Running a 125-site WordPress network
Five years designing and developing sites end to end for a broadcast group, from concept through custom WordPress themes and plugins, across a multisite network of 125 properties.
Client
Saga Communications
Role
Senior Web Developer
Year
2014 to 2019
Stack
WordPress Multisite · PHP · SASS · JavaScript · Figma · Sketch
- Sites in the network
- 125
- Building and maintaining it
- 5 yrs
The problem
The network ran a hundred and twenty-five station websites. At that count the work stops being design and starts being architecture. Shortcuts you take early get paid for later, across every site at once.
The approach
Anything that could be shared got shared. Themes, plugins, and patterns built once, then inherited across the network. A fix landed everywhere at the same time. Station branding and market-specific content stayed configurable instead of forked.
I worked the whole way down, from concept and design through custom theme and plugin development. Designing something and then having to go build it yourself teaches you fast which ideas are worth the maintenance.
The result
Five years of a network a small team could keep up with. It's also where I got into the habit of building tooling instead of one-off pages. That's still most of what I do, except the output is workflows now.