Multisite management can leave even the most organized teams feeling strained while juggling too much at once. They’re balancing resource management, technical maintenance, brand consistency, and more, and it can easily become too much to handle without help.

To improve their performance, enterprise brands need a content management system (CMS) with best-in-class tools that improve visibility and scalability regardless of their website volume. These platforms consolidate all of your domains and web properties into a single portfolio, providing team members all the control, consistency, and security they need.

But the tools don’t matter if you can’t use them to their full potential. Here’s how to effectively manage multiple websites with an all-in-one CMS like Squarespace Enterprise.

Empower your website content teams

Agility is key to the success for every brand, so you should use your CMS to empower your team to handle publishing and updates without requiring development resources. It should streamline your publishing processes, increasing your brand’s time to market by reducing workflow steps and admin oversight. 

If you trust team members to manage content, you should also trust them to publish content. With a platform like Squarespace Enterprise, brand-approved templates give authors the tools to create content regardless of technical skills or HTML or CSS mastery.

As a result, your team can build sites without waiting on developer bandwidth to launch schedules. Engineering resources have always been a major blocker for web teams, keeping content stuck in queues for weeks at a time. With a platform like Squarespace Enterprise, projects head to the finish line faster.

You can assign team members their own login to access your multisite account, preventing the security issues that come with shared accounts. Squarespace Enterprise’s integrates with your existing SSO solution to eliminate the risks of password sharing.

Organize your website portfolio

For large brands, it’s easy to become buried under the sheer volume of your digital footprint, so you’ll want to utilize your CMS account dashboard to keep all your projects in view.

To make the most of your dashboard, use the tagging and filtering features to ensure every project stays easily accessible. Within the platform, your team can label websites according to corporate criteria, then you can filter the dashboard view to display only the necessary projects. This keeps your attention solely focused on the projects that need your direct involvement.

If there are projects that require even more day-to-day oversight, Squarespace Enterprise has a dashboard pinning feature that enables you to select up to 12 sites to keep listed above all other content. This keeps in-progress work top of mind whenever you log in. 

These components are essential to the multisite management of groups like Vanguard Properties, operating over 500 websites for their brand. They label their projects with traits like agent ownership and other identifying information, giving them easy access to the filtered details that they need, exactly when they need them.

Assign website permissions effectively

Smooth operation of a multisite portfolio requires the input and collaboration of many team members, so you should use the power of your CMS to optimize their impact with thorough role permissioning. 

When you give team members access to functions that directly align to their responsibilities, you’ll see more efficient workflows and quicker output. They’ll stay focused on the task at hand and better understand their responsibilities, and your site will stay secure.

Your CMS should also offer both global and website-level permissions to members with access to your multisite portfolio. For example, Squarespace Enterprise enables you to create global team administrators that can access and edit all organization-owned sites, or set up team member accounts with access to just select sites related to their specific roles. 

You can also grant permissions at the website level as well. Admins have full site-level authority, website managers can access pages and designs, website editors can edit website content, and draft editors can make edits without publishing. 

Knowing who’s equipped to handle certain roles makes all the difference in multisite management. For example, C-suite leaders may need organizational permissions so they can maintain a global view of the brand. On the other hand, managers with specialized knowledge about specific brands may only need website-level permissions to fulfill their job functions.

To make permissioning easy, Squarespace Enterprise also allows for SSO integrations that automatically grant the proper role permissions when team members first log into the site.

Utilize existing website templates and themes

You should also use your CMS to create standardized templates, design libraries, and themes for your brand, as keeping visuals consistent across multiple web properties becomes difficult at scale. 

When multisite portfolios use different instances, there’s plenty of opportunity for inconsistencies between them. Preferred design elements like fonts and spacing can become lost in the shuffle when developers code each visual identity from scratch.

With Squarespace Enterprise, admins can create approved site templates according to brand standards and share them across your organization. Teams can use these templates to create new sites with the latest and greatest visuals without an approval step from creative.

Simplify your website billing

If you’re using a CMS that charges for all of your sites individually, switch to one that enables your enterprise to pay for all of your sites, all at once. Squarespace Enterprise makes multisite management easy by bundling your entire portfolio together for a single, convenient payment.

For brands like Barn2Door that run hundreds of sites, Squarespace Enterprise makes payments convenient and manageable. It streamlines their purchases and renewals and keeps all of their details in one place for easy audits.

Plus, a bundled payment simplifies invoice collection and updates for accounting and revenue teams. They don’t have to track down payment information, use multiple account logins, or enter credit card information repeatedly. There are no lost invoices, no tedious updates, and no accounting headaches.

High volumes of web content, low levels of stress

To effectively manage a multisite portfolio, your corporate brand needs a CMS that’s built to scale. It should save time on processes by empowering content authors to publish using existing, pre-approved themes and templates. It should also improve visibility and security by streamlining organization, permissions, and payments.

When your corporate brand uses a CMS like Squarespace Enterprise, your team will have the tools they need to collaborate effectively and efficiently. As a result, your organization and your clients can see more consistency and quicker growth.

Scale with Squarespace.