WordPress Event Ticketing

Ah, Multisite. A powerful but often misused aspect of WordPress. One of the most important aspects is to decide on subdomains or subdirectories before you start. Sure you can switch at a later date, but that isn't overly straightforward to do and will cause you issues.

Subdirectories

Subdirectories are in the format of example.com/somesite. Google and other search engines see subdirectories as part of your main site. This means they are affected by the main sites SEO and can also affect the main sites SEO themselves. This may or may not be what you want depending on the exact purpose of your multisite install.

You'd usually go with subdirectories if everyone on your network was part of your business.

Say you run an online store, but you sell such varying products you want them as offshoots of your main site. Well rather than cars.example.com you might have example.com/cars where /cars is it's own site on the network. The benefits being that /car can have it's own unique theme activated and configured and look like a completely separate site, perfect if you have multiple brands under one parent company but want each site to have its own style.

You wouldn't want to go with subdirectories, though, if you were, say, hosting sites for a client. As the client wouldn't have their own domain name unless you used something like domain mapping and the client would directly impact on your own main sites SEO and would never properly achieve their own ranking unless, again, you used something like domain mapping.

Ideas for sites to use Subdirectories on

• A network where each employee has their own site.
• A school network where each class or student has their own site.
• A network of multiple brands that all connect and link in, allowing you to gain exposure for every site via the main sites rankings.

Before you use subdirectories always stop and ask yourself what the point of the network is. You don't just want to jump in and occur SEO penalties later down the line as it wasn't well planned at the start. Subdirectories also might not be as useful if you want someone to think of your sub sites name first. For instance imagine talking to a client about your site and then explaining it's at example.com/yourbusiness it'd sound a lot better to say it's at yourbusiness.example.com that way your business name is at the forefront of the customer's mind, rather than the site they have to go through to get there.

Subdomains

Subdomains are in the format of somesite.example.com. Google and other search see subdomains as an entirely new site and Not part of your existing. This means they don't inherit or benefit from any SEO ranking already applied to your main example.com site. This can be useful if you want to give people access to their own site and maintain them all within one network, but you don't want their site affecting your SEO or ranking in anyway.

 

Subdomains are perfect if you want to use them for development purposes.

 

You wouldn't want the new version of your site to be developed on example.com/newversion, but setting it up as newsite.example.com and setting it not to be indexed in search engines allows you to get on with development without worrying about two versions of your site showing in search engines.

If you want your subsites to benefit from the SEO work done on your main domain. You wouldn't want to go with a subdomain; you'd be much better off going with the subdirectory setup mentioned above.

Ideas for sites to use Subdomains on

• A network of sites where you sell access to them. For example using WPMU DEV's Pro Sites plugin to sell a subsite to someone. You wouldn't want their website affecting your SEO in which case using Sub Domains is a perfect option!
• An anonymous blogging network where everyone gets their own subdomain and is treated as entirely independent sites.
• Development/sandbox installs for clients and testing new developments.

These are just a few ideas on what you could build with a WordPress multisite network. But the real question is what you should go with sub domains or sub directories? The simple answer is if you aren't sure is to always go with subdomains, worst way you have to build up the SEO on each subdomain but at least there is no worry of negative SEO impact on your primary domain.

Domain Mapping

I mentioned domain mapping above, Domain mapping is great! It allows you to map a full domain like example.com to example.com/subsite, it helps brand the website and is perfect if you develop your client's sites on a multisite install, but they want their own domain to show rather than yours (and who doesn't want their own domain?).

There are a couple of different domain mapping plugins but did you know since WordPress 4.5+, domain mapping is a native feature! That's right; now you don't need those crazy complex plugins to map your domain. You can find out more about the native domain mapping features here.

If however, you want something with a bit more flash, then how about WPMU DEV's Domain Mapping plugin.

The plugin can be found here and its main functionality provided over the built-in domain mapping of WordPress is the integration with WPMU DEV's other multisite based plugins like Pro Sites, but it also integrates with eNom, allowing you to become a domain reseller and selling domains right at the point of signup. With functionality like that, you could become the next Wix in no time.

What did you go with for your Multisite? Subdomains or Subdirectories? Have you regretted your decision or was it the best choice you've ever made for your site? Maybe you've had domain mapping nightmares? Let us know in the comments below.