What is a WordPress Multisite?

This is a feature allowing to run multiple WordPress websites using one single WordPress installation (from a single codebase). WordPress Multisite is a convenient solution for large businesses. The number of WordPress websites to manage is unlimited.

Pros:

– possibility to share WordPress themes and plugins across all your websites;
– better control of user permissions and roles, possibility to assign the management of different websites to different teams or departments;
– you need to login to dashboard only once to get access to all the websites;
– search engines consider every website from WordPress Multisite as an individual one;
– you don’t need to manually do every action, like update, for each website, so it saves your time.

Cons:

– all users added to your network become guests on every website of the network (you need a plugin to give them different roles);
– only the network admin can install new themes, plugins, edit the user profiles;
– no possibility to restrict plugins on individual websites;
– WordPress themes are installed for all the network, so editing the code will affect every website using the theme;
– not every plugin is compatible with WordPress Multisite;
– it isn’t easy to remove a website from WordPress Multisite or to change hosts;
– it requires good technical knowledge of server administartion and network management;
– hosting cost will reflect the necessity to host more than one website;
– something affecting one website can potentially affect all the network.

So, if you want to manage lots of websites, user permissions across the network, share resources, you’re good to go with WordPress multisite. If you want to manage smaller number of websites, get more control over each individual website, you can choose multiple WordPress websites.