Multisite, Multibrand, and Multilingual WordPress at Scale: The Enterprise Consolidation Playbook

Enterprise CMS strategy is challenging. Over time, you end up with a sprawling digital estate spread across multiple platforms. 

A collection of websites acquired through acquisitions, international expansion, new product launches, and brand launches all add up in the end. What seems like a simple content management task now soon grows into a Herculean effort involving multiple departments. 

This results in significant operational deficiencies: 

• Legacy CMS platforms
• Proprietary content systems
• Ad-hoc builds
• Mounting maintenance debt

You need a consolidation strategy to tackle these challenges effectively, and that starts with moving to an enterprise multisite framework.  

At rtCamp, we’ve seen all kinds of digital sprawl and helped consolidate it all into simple, standardized, scalable, open-source architectures. We regularly help enterprises implement these very models, using WordPress and OnePress. 

This handbook will introduce you to the challenges faced by large enterprises in terms of multisite, multibrand, and multilingual operations. We’ll then explore a few examples and how our solution compares with three proprietary CMS solutions: AEM, Sitecore, and Kentico. 

Real-World Enterprise Multisite Scenarios

The true power of a multisite approach is best understood through its application in the real world. Let’s examine some common enterprise verticals where this applies:

• Higher Education: Managing websites for numerous university departments, schools, and research centers.   
• Global Franchises: Maintaining brand consistency between a corporate parent and hundreds of local franchisee sites.   
• Media Conglomerates: Orchestrating content and design across a portfolio of distinct digital publications.   
• Manufacturing/Automotive: Supporting a network of regional dealership or distributor sites with a mix of global product information and local marketing content. (Read our Cox Automotive case study for an example)  

Though their markets and audiences differ, these examples share a common narrative: the need for central brand control and local operational autonomy. Furthermore, enterprises face increasing pressure regarding data privacy, accessibility, and security. 

A well-orchestrated multisite framework resolves this conflict, providing a scalable and efficient solution for managing a complex digital portfolio. 

Proprietary Enterprise CMSs: The Flawed Alternatives

The qualities that make proprietary enterprise content management systems powerful—integrated, all-in-one features—also make them weak at scale. For instance, platforms such as AEM, Sitecore, and Kentico are built as monolithic systems, which creates significant hardships in terms of flexibility, cost, and agility. 

• Tangled dependencies: Proprietary CMS platforms are architecturally rigid and have deeply intertwined features. It’s challenging to maintain them. As your organization’s network of sites grows, these dependencies become resource-heavy and degrade performance.
• High Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): Beyond initial implementation costs, all proprietary enterprise CMSs involve significant licensing fees, specific cloud hosting requirements, and expensive integration layers. All of this drives their TCO far higher than open-source alternatives.
• Complex orchestration: While proprietary enterprise CMSs can manage multiple sites, the effort required to make them work together as a single, cohesive system (a.k.a. the “orchestration”) is super complex. They lack a built-in orchestration layer to share content, design systems, governance rules, and other resources. You must build that layer using custom code, APIs, and other middleware.

The Search for a Unified Platform: WordPress + OnePress

The above flaws, which make closed enterprise systems weak, are absent in an open-source orchestration framework like OnePress. However, before we begin, here’s a quick refresher about OnePress.   

What is OnePress?

OnePress is a multisite framework powered by WordPress. It’s based on our years of experience working with some of the most complex multibrand migrations and WordPress implementations in the enterprise space.

We’ve worked with enterprises that manage dozens of sites across various brands, business units, and languages. And the pattern is always the same: 

• Central teams want consistency
• Local/Brand teams need autonomy
• Leadership wants to keep costs under control 

WordPress can deliver all three if used effectively.

That’s where OnePress comes in. It’s a proven enterprise consolidation solution.

With it, you can manage all your brand websites through a single, unified framework. It simplifies WordPress multisite setups at scale. Whether we’re working with traditional WordPress Multisite setups or architecting standalone instances that work in concert, the goals remain consistent.

Read more about OnePress in our handbook resource. 

How OnePress Works

OnePress by rtCamp transforms WordPress into your enterprise’s centralized digital platform, combining:

• Standardized editing experience: Works across all page builders, including Gutenberg and Elementor.
• Unified design & UX: Standardized themes, pattern libraries, and reusable components.
• Optimized SEO & performance: Pre-configured best practices for all sites.
• Ready-to-plug integrations: CRM, ERP, DAM, analytics, and marketing automation.
• Automated deployments: CI/CD, testing frameworks, and version control.

We built OnePress to meet the unique needs of large-scale businesses, publishers, and other enterprises. Continue reading to discover how proprietary enterprise CMS platforms like AEM, Sitecore, and Kentico compare with it.