Can you have multiple wordpress sites under the same domain?

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Any issues with having multiple wordpress sites under the same domain.

Example:

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  • domain.com/programs
  • domain.com/sales
  • domain.com/learning

Each would have its own templates, functionality, menus and whatever. Any issues you can see?

One of the issues I am worried about is if I have:

  • domain.com/programs – which might be a hub site for programs

and then I have another person who is the “golf” program admin…
– domain.com/programs/golf

two totally different sites – may use multisite but not sure yet.

So what if the domain.com/programs admin adds “golf” as a category?

NEW INFO:
To those who said, this is normal for WP and no issues please see Why did installing wordpress in url root jack up underlying WP sites?.

I had 10 sites installed and after installing a “root” site all are having MAJOR permalink issues.

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4 comments

  1. Yes, instead of installing WordPress at root– example.com/— you’d create the “programs”, “sales”, and “learning” directories on the server and install a seperate WordPress instance in each directory. There is nothing special you need to do to make this work.

    I think you may end up happier if you create a network, though. Multisite, while not always appropriate, seems to me to be exactly what you are after, and you can create the same “path” based structure.

  2. Basically there are two main rules that you have to adjust for to have WP sites across the same domain – not using multisite:

    1. For the root I simply put everything in a “home” folder and auto-redirect to xxx.com/home. This fixed the whole root subcategory issue.

    2. If you are running IIS and you have multiple WP instances on the same server… And then you turn on URL rewriting (different permalinks) well your entire structure will be jacked up because wordpress names all of its rewrite rule “wordpress” in the web.config file it sets up for URL rewrites. You have to rename the rule manually for each wordpress install. I have submitted this as a bug but haven’t heard back from this – suggestion was name should be wordpress plus timestamp.

    I will add on if I find more stuff but these are the two big ones. We have 10 WP installs and growing on our main server. Each has a different usage so multisite is a no go.

  3. Instead of doing a multiple wordpress install, I would recommend using the multi-site/network feature discussed in other answers.

    When it comes to category/sub-folder creation, it will be dependent on how the network admin creates the permalink structure.

    If you use a custom structure, I could see some potential issues. However, Categories are almost always setup to be /SITENAME/category/category-item

    If you use the default permalink structure, you’ll have ?p=### for nearly everything and the Database will make sure the pages are linking to the right areas.

    Just note that wherever you setup your initial install of WordPress will be your “main site.”

  4. Is there some reason you want to put your sites into directories rather than using subdomains?

    If you want to put them all on the same domain so that you can share cookies, but have them essentially independent, you can do that with subdomains (programs.domain.com, sales.domain.com etc)

    If you are just wanting three separate wordpress installs in three separate directories though there’s no issue with that. If you have 

    domain.com/programs
domain.com/sales
domain.com/learning

    and the three admins all create a category called ‘golf’ then you’ll just have 

    domain.com/programs/golf
domain.com/sales/golf
domain.com/learning/golf