So you have to test them thoroughly in test environment to ensure them to function as you want, or at least you can bring comfort to what they are providing.

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_{1. Multilingualpress for Gutenberg editor is a paid service now. If you use Classic editor, you can use Multilingualpress free version}