Site Structure Question

  • Resolved bammichael

    (@bammichael)


    1 year, 3 months ago

    Hear me out, I’ll try to explain it the best I can.

    So we have a company, I’ll call it domainA.com. Company “domainA” is a “parent” company, which has a bunch of “child” companies that operate under it, but we regard all the children as being a part of “domainA.”

    For the sake of the example, let’s call the child companies domainB, domainC, and domainD.

    We are doing a website redesign, and (if possible), I would love to have domainA serve as a sort of “company website hub” that links off to all the other child companies (domainB, domainC, and domainD), while all companies are available on the same WordPress website/installation. All child sites are going to reflect the same website layout/structure/colors/fonts/etc, the difference being each child company has a different objective.
    > domainB – a one-page site with information about what we do and contact info to schedule tours
    > domainC – a several-page website to explain hours and what we sell
    > domainD – a “large” website with 10+ pages and tons of separate functionalities ranging from presenting information, linking to external resources, and contact us forms

    Ideally, I would love each company domain to link to the same WordPress website. For example, domainA.com links to domainA, domainB.com links to domainB, etc., but all the company sites would be built on the same WordPress installation. Each company would have a separate header, BUT would use the same footer. Likewise, each child company header would ideally have a “back to parent” mechanic implemented.

    Is this hypothetically possible? Is this a good practice? Or would the better approach be to have all children point to the domainA.com site and get their own directories, such as domainA.com/domainB, domainA.com/domainC, etc.?

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • Thread Starter bammichael

    (@bammichael)

    Another reason I ask is because a few of the plugins we use, one of which being an Events Calendar, would work extremely well if I could tag each event to connect it with a different “company,” yet on the parent website I could have a global calendar listing all events.

    Plus it would be significantly more efficient to maintain/expand/update the site if it was being handled all in one place. Just wanted to make sure it would be feasible before we start the redesign project.

    Hi, that sounds like a good use of Multisite.

    You could also create a parent theme for all of the common front-end templates/CSS/etc, and then create child themes for each site that customizes the header/etc for each individual site.

    You may need to write some custom code to get plugins like Event Calendar to be aware of the other sites and pull data from them, but that’d probably still be easier in Multisite than trying to build a similar feature across many individual sites.

    Thread Starter bammichael

    (@bammichael)

    The most important 2 (Elementor and Events Calendar) both support multisite. I would need to bump both plans up a tier to allow multisite, but that works.

    Also our site host allows multisite, so cheers! Thank you very much for your advice, I greatly appreciate it ??

    No problem ??

    Thread Starter bammichael

    (@bammichael)

    From the documentation I have from my hosting provider, multisite can only support subdomain structure (subdomain.domainA.com). Can WordPress Multisite support domains (domainA.com)?

    Multisite itself can support:

    • Sub-domains: cats.example.org, dogs.example.org, whales.example.org
    • Sub-directories: example.org/cats/, example.org/dogs/, example.org/whales/
    • Separate domains: cats-example.org, dogs-example.org, whales-example.org

    Your host may not support that, though. It could also be technically possible on your host, but they just don’t officially support it. IIRC, on Dreamhost for instance, you can several “alias” domains that all point to the same folder on the file system that the main domain runs from. At that point all of the requests to all domains are being sent to WP, but WP needs to be configured to handle them.

    That doesn’t always need custom code or a plugin, but many use a “domain mapping” plugin for convenience.

    • This reply was modified 1 year, 3 months ago by Ian Dunn.
Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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