Installing Multiple WordPress Sites On Same Domain To Section Off Uses

  • So I have already done this but I’m curious what pros and cons others see in this setup and interested in other perspectives. I have a site in mind, its to have an information area and blog, a customer support and client dashboard area, a forum and a directory…with possible growth of other areas.

    I built a centos cpanel server on AWS …
    I started making it and decided that I didnt want more than 25 or so plugins cause I didnt want a ton of requests on each page load. But each plugin seemed to push the js and css files through the roof. I didnt want a multisite cause thats just making one site look like more, I wanted the opposite of multisite I want people to see one site but its actually several. Then the plugins for one area are just in one area, and it keeps all the SEO value in one domain.
    So I settled on three sites one main domain two in 2 subfolders, installed the same theme and while each has its own table they all three share the same user table…that way you join one you are in all three. Same cookies are set up in them.
    I just have to be mindful to manually custom interlink the sites. And thats been alright. Now I also had some redundancy with having to install the same security plugin in each of the three but that seems to be working fine. Statistics is alright cause I can just use the same Google Analytics.

    Do you think this configuration is going to work out? What problems do you forsee? Like I know I have 3 sites basically to watch out for but I think they’ll run faster for users….tables are smaller, plugins for X arent involved in other areas…I have been debating combining the wp-content folder so that media and theme is shared but still want plugins totally separate so may just get over that plan. I had some .htaccess oddities but got passed those after redoing the ones in the subfolders.

    Site homepage gets an A from gtmetrix. Loads in 2.2 seconds with 41 requests…WP Statistics shows 480 users made 1311 visits yesterday. Didnt seem to slow it down, 4804 users in a week…14,000 visits. Most is bot traffic probably but thats still useful for my testing. Each site is developed and there are 900 indexed pages…each site has its own xml and the main one has links in it to the other sitemaps on the other installs.

    Google search is trending higher and higher for visitors and keywords. So the SEO aspect seems taken care of…

    So my cons I can come up with are…
    Users upload something and its not available somewhere else, not a biggie cause each area is kinda function and audience based. I dont know if the added tables are a strain on the database or if that help it by sectioning things off more? Is it more secure with 3 compartments or is it more dangerous. Than if I have just used one site with everything…each has its own admin area … I suppose if the database becomes sluggish I can move to a dedicated one….it will probably be more trouble if I need to migrate the site as each site just sees itself…

    Any thoughts? Warnings?

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  • Thread Starter matthew40

    (@matthew40)

    no thoughts.:-). sitemaps are disconnected this way I also think I had to use a plugin to help with autolinking between the installs. but homepage loads in an easy 2 seconds so thats nice. SEO can be trick though as each site has a different members pages. And like I have to avoid posting blog entries here and there as that kinda creates duplicate categories and then the same meta titles may popup. I’ll update time to time and anyone has any thoughts let me know.

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