Subdirectory, Subdomain, Domain Mapping Overview

After exploring WordPress-Nginx Configurations for standard/single-site setup, its time to explore WordPress-Nginx Configuration for Multisite setup.

In today’s article, we will take a general overview of WordPress-Multisite. Then in the subsequent chapters we will explore different Nginx configurations.

WordPress Multisite

There are three ways in which WordPress Multisite can be configured. Each has its own use cases and different level of setup complexity.

Configuration	Sub-directory mode	Sub-domain mode	Sub-domain with Domain Mapping
Site Address Examples	example.com/site1 example.com/site2	site1.example.com site2.example.com	site1.com site2.com
DNS requirement	None	Wildcard domain name support	Wildcard domain name support
Ongoing DNS Efforts	None	None	Creation of “A” or “CNAME” record for “mapped” domains
Dedicated IP	Not Required	Not Required	Required – if we want to use A-records for “mapped” domains
Common Usage	Development environment, Demo Sites	Blog Networks with generally common owner, Community Sites	Open Blog Networks, WordPress as CMS hosting

* Note: In domain mapping mode, its not compulsory to map top level domain for every site in Multisite.

There are some differences and quirks you need to be familiar when running a WordPress-Multisite network. All of these will be addressed in separate chapters for three modes.

If you have never used WordPress Multisite before, its better to check right now if it is a good choice going ahead. We get this question many times from our clients.

Is WordPress multisite right choice?

WordPress multisite has many advantages but in some cases you may regret going for it. For this reason I am addressing this question earlier and quickly.

WordPress-Multisite may prove bad:

If there is remarkable difference between functionality of sites. For example, if you put mixture sites running e-commerce, event-website, membership portal, bbPress-forums, job-boards, community blogs, big CMS, wikis, etc – you will end-up with complicated user-permissions which you will find hard to manage. There are some plugins to help you out but from management perspective you will have hard-time.
As you host hybrid sites, total number of plugins will keep going up. You can activate/deactivate plugins per site, but then again managing plugins will get tough. Also, if plugins you uninstall leaves a database tables behind, your WordPress database will become bloated soon.
One poorly coded theme/plugin can bring an entire network down. I see people using poorly coded/outdated plugins in Multisite. They think a bad plugin may impact just 1 site but most likely it will degrade the performance of the entire network.

Good things about WordPress-Multisite:

Multisite works very well when you have similar sites in network. For example, wordpress.com itself. They offer some paid-feature but list of plugins/themes they maintain is same across all sites.
It has some administrative advantages like ease of maintaining WordPress in terms of backup, upgrades, etc. But this can be done easily using other tools & scripts so this advantage alone is not worth going for WordPress Multisite.

Technically, Multisite comes with some performance issues out of the box, but these can be solved by small tweaks. In terms of scaliblity, you can again look at wordpress.com stats which is proof of WordPress Multisite scalability! So performance issue can be ignored if you are willing to put some efforts into tweaking.

Nginx itself is capable of handing many performance issues. I will shed more light on this in the next chapters.

Tomorrow, we will deal with WordPress-Multisite configuration with some optimization! Keep reading!

You can also find the complete list of WordPress-Nginx tutorials here.

Comments

Chris

April 25, 2013

Thank you! I have spent all day trying to make WPMU do something it wasn’t designed to do and I didn’t figure that out until reading this. We need more when-to-use posts like this. Well done! If you’re ever in Cleveland, Ohio, lunch is on me!
1. Rahul Bansal
  
  June 3, 2013
  
  Hi Chris,
  
  Glad to know that you find this article useful. 🙂
Venura Herath

June 27, 2013

Thanks Rahul! I was really confused about subdir and subdomians!
Amir

November 9, 2013

Hello,

I am trying to run wordpress multisite on the subdomain.

Example:

subdomain.domain.com is a place which my wordpress multisite installed.
My newly created blogs are under subdomain setting and something look like these:
blog1.subdomain.domain.com
blog2.subdomain.domain.com
examplesite.subdomain.domain.com

But it doesn’t work.

Could anyone help me figure it out please…?!

Best regards,
Amir
hareesh

February 4, 2014

how do i do this?

site1.example.com to point to both site1.com and site2.com
1. Rahul Bansal
  
  February 5, 2014
  
  Sorry, couldn’t understand your question?
  
  You can point any number of domains to one site but you cannot point a single domain to 2 different sites!
Antoninf

March 8, 2014

Can I do a site2.domain.com mapped from a WP platform installed on site1.domain.com? I couldn’t get it yet. Thanks.
1. Rahul Bansal
  
  March 14, 2014
  
  Sorry but I couldn’t understand what you want to achieve. A subdomain is technically as independent as a domain.
Daniel Haas

May 1, 2020

Nearly all Links on the help pages regarding Multisite setup are broken. Could you please fix them?
i.E the Link on the bottom of the article : “WordPress-Multisite configuration”
Broken: https://easyengine.rtcampmu.rt.gw/tutorials/creating-wordpress-multisite-network-nginx/
Working: https://easyengine.rtcampmu.rt.gw/wordpress-nginx/tutorials/multisite/overview/
1. kirtan
  
  December 18, 2020
  
  Thanks for reporting Daniel. We have fixed the links 🙂