An introduction to multi-site management

If you want to talk to someone at a party, shouting over the crowd probably isn’t the most efficient way of making a connection (or, indeed, making friends). The better move would be to walk up, join the group conversation, and make the interaction personal. 

Brands have the same sort of problem. In a crowded, competitive marketplace, it’s difficult to speak effectively to every audience, or every audience member, at the same time — especially if they're spread out over different geographic locations or demographics, or speak different languages. And sometimes, if you don’t have the capacity to adjust your message, it might end up missing the people you need it to reach.  

Fortunately, there is a way of making a connection with those groups: you can build multiple websites, and tailor the content in each to their specific needs and expectations. 

But more websites means more content, and more content means more content management problems, right? Not necessarily. If you understand the content challenges of multi-site management, it’s going to be easier to manage them. 

In this post, we’re going to explore multi-site management, including why you might opt to build multiple sites in the first place, and the content challenges that entails.

What is multi-site management? 

Multi-site management refers to a single organization or brand managing several websites under a single IT framework. 

Those different websites serve to address a specific business need or market characteristic that the “primary” site cannot, or cannot optimally, serve — a factor that typically influences the content they present to their audiences. Some websites may diverge only a little from their counterparts, perhaps presenting the same content in a different language, while other sites may be entirely new, with entirely different features, functionalities, and approaches to content creation. 

Multi-site management is a particularly useful ecommerce strategy since it allows brands to target online content at specific audience demographics, appealing to different tastes and trends, aligning with local regulations, matching languages and currencies, and so on. It also means marketing teams aren’t beholden to market demands in one location — and have the scope to adjust content to optimize results in another. It's no different, really, from companies building physical stores in different locations, and adapting them to the environment: bigger stores in rural areas, “express” stores in urban centers, and so on.  

Let’s go deeper into the reasons that brands start thinking about multi-site management.

Why do brands build multiple websites?

Global reach

Brands with a global footprint, or those thinking about expansion, typically have a diverse customer base, spread across a spectrum of linguistic and cultural norms. A brand that wants to sell sunglasses in California and Dubai, for example, is going to need to talk to customers in both locations differently — not just in terms of language, but perhaps in the marketing imagery they use to promote their products, the price they set, and so on. 

Marketing autonomy

Websites that target different demographics can help marketing teams boost lead generation. It may be more impactful to run a specific campaign through a separate website — and simpler for customers to engage with it from that single delivery point. For example, in Germany, there’s typically less customer interest in Black Friday (compared to the United States), so a German online marketing team might instead put resources into promoting the adjacent “Cyber Week” through the brand’s German website. 

Regulatory restrictions

Some products or marketing techniques may be constrained by regional regulations. Rather than meticulously adjusting site content to comply, or making other technical interventions, it may be more straightforward to develop and launch a new, compliant website. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), for example, introduced numerous data privacy rules that forced non-EU websites to restrict content, a requirement that led many to simply block users from those jurisdictions. 

Search engine optimization

Content performance can vary significantly across different regions, based on the search behavior of customers. For example, certain keywords may cannibalize those associated with other products on the site, or language differences may limit the transferability of a particular phrase. Launching a new site that optimizes those keywords, or that captures a different type of customer search behavior, can be a useful way to address SEO issues. 

Parent companies

Where a single parent company owns multiple brands, it may not be useful, or even possible, to talk about those brands in a single voice. Similarly, products are often known by different names, in different countries. Here, a multi-site approach creates dedicated spaces where companies can not only talk about their brands and products in a way that audiences recognize, but can create distinct user experiences that reflect local customer’s expectations for those products. 

Service segmentation 

Some companies may offer distinct, separate services under a single brand umbrella, and so build several websites to deliver those services to customers. Many supermarkets, for example, operate a grocery store and delivery service, a mobile phone service, and an insurance service — and so segment those services to customers through multiple sites. 

Testing

Multi-site management isn't necessarily about immediately appealing to a new demographic. Brands may use that new online real estate to test a new approach to marketing, or the effectiveness of some addition to their tech stack. Running multiple sites is a way to perform A/B testing on alternative page layouts or design elements without disrupting the original website.  

Multi-site content challenges

The reasons for moving to a multi-site model may be clear, but the process isn’t as simple as simply building and launching a new site. When you add a new website (or multiple new sites), you’ll have to start thinking carefully about the content you use across all sites, and how it aligns with your existing brand voice and business objectives.  

Consider the following multi-site management challenges. 

Content consistency

Multi-site management can lead to a divergence in the content that you show to your audiences, and what audiences understand about your brand. You’ll need to ensure the content that is being published on one site isn’t undermining or contradicting content on another. That means being able to track high value content across your network to ensure consistency of voice, and to avoid confusing customers. 

Creating and distributing content

Your expanded digital footprint will require new content creation workflows that align with the objectives of the sites on which it will be published. Those different environments may make it difficult to implement exactly the same creation and publication process, but you’ll still need to be able to ensure that corporate editorial standards are followed and applied, and that the content team (or teams) can work on content efficiently.

Localization and translation

Multi-site management often involves websites in different countries. If your new site publishes content in a foreign language, you’ll need to ensure that you’re translating existing copy accurately, or are producing foreign language copy that aligns with your voice and business and local cultural values. 

Content volume

Multiple sites necessarily mean you’ll need to produce a greater amount of content — which can lead to content overload as different marketing teams work to populate the expanded digital footprint. That momentum may trigger an explosion of new blogs, adverts, comms, and so on — a situation that can end up harming content quality standards, and eventually exhausting and confusing audiences. 

Technical limitations

Adding websites to your footprint means adjusting or expanding your tech stack, modeling new infrastructure, and even migrating content — all of which can present technical challenges that complicate your multi-site management strategy. You’ll need to ensure your multi-site tech stack has the capacity to manage that increased volume of content and visitors, and that it can scale to adapt to future needs.   

Personalization 

While multiple websites make it easier to deliver tailored content to different audiences, actually personalizing that content for those audiences is more difficult. Content teams and marketers can make an effort to adjust content as it goes out, but it may become necessary to integrate some form of personalization tool to support them, and ensure different websites are optimized for the right audiences. 

Selecting a multi-site CMS

The content challenges that multi-site management strategies present require brands to think differently about their approach to content management. In other words: the flexibility of your content management system (CMS) is going to be critical.

Ideally, you want to implement a CMS that allows local marketing teams the autonomy to capitalize on local opportunities and react to market trends through their website, without you having to compromise editorial standards or relinquish control of your brand voice. Ideally, you’d also want your CMS to help keep workloads manageable, and content processes as efficient as possible. For example, the more potential your CMS gives you to reuse content, the quicker it will be to take your new websites to market. 

So, what kind of CMS is going to suit a multi-site technology framework? 

Monolithic limitations

Given the need for flexibility, all-in-one monolithic CMSes typically aren’t optimal in a multi-site management approach.

In monolithic systems, the backend administrative layer of the CMS is tightly coupled to the frontend presentation layer (the head), with content tangled up in code. That coupling means that content creation requires technical expertise, since the addition of new content risks disrupting site formatting and limiting reusability. 

Low reusability means higher workloads, which is especially relevant if content is being published across the multiple front ends of multiple websites — not to mention digital channels (desktop, phone, tablet, etc.). On top of that usability problem, it’s also difficult to add new frontend functionalities to monolithic systems because you’re locked into the functionality the vendor provides. 

Those factors make the creation and distribution of content to multiple websites challenging. The technical complexity not only restricts who can create content, but means that it’s harder to publish and track content across different front ends, while maintaining editorial standards and brand voice, and making adjustments and updates efficiently. 

Headless advantages

In a headless CMS, there is no presentation layer. You build your front end yourself, connecting it to the entirely decoupled back end via APIs.

That approach offers a new degree of content flexibility. With no backend coding complications, and no assumptions about what frontend content will look like, you can create any kind of content experience you want — or any number of separate site content experiences.

Headless CMSes offer significant advantages for multi-site management. Developers can design their stacks to handle multiple front ends, while retaining high-level oversight of the content displayed on them. Since the front ends are connected via APIs, there’s no risk of local content teams disrupting underlying code when they publish their own content or localize existing content for a specific site.  

The headless CMS also makes scaling easier in a multi-site environment. The API-first development approach means that brands can integrate new features and functionalities to the front ends of each site individually, as they are needed or wanted. Similarly, content can be displayed seamlessly across different digital channels, meaning that you can reuse content on mobile, tablet, wearables (and other formats) without needing to adapt it, or tediously copy and paste it — thereby protecting consistency of voice and messaging.

With a bit of clever coding, you could take that reusability factor even further, implementing a single frontend application that drives content on each local site separately. Doing so would not only reduce developer overhead, but help with issues like brand image/design guidelines since every site in your footprint would now be using the same frontend base, including design system, CSS, and so on.  

Multi-site content management best practices

If you’re running multiple websites with a headless CMS, the following best practices typically make that job a little easier. 

Content strategy

Establish a content strategy for your multi-site framework, accounting for the different market factors affecting each site and your goals for maintaining consistency of brand voice. Your strategy should inform the choices you make as you build out your different front ends and then select the components that provide the functionalities your various sites need. 

Refine content workflows

Establish workflows for the creation and publication of content across all your sites. Workflows should account for content style requirements and editorial review, and should ensure that stakeholders understand important procedural details — such as local deadlines, where to send completed content, and how to adjust, update, or retire content. 

Centralized oversight

Store content for your various websites in a centralized repository. In a headless, multi-site environment, you’ll be able to set clear access permissions for that central location, ensuring access to shared resources such as images and videos, while partitioning or restricting access to more specific, localized content for the relevant content teams. 

Prepare for growth

Brands that take a multi-site approach may find their increased reach triggers growth — or they may even be moving to multiple sites as a result of growth. That being the case, it’s worth treating scalability as an upfront priority when you build additional sites. Headless CMS architecture allows you to add new components to your front end easily, and you can test those new additions without causing significant disruption or downtime to the wider system. 

Multi-site management with Contentful 

The value of a multi-site management strategy lies in your ability to deliver content that connects with audiences — a factor that makes your CMS a critical consideration. With that in mind, Contentful goes a step beyond headless content management — by offering content composability.

In a composable content platform, developers create both their frontend and their backend layers from the ground up, selecting exactly the apps they need to achieve their content management objectives, including publishing across multiple websites. In this environment, you can add features and functionalities like modular building blocks, connecting each component via a network of APIs, and ensuring content can be published quickly and easily across different channels.

The Contentful® Composable Content Platform can power every part of your multi-site framework, and ensure you’re able to tackle your multi-site management challenges without compromising content quality. In fact, we’ve helped some of the world’s biggest brands expand their footprint to multiple websites, in different languages, to optimize the impact of their message to customers. 

Start your multi-site journey by exploring our ecosystem of modular apps and services, and build a tech stack that helps you not only stand out from the crowd, but begin conversations with new audiences around the world.

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