Today, consumers of online digital platforms demand consistency of content, easy accessibility of websites from different devices, user-friendly setup, speed, and quick response. But reaching that level of consistency to maintain various websites would require a huge team, high budget, and painstaking efforts to keep their content consistent.
Deliveroo, an online food delivery company, experienced something similar. They witnessed a huge demand for service in the European market. It operates not just in Europe but also in more than 200 locations across various countries. However, keeping up with separate site management and user experience were two crucial challenges.
To centralize their global experience and improve site management, the online delivery company adopted a multi-site management system to facilitate the user onboarding experiences and allow personalized content for targeted segments.
Multi-site management is known for answering the calls of business holders with the wish of expanding their business, attracting new consumers, or even increasing market penetration. While it comes with its challenges, it is a new promise to reach more consumers locally and globally, given that it is utilised in the proper manner.
What is Multi-Site Management?
Multi-site management is used as a strategy that you could use to manage websites, microsites, single-page applications, landing pages, and more through a single platform. It means that the developer can utilize a single user-centric platform to develop several individual websites with its unique features and elements.
The backend of the multi-site management system can be considered as the central unit, giving complete content management authority to the users. Here, a single user interface allows the user to manage individual websites and their domains simultaneously.
Considering that each site’s front end is distinct and unique, meant for appealing to the customer’s user experience, these sites are distinguished by their domain name. Through a DNS, each domain is mapped and accessed by the site manager for its content management.
The architecture of a multi-site management system omits duplicating efforts to create the content of each site separately. The approach lessens the pressure of recruiting a large team for managing each site and reduces the developers’ cost and time.
Use Cases of Multi-Site Management
Let’s check out some use cases to understand how a multi-site management system works:
Organizations Overseeing Multiple Brands
Although overseeing multiple brands can be done through a diverse development team, it may not be the most cost and time-effective for your organization. Moreover, with diverse products and target consumer segments, a single website is not enough to reach a wider demographic. Therefore, a multi-site management system reduces the time, cost, and effort to manage and develop several sites simultaneously.
For instance, Kao Corporation witnessed a 20% rate of quicker updates and localization after embracing a multi-site management system. It provided smooth management, delivery, and maintenance to approximately 250 websites and more than 500,000 digital assets owned by the company.
International Organizations
International organizations often face the challenges of maintaining a regional team, systems, sites, products, and even services for specific consumers. Multi-site business offers low-cost digital asset management with a globally distributed web architecture. This approach enables teams to focus on regional-specific target consumers, content, SEO-based promotions, marketing trends, product and service categorization.
In an effort to increase market penetration into China, Oriflame made use of a multi-site management system to create a range of digital sites. Along with its existing website, it launched a mobile application and integrated it with AliPay and WeChat. This allowed the developers to create customized and personalized content for regional consumers.
Organizations Maintaining Microsites and Campaigns
With multiple client bases and brands, processing each site requires a faster management approach in organizations that oversees microsites and campaigns. Multi-site management allows you to manage and handle separate microsites and their campaigns economically. As a result, you receive greater investment returns.
MasterControl remodeled its backend and frontend user experience, modernized the localized websites, and shifted to a content-based platform through a multi-site management system. With a digital asset of over 3,000 web pages, it developed a quick and modern website with widgets and themes, resulting in a 47% rise on its homepage.
Multi-Site Management: Adopting a Headless CMS
Content Management System is a software platform that allows you to create content, manage, modify, collaborate and publish it over the internet. CMS does not require developers to create websites through HTML or CSS codes. Since it’s easy to use and can be quickly built, it allows you to focus more on content activities, website analytics, and maintaining customer satisfaction.
The content management system is made up of two core elements –
A Content Management Application that manages anything that is being typed, added as graphics, or anything that could consist of the site content.
A Content Delivery Application that stores the content saved in the CMA and makes it visible to the visitors of the website.
Amongst the variants of a CMS, two of those are most commonly used – the traditional or couples CMS and the headless CMS. The traditional CMS architecture has the frontend and backend coupled together, which means that the content stored and edited in the backend is bound by the same system that delivers the frontend content. On the other hand, the headless CMS does not have a frontend and is designed explicitly for content-focused users.
Check out the original article published here: A Guide on Multi-Site Management Using Headless CMS