5 Explanation On Why Use WordPress Multisite To Run A Network Of Websites Is Important.

WordPress is one of the fastest growing internet development tools round, and gives an exceptional solution for people that wish to handle dozens or even thousands of sites from one admin panel.

Perhaps the strongest feature of best managed wordpress hosting providers is how the content management system keeps the content of the site separate from the functionality and design. Rather than these all being entwined together, functionality is controlled by plugins and the layout is controlled by themes. WordPress themes control each aspect of the design from the colours and fonts into the header, footer and design.

Having started out in 2003 as an easy open source website publishing tool, WordPress is currently used by over 14 percent of the world's biggest websites, as of June 2011.

The last significant release of WordPress comprised WordPress Multisite - a more strong but user-friendly method to handle multiple sites from a single login. While the basics of WordPress Multisite are extremely simple and a new website can be produced in seconds as a subdirectory or sub domain of the parent website, WordPress Multisite has a wealth of additional more sophisticated features. The Super Admin additionally controls which WordPress plugins and themes the local site administrators may get.

To set up a WordPress Multisite network, a user should first have their very own self-hosted WordPress installation, updated to the latest version. As of June 2011, the latest version is 3.1.3, however, upgrades are typically released every month or two.

Beware that it can be far from straightforward a user to upgrade from standard WordPress to WordPress multisite along with the WordPress founders might even maintain it that way purposefully. Not for nasty or industrial motives, but just to save their experienced customers the extra complication.

They do this since the technical prerequisites of WordPress Multisite are substantially larger and less technical users who aren't certain what they are doing can easily bring about instability in their websites, especially when they have a great deal of plugins installed. Specific plugins work nicely with WordPress Multisite and other plugins are not compatible.

The service provided by the developers of WordPress plugins don't always test their plugins with WordPress multisite, let alone in conjunction with the rest of the plugins. With the unlimited potential combinations of plugins which WordPress users might potentially have installed, this could be impossible anyhow.

So if you are a technically innovative WordPress user, the best way to set up WordPress Multisite is to

Assess the requirements of your hosting, especially if you are operating the websites as sub-domains or independent domain names. These are more complex to set up, but carry many benefits, particularly for SEO. Switch off any plugins that you're not certain of.

Follow the guidelines WordPress provide and execute their instructions to the letter.

If you are running the multiple websites as independent domain names, install domain mapping also, or seek the support of a specialist for it.

However, if you're a relatively recent convert to WordPress or even only an intermediate person, then it is strongly advised that you hire a professional WordPress consultant to do this for you. It may take a professional WordPress developer just as a few hours to install multisite for you, saving you a lot of time and a great deal of stress.

Toby Thomas is a professional WordPress adviser based in London. Toby is an expert in using WordPress Multisite for web designing, SEO and internet advertising.

My expertise: Online Branding and digital marketing. My clients say I bring clarity and focus to the brand-building exercise.