WordPress multisites and how they work
October 24, 2025
Introduction to WordPress multisites
Developing a WordPress multisite allows you to deploy and manage more than one WordPress website within the same installation. The biggest impact this has is a single, unified administrative dashboard that allows you to switch between your network of websites as a ‘Super Admin’; while still giving you control over individual site access, permissions, and content.
One of the biggest benefits of a multisite website design is that each site in your network will leverage the development efforts of a single build, including your WordPress website files, your site themes, and your network plugins. By leveraging this, you can easily keep your site up to date, deploy new changes, and manage the content on a per-site basis. While you may think that this limits the overall design of each site, there is the ability to control branding per-site including logos, colours, and fonts to set each site in the network apart from the others.
Features of a WordPress multisite
Database
Database structures are built to share resources like plugins and users, while separating content management.
Domains
With a multisite, your site domain structure is flexible!
- You can have all your sites as a subdomain (ca.domain.com and usa.domain.com),
- As subdirectories of your main domain (domain.com/ca/ and comain.com/usa/),
- Or even as unique domains (cadomain.com and usadomain.com).
Users
Each site can have unique users and content, which allows you to maintain control over access. The top-down approach to users allows you to have a ‘Super Admin’ with unmetered access, as well as user roles for each individual website, including Admins, Editors, Authors, and Subscribers.
Site updates
Performing plugin and WordPress updates at the network level saves time and allows you to quickly deploy once for all the sites in your network. Deploying a development change or new feature that impacts all sites is also very easy and saves on development times and costs, by streamlining efforts.
A scalable solution
Your multisite naturally provides you with a scalable solution that allows you to roll out any number of sites quickly and easily. With the knowledge and flexibility of managing your multisite, you can launch new services or brands with ease. A great example of this is managing multiple languages with unique content, while leveraging your existing branding. A successful multisite that uses this approach can be seen in the Drake International Canadian websites managed in English and French.
Does a multisite benefit your business?
The flexibility of a multisite website means it can provide a wide range of benefits to any industry. There’s no right or wrong time to implement a multisite, but there are some obvious use cases that could benefit from this approach to designing, developing, and deploying their online presence.
Franchising your business
By leveraging a multisite structure, you can easily roll out updates to a range of sites within your network. By utilizing a multisite to easily expand on several locations – adding, updating, and launching new franchises becomes streamlined. The benefit of maintaining familiarity and consistency across all sites helps maintain brand consistency.
Corporations with many stakeholders
Many larger corporations have individual teams that manage the effort for their departments, location, or branch. The multisite approach maintains brand identity while dividing these efforts across many teams and restricting access where necessary.
Multilingual content
As noted earlier in this post, the ability to quickly deploy a site in a new language while leveraging your existing branding and digital efforts is clear!