Seravo's service includes support for multisite in the WP Corporate and WP Enterprise service plans. If your service package is one of these, you can convert your site to a multisite. Multisite refers to a WordPress installation that allows you to manage and maintain multiple sites through a single installation, rather than each site having its own, separate site environment on the server. You can read more about multisite in our separate article.
A multisite can have either subdirectory or a subdomain structure. The main differences between the structures relate to the format of the subsite URLs. Read about the different structure types here before you start converting your site to a multisite.
Things to Note Before Converting to a Multisite
If other domains besides the site’s primary domain point to your site, and no separate redirects have been configured for those domains, you must create the redirects at the nginx level in advance to ensure they continue working. Unlike in a standard WordPress installation, where each additional domain redirects to the site’s homepage by default, in a multisite each additional domain must be configured to point to the desired location either through multisite settings or with redirects. We do not recommend using the Redirection plugin for this, as its behavior in a multisite is not as reliable as in a standard WordPress installation.
It’s also a good idea to take an extra backup of the site before making any changes. That way, the site can be restored to the most recent version possible if something goes wrong during the multisite conversion.
If the site has already been published i.e. if its primary domain already points to our server, it’s also a good idea to notify Seravo’s customer support of the multisite conversion so that we can take the site’s new structure into account in our monitoring. However, the site will not stop working or be removed from monitoring even if you forget to notify us, so feel free to make the changes without worry!
Important!
To ensure that the multisite works properly, run all the commands in the instructions and don't make any changes to the multisite configuration files or settings. If you have any questions, contact our customer support!
Creating a multisite with a subdirectory structure
Convert the site to a multisite using the following command:
wp core multisite-convert
Download the required nginx configuration file and restart nginx for the change to take effect:
cd /data/wordpress/nginx && wget https://seravo.com/network.conf-example -O network.conf && wp-restart-nginx
Run
wp-network-statusto see if the conversion was successful. The command should print information about your multisite setup.Finally, go to the Settings > Permalinks tab in the WordPress Dashboard to make sure your site’s permalink structure is still set to the desired format.
Creating a multisite with a subdomain structure
Convert the site to a multisite using the following command:
wp core multisite-convert --subdomains
Download the required nginx configuration file and restart nginx for the change to take effect:
cd /data/wordpress/nginx && wget https://seravo.com/network.conf-example -O network.conf && wp-restart-nginx
Open the
wp-config.phpconfiguration file in a text editor:cd ../htdocs/ && nano wp-config.php
From the file, find the lines related to multisite and add the following line below them:
define( 'COOKIE_DOMAIN', $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] ?? '' );
Run
wp-network-statusto see if the conversion was successful. The command should print information about your multisite setup.