Multi site option or not

Hi there

Here is my context I would like a validation

  • My first future WP site will be hosted at a hosting company and will be secured through a SSL certificate attached to it
  • I have prepared at home on a dedicated NAS machine a dev website to test the options, plugins I would like to use on my live site
  • I have installed on my Mac an instance of Local on which I would like to have my preprod site which will be the mirror of the live site. My intend is to write my articles in this preprod site then export from there to import in my live site.

I choose this option to put my preprod site on Local because of SSL as per my understanding I can activate a local SSL certificate on this site which will means that my urls will be https then once exported/imported in my live site no additional work to rewrite the url.

Now my question is what is the best approach regarding the fact that probably I’ll develop more sites in the future then I thought to use the multi-site option and put there all my preprod sites but my concern is about the database ? in multi-site mode are all the sites sharing the same DB or have they there own DB?

What I understood is that in order to have export/import working I need to have the same DB on both sides (live and preprod) so if multi-site means 1 DB instead of several I can’t use this option.

thanks for your advices

BKantique

More often than not, you won’t need multisite.

If your hosting only provides you with one database, you can change the $table_prefix setting in the site’s wp-config.php file to allow for multiple WordPress sites on one database.

Here’s an article listing out some considerations when choosing whether or not to use multisite: https://serverpilot.io/community/articles/why-you-should-not-use-wordpress-multisite.html

If you wish to learn more about multisite itself, we have a great post on our blog about it here: https://getflywheel.com/layout/the-basics-of-wordpress-multisite/

Hi Clay

thanks for your clear answer very very helpful.

Now it’s clear for me that I don’t need at all multisite option indeed.

Would simplify my workflow for sure

Just need to deconstruct what I started but once done should be good for me

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Multisite (particularly when set up as sub-domains) also makes it very frustrating (understatement) to sync data (and sometimes other irritations, especially with third-party plugins). I came up with an “okay” workflow for syncing from production to staging and Local dev instances (I would not recommend my method for syncing to production, only from), but it took a lot of hacking and experimenting and isn’t perfect.

There are times when multisite has been an excellent solution for clients (and I work with it every day), but as Clay said, you probably don’t need it (or even want it).

If your sites are rather similar/use the same or very few themes, or if you have a reason to offer subscribers/members their own sub-sites, it may be of interest for more centralized management (and other reasons). For example, one of my clients has ~50 sub-domain sites. All use the same theme and similar collection of plugins, and authentication is centralized. It works great for their needs.

Otherwise, single sites have far fewer headaches.

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