The Benefits of a Drupal Multisite

Whether you are in the public or private sector, running a higher education, healthcare or government website, serving thousands of clients or citizens is a tremendous undertaking. More often than not, one website isn’t enough to provide your visitors with what they truly need.

In addition, having a multitude of disparate websites can be a nightmare when you want to deploy and manage content consistently. So how can you better manage multiple sites, workflows, themes and content delivery? A multisite approach may be what you need.

The Benefits of a Multisite Experience

With many educational institutes, government agencies and healthcare organizations focusing on holistic development for their students, citizens and patients, there is a demand from different departments for sister domains. 

If you are looking to spin up new sites, make content or configurations quickly, effectively and inexpensively, a Drupal multisite implementation should be your next step. Freshly branded sites are attainable in a matter of days as opposed to months by leveraging shared content such as libraries, components, sign-on kits, etc.

Having this sort of flexibility will allow you to manage delivery and governance for providing unprecedented control over many sites from a single management console. By utilizing Drupal multisite capabilities, your departments will:

• Improve governance across your organization and web experiences
• Centrally manage your multiple Drupal sites from a single interface
• Mitigate outages through an elastic and scalable platform
• Cut costs per site delivered and developed

 

Let’s take a closer look at some more benefits of taking a multisite approach.

Faster Time-To-Market Leaving Time to Innovate

As more and more organizations grow their digital presence, the demand for innovation and efficiency for managing content across many websites has never been greater. Drupal is widely regarded as the preferred CMS that delivers the most robust multisite capabilities in the world.

We’ve seen first hand that our multisite platform implementations, such as with Northern Health, have accelerated our client’s time-to-innovation, time-to-delivery and lower the per-site costs as their deployments grew.

Drupal’s multisite capability will reduce the overhead of managing code across multiple sites and enables great agility in launching new sites quickly. 

A multisite integration can do an amazing job of consolidating digital marketing operations and operational maintenance, especially if you are a larger organization that oversees the marketing capabilities of many ancillaries.

Drupal Multisite is great for content creators, editors and developers, giving them a single point of access where they can manage each site, drastically cutting down the time it takes to manage these different properties. 

Reuse Components and Standardize Development Processes

When deploying a Drupal Multisite solution, various site stakeholders within your organization are able to work within the same structured and standardized toolsets and templates. Creating a shared library of reusable integrations, components, and workflows. 

These prebuilt components are created at the beginning of the deployment process allowing independent teams to reuse them without having to build everything from scratch. Not only will your team save time, but this process will ensure that any new site or site in the process of being updated offers a consistent visual and user experience.

Speaking of user experience, Drupal Multisites can create a much more personalized experience for your visitors!

A More Personalized Experience for Your Users

We understand that large organizations may already have many web properties. Using a Drupal multisite means each site will have its own database, configuration settings, content, settings, enabled modules, enabled theme, and URL, but will be served from a single codebase, making it easier to maintain.

With personalization becoming a real industry focus, tailoring an online experience for your visitors will maximize engagement and ROI. In an email marketing census, 71% of companies utilizing advanced personalization services report “good” or “excellent” ROI as opposed to 35% of organizations not using it. 

Additionally, in a personalization study, 82% of marketers attributed a higher open and click-through rate of 75% to personalization. 

Having the ability to make content configurations quickly greatly assists in delivering your content across multiple sites and automatically responds to the user’s preferences, delivering the right experience at the right time on the right device.

This capability highly regarded and much sought after within healthcare organizations, government agencies as well as higher education institutions. 

Where should you start?

A multisite solution is not the answer for everyone. However, if any of the above benefits pertain to your organization, it is important to consider seeking a Drupal expert and ask if a multisite architecture will help you reach your goals. 

Taking the next step forward and embracing a multisite platform could end up paying dividends for your organization by delivering a more comprehensive, user-centric and faster digital experience