The pros and cons of website clones and multisites for business growth

As businesses evolve and expand into new products, services, departments, or regions, having a scalable digital strategy becomes essential. 

Two common approaches to support this growth include website cloning and multisite networks.

Website cloning involves replicating an existing site to serve as a foundation for new ventures, while multisite networks enable the management of multiple sites sharing core files and databases from a single user account. This article will explore the pros and cons of both strategies to help you determine which is best suited for your business’s growth and digital needs.

Approaching a new development project can feel overwhelming, but website cloning offers a practical solution for many businesses. By replicating your existing website, you can efficiently build new sites that meet specific functional needs. This method allows you to leverage pre-built elements, ensuring consistency while also providing the flexibility to add or modify pages and features both now and in the future.

Benefits

• Cost-effective development: Instead of starting from scratch, our team can leverage your existing website design and development framework as a foundation to be able to create new sites for your business. 
• Faster time to market: By establishing a reusable codebase, significant time and cost efficiencies are gained compared to designing and developing each site from scratch.
• Functional flexibility: Each clone will have its own codebase, allowing for modifications to accommodate specific functionality requirements of each website. 
• Customisation opportunities: Each clone is a standalone website, meaning it can be highly customised to distinguish between markets and brands if needed. This includes not only colour, font, and imagery but it also has the potential for designing new page templates when required. 

Limitations 

• Costly ongoing maintenance effort: While this clone approach affords flexibility in going management/enhancement, it does mean each site will require the same effort to maintain given each has its own codebase. Platform and plugin updates would need to be applied to each site individually and if there was ever a need to rollout a feature across multiple sites, we would need to make this change on each website. This results in increased development time. 
• Hosting requirements: Each website will need to be hosted separately, which will result in yearly hosting costs for each site. That being said, having separate hosting is beneficial for managing server load and performance given the websites will be operating independently and won’t be impacted by each other.
   

A multisite approach is one way to reduce ongoing costs of rebuilding similar sites. This approach offers simplified administration as managing all sites from a centralised point is incredibly convenient, and easy network-wide rollouts and changes. Assets within the multisite would follow the same page template structure and rely on the same technology (and codebase), with the ability to customise each site using elements such as colour, imagery, and font. 

Benefits

• Scalability and affordability: By investing in the design and development of the initial multisite build, subsequent additions to the portfolio would require minimal setup costs compared to building a standalone website for each. 
• Streamlined ongoing maintenance: Maintaining and updating a multisite is more efficient and sustainable, as all websites are managed within the same codebase. This reduces ongoing support costs in the long run. In the same vein, any new feature rollout can be actioned in one instance and applied across websites, resulting in a far more efficient process.
• Brand consistency: A multisite ensures consistency in the overall look and feel of websites in the portfolio, promoting cohesion through shared layouts, designs, and user experiences. There is still the opportunity to differentiate the sites (across markets) through simple changes across each multisite, such as the logo, colour palettes and typefaces where we are able to achieve a 1:1 replacement/swap of these elements.
• Centralised content management: A significant advantage of a multisite structure is the ability to manage all content and plugins for all websites within a single content management system (CMS). This facilitates page template sharing across websites, resulting in streamlined updates and maintenance for the internal team.

Limitations

• Hosting requirements: While a multisite can be handled within one hosting server, it is likely that additional server space will be required due to the increased capacity required to handle multiple websites within one platform. However, this would likely be significantly less than the hosting costs for multiple standalone websites as would be the case with the cloning approach. 
• Website performance issues: Performance as multisites share the same database, with each site having its own subset of database tables, may have are negative effect on performance, and performance issues on one site can also impact others such as traffic overload and downtime. 
• Minimal branding and UX differentiation: This can be a drawback if you’re looking to create highly differentiated websites or if each website has a very different user journey. 
   

If you're seeking flexibility and customisation, website cloning might be the ideal solution. By replicating your existing site, you can efficiently create new websites tailored to specific functional requirements. This is particularly useful when launching a new brand with similar products or when expanding into new markets, allowing you to reuse existing elements while customising each site as needed.

However, if you're expanding into new regions with similar branding but different product offerings, or managing subsites with consistent functionality—such as a university with multiple departments—a multisite approach might be more suitable. Multisite setups allow you to leverage shared templates and features across all sites, streamlining both the initial development and ongoing management. While this approach offers efficiencies in maintenance and administration, it limits the flexibility to diversify the design and functionality of individual sites.
 

Choosing the right approach for your website can be a difficult task, especially at a time when your business is going through growth or change. 

At Vivo Group, we specialise in creating solutions that humanise digital and enable you to create content in a way that suits your business needs. We can consult you on the best option that suits your content requirements, business goals and future objectives to ensure your website is future-proofed and primed to grow with your ambitions. Whether it’s a new website or existing rebuild, we will help you choose the right approach for your site. 

Contact us to get your next digital project underway.