When your brand presence is spread across multiple websites, brands, products and other assets, development & content management can prove to be challenging task. And it’s not easy on the company coffers either – the more websites, platforms and distributed teams you add to the mix, the more you need to loosen your purse strings.

Needless to say, at a time when Marketing heads are under pressure to deliver ROI, it makes little sense to bleed money.

Working for a client who was facing all of the above (and some more) problems, we identified major roadblocks and helped plug them. If you’re also looking to optimize your spend by controlling the burgeoning cost of web properties, don’t look any further. Here’s five ways you can reduce the spending on development, design & management of multiple websites.

1. Reuse Codes

Redundancy is a huge problem. Large organizations can have large distributed teams of developers working on websites and applications. In absence of a central authority making the decisions, websites often get built on different platforms. This means that the websites have varying levels of functionality, flexibility and scalability. Customizations, innovations and enhancements have to be made separately for different web properties.

To cut the costs incurred by various development teams, it is essential to migrate to a multisite platform. This would enable developers to reuse codes across web properties.

2. Establish Single Point of Integration, Deployment and Upgrades

IT and admin staff field a lot of requests that emanate from fragmented web properties. If you shift to a single Content Management System with multisite architecture, you straightaway reduce the amount of time you require from the IT resources. Instead of upgrading, deploying, integrating and maintaining websites in various platforms, you now have a single point for upgrade and maintenance.

At the same time, focus on a single codebase helps improve the quality and simplify further customizations and enhancements. This would have an impact on testing too. Additionally, it becomes easy to quickly roll out new websites for marketing campaigns or for new products or brands, or to build new modules, features and functionality for existing websites.

3. Reuse Design Themes, Templates and Components

When you have separate teams for different websites, the costs are bound to be high. If your content management system offers the ability to easily reuse design templates, themes and other web components, you can rapidly create new microsites. So, instead of several design teams creating specific designs for each new website, you have access to repository and can easily replicate designs.

This will not just save you time and expense, but also allow you to employ your creative people to design attractive and high-quality digital experiences. A single source for publishing will also make it easy to enforce brand consistency. At the same time, you will have full freedom to customize and tweak the look and feel for any pages.

4. Centralize Content Management

Even for companies selling a wide stack or products, or promoting unique brands, there is some content that can be reused across web properties and social channel; for e.g. corporate press releases, product news, contact pages etc.

At the same time, the task of enforcing uniformity in content & SEO is simplified by providing a single interface (as opposed to multiple interfaces for different web properties) for management, with clearly defined permissions and access controls. In addition to removing redundancy from the content creation efforts, this will also enable you to achieve better results with leaner teams.

5. Get one License for all Sites, Curtail Hosting Costs

Licensing costs can be sky high for legacy CMS systems. One of the major reason some of our clients have moved to multisite CMS is the high annual licensing costs for dozens of web properties. There are several modern CMSes that will allow you to run a large network of web properties on a single license. And if you choose a content management system that runs on a multitenant environment, all the sites will run on the same installation. This translates into better utilization of hardware, leading to reduced hosting fees.