WordPress Multisite & Performance Plateau- #063

10 March, 2023

Home » Inside WordPress » WordPress Multisite & Performance Plateau- #063

Issue 063

Reading time:

6 mins

Welcome to Remkus’ Ramblings – helping you find the things you didn’t find 😏.
Let’s get to it.

Today’s Ramblings are sponsored by DLX Plugins. They have one of the neatest solutions with Quotes DLX. Twitter sharing made easy, all inside a Quotes Block. And lot’s of extra features which make it fully customizable and themeable. My other favorite is Comment Edit Pro which now has Cloudflare Turnstile integrated. Love it. I use it on many client sites.

🗞 WordPress News

This is what I caught this week in the WordPress realm.

Speckyboy offers some thoughts on what to think about when you Redesign a WordPress Multi-site network.

To be honest, that article is a bit light. There are quite a few extra points that should have been discussed to make that a great post. However, it did make me wonder how relevant WordPress Multisite still is. I’ve been using WordPress in Multisite mode since it was a stand-alone version called WordPress MU. In fact, I still own and maintain about a dozen multi-sites instances.

Are you using multi-site instances of WordPress? If so, what for? I’d love for you to reply to this newsletter, but I’d love it even more if you commented on the newsletter article on my site. Genuinely curious. Click on the Read Online link above.

Felix Arntz published a very extensive write out of how he relaunched his site using a block theme.

Felix offers the opposite of a light article this week. He goes into great detail what he did, why he did it, and how he had “performance” top of his mind while building it.

There were a couple of blog posts published on the WordPress Developer Blog. Two in particular stood out for me:
- Creating a custom block that stores post meta by Ryan Welcher
- Converting your shortcodes to blocks by Jonathan Bossenger

I really like the quality of blog posts on the WordPress Developer blog of late. Justin Tadlock and others are adding content that is of absolute value. Justin’s Intrinsic design, theming, and rethinking how to design with WordPress is also a great example of that.

Last one for this week. If you have not yet familiarized yourself with Patterns inside the WordPress Block Editor yet, you need to start now. Because, like Mike McAlister argues here, they are going to be a game changer.

🚀 Performance

If you’ve ever done an optimization round on your site and you’ve made it faster, but user engagement didn’t improve, you may be running into what’s known as the performance plateau. I know I have.

Learn all about performance plateau and how to find it.

Good and thorough post worth checking out and see what parts of it you can use in your world.

💡 Interesting finds

Who wouldn’t like to learn more about SQL? If only there was a cool way powered by ChatGPT. The tool is free and supports MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server.
DocsBot AI. Custom trained ChatGPT to power your support chatbots, reply to support tickets, and more. I see a lot of potential for DocsBot AI, created by Aaron Edwards, in many different scenarios.

🔆 WordPress Highlight

Have you seen InstaWP by Vikas Singhal yet? It’s a wonderful solution that allows you to spin up a WordPress sandbox in less than a second.

One of their beta features is super interesting when you’re monetizing designs. Preview of that feature can be found here. What does it do? Instead of selling a .zip file, you sell a fully functional WordPress site. Yup, you read that right. Jamie Marsland explain it well in his recent YouTube video.

📖 What I am reading

My schedule the last couple of weeks were hectic and thus my book reading came to a halt. However, I have picked it up again and am now close to finishing The Happiness Advantage. Love it so far. Who knew achieving happiness can actually be broken down in a scientifically proven plan of attack.

🎁 Bonus

Will you create the next version of the Avatar movie? Because it sure looks like you can with this tool. Mind. Blown.

That’s it for this week’s ramblings. Thanks for reading!

Best,
Remkus

One last thing…

Share the love: Forward this newsletter to someone who appreciates WordPress news you’re not seeing somewhere else. 🙏🏻

Let’s connect: I’m most active on Twitter and Instagram, but appreciate a connection on LinkedIn as well.

WordPress veteran. I’ll help you grow your WordPress + WooCommerce sites & scale your business at Truer than North. Co-founder #WCEU, I am the leftness in the right

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4 responses to “WordPress Multisite & Performance Plateau- #063”

Henk

10 March, 2023

WordPress Mu is still very relevant to me. I have an active install for the websites of a real estate developer. Each project has its own site, which has several stages that need to be published at specific points in time.
With MU i can discreetly make the first design on a temporary subdomain – online so the client can cooperate and provide feedback. Once the site can be published its just a matter of pointing the domain to the install. For the next phase of the site I make a clone with NS Cloner and continue the work there.
When that next phase needs to go live I point the domain to the new install and deactivate the old/former.
I find its more solid to make the themes specific for each site and not share a theme. sometimes it can be necessary to import form entries and such.
This way I only need to maintain only 1 WordPress install and hosting for 20-30 websites which saves cost for the client and provides more budget for the maintenance of the sites.
Disadvantage can be that its not possible to use different PHP versions for each site.

Reply
Torsten Landsiedel

10 March, 2023

I use WordPress Multisite for two use cases: Multilingual websites and multiple locations of similar websites (for example, for fitnesscenter or real estate objects).

Cloning a site in a multisite is so much faster and easier (NS cloner FTW!).

If you need something done for every site, I can use the child theme, a plugin or a mu-plugin (according to the use case) and it is done in no time.

The only problem is that you are mostly working against the system. Multisite is built for sites like WordPress.com, so there is no real connection between those sites. If you want to share media, connect posts/pages for translation, etc. you need plugins to change the system behavior. And every update can break things. Or a necessary plugin gets abandoned, and you need to maintain/fix it yourself.

And you have limitations which make no sense in your use case (upload limit, no spaces in usernames, etc.).

Reply
Drivingralle

13 March, 2023

I still use Multisite. First of all for all my private/company websites. To keep the maintenance effort low.
But also for client websites. Multilingual websites are easy and stable with a well done multisite.
Have also used it for organizations with design and feature heredity -> Parent theme == main design >> Child-Theme == tweaks and color changes.

Currently working on a SaaS with many different company accounts on it. MU keeps the data per site in separate tables to improve performance and the door open for moving one company out into an on-prem version for an extra price tear.

Reply
Donncha O Caoimh

25 March, 2023

Nice to see people still using multisite! I’m using it too, for two personal sites.

The only times I notice is when a plugin didn’t activate correctly through the network plugins page and needs to be enabled on each blog. But I only remember one plugin on recent times that was like that.

Reply