Individuals/Companies who manage 100s or 1000s of WordPress Websites – Can you share your workflows and infrastructure choices?

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**This question is geared solely to individuals/companies who have at least 100 WordPress websites in their portfolio**\– there are lots of threads about management at the low-volume end, but few on the high volume side. It seems like this information stays relegated to within companies and among those who have worked for larger companies, and seldom shared publicly here.

This post comes in response to seeing a thread about an agency with low-technical skill who were in over their heads at 2400 websites, and their processes were falling apart on them. That thread had some good answers but a lot of condescension, so **I’d like to keep this more educational**.

I’m looking for a more in-depth description of setup and solutions, not just the usual recommendations of tools like MainWP, ManageWP, and InfiniteWP that are geared toward users managing only dozens of sites. This is geared toward anyone with a huge portfolio or network– hundreds or thousands. Those tools can “still work” up to a certain point, but I’m looking more for “optimal solutions” for this scale. WP-CLI, dedicated DevOps teams, and custom automation starts being mentioned at larger management volumes, it seems.

So, for anyone who has worked on those teams or who runs those sorts of levels of management, building, etc, I and the community would interested to hear as many of the following things as you would feel comfortable sharing:

1.) **WordPress Build Choices** \– There are a million ways to skin the cat that is WordPress. What is your WordPress setup like, itself? Do you use a page builder, be that third-party (Elementor, Bricks, Oxygen, Divi, Etc) or Gutenberg, or are you using entirely custom themed solutions? What issues and benefits (Pros & Cons) do you see with whatever solution you chose to be your go-to? This also encompasses your plugin setup. Do you do entirely custom plugins or functions built into the theme, or do you just use commercially available plugins and try and keep it minimal? How do you ensure that development costs/time stays low enough to be economically viable?

2.) **Hosting** \– What is your hosting infrastructure like? Do you just use a dedicated server from one of the mainstream hosting providers, a custom network of dedicated servers, or do you use some sort of enterprise cloud hosting solutions? Elaborate on whichever answer it is– what works, what doesn’t, what’s the pros and cons of your chosen solution?

3.) **Scalability of Process** \– How do you ensure scalability of your processes when managing this volume of websites? What is your philosophy for building and managing, and what tools are you using? Do you have entire DevOps teams for this, and if so, what sorts of things are they ensuring when working in the WordPress ecosystem?

4.) **Deployment & Editing** \– Do you edit live sites, or work in some sort of Git-based environment? How do you ensure changes and updates don’t break your sites, and how do you keep an eye on who is making what modifications? Who is allowed to make changes, and who isn’t? Do you allow clients or partnering agencies (think SEO or content agencies) to ever have editing access to the site, or keep it strictly in-house?

5.) **Multi-site or Single Installations** \–Have you chosen to opt for isolated installations of WP, or have you chosen a multi-site setup? What motivated either decision, and what are the pros and cons you’ve seen of your choice?

6.) **Security** \– The big item that keeps WordPress managers up at night. We’ve all read the WordPress security guides, maybe hardened the server-level items and implemented file permission controls, firewalls, CDN security rules, etc. But, how do you keep everything sailing smoothly? If you’re toggling on-off read only type permissions, how do you scale this, or any other security solution? How much energy do you give to security? Headless is an option here, but doesn’t seem scalable when we are talking about this volume of websites. Elaborate as much as you like.

7.) **DNS Management & Domain Setups** \– Where do you keep your domains, and where do you manage your DNS? Do you allow your clients to buy their own domains and give you logins (seems like a headache) or do you require them to keep everything in your account of choice while they’re with you?

8.) **Custom Solutions** \– If your workload has evolved to requiring custom, automated management software or tools, can you elaborate on what you’ve had to automate, and what resources were required to make it happen? How has your work changed in relationship to these tools?

9.) **Anything Else** \– Any other comments, feel free to share.

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