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In May of this year, I merged Many Little Blessings, The Homeschool Classroom, Catholic Mothers Online, and Catholic Printables Online all into one site – Real Life at Home. Considering that three of the four sites were six or seven years old, it was a huge decision to merge all of the sites together.
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As inviting as it sounded to have just one site, it was also a scary prospect. I was afraid about what it would mean for my traffic and my income. I finally had to weigh my own happiness and sanity against those things, and just went for it.
While I did, indeed, see a loss in income, as well as some followers of the individual sites that weren’t pleased, I would still do it again, if I had it all to do again. Sure, the merging process was tedious. But, once it finally came together, I was so pleased.
In fact, I decided to share seven reasons I’m glad I merged all of my blogs into just one site.
1. I don’t have to worry about content creation on four different sites.
Writing posts and creating other types of content is a lot of work. If you’re a blogger, you already know that. Now, imagine trying to do it over four different sites. Even with the help of contributing writers on two of the sites, it was still a huge undertaking.
I was shocked when I moved to having just one site. I started to worry about having too many posts each week, so I’ve had to try to find a happy medium.
Right now, at a time when I’ve been very busy, it has also taken off a lot of pressure. I don’t have to worry about cranking out content.
2. One site shares all of the stats of the old sites (plus some).
As someone who has often loved to look at site stats, it would sometimes make me sad when one of my sites would get big traffic spikes. I know that sounds crazy, but it always seemed to coincide with a time when another of my sites was having lower traffic. Sometimes I just wished that all of the numbers could count together.
Obviously, now they do! In fact, my pageviews have typically been higher with the new site than they were with just adding up all of the old individual sites’ stats.
3. I now only need to do plugins, themes, and WordPress updates once.
Well, okay, sure, I need to do those things a lot. But, with one site, I only have to do the same update once. When I had four sites, I had to do things like update WordPress four times for each new release, since I had to do it on each site. Ditto that for plugin and theme updates. What a pain!
4. I can be more focused in promotions.
It’s a ton of work promoting blog posts. I remember back in the day when writing a blog post meant you just hit publish and waited for people to show up. Sure, it also involved being sure to visit other people’s blogs and comment, but it looked nothing like the amount of promoting that publishing a blog post takes now. Trying to promote posts on just one site can take a lot of work. Doing that times four is a ton of work.
It’s so nice to only need to work on promoting posts from one site now.
5. Running one site typically means running just one set of social media accounts.
If you have multiple sites, you probably have social media accounts for each site. For example, I had a Facebook page for each of my four sites. That’s a lot of Facebook pages to take care of. Not only did I need to find things to post about on each of the Facebook pages, but I needed to monitor them for things like spam as well as followers who had questions.
When I was trying to run multiple Facebook pages, it usually meant that I was focused on one or two of them, and then pretty much just ignored the others. That’s not really a great business model.
6. I can take more time to work on big projects without worrying about ignoring other sites.
Sometimes, when working on a big project, such as a the St. Mary and the Rosary Printables Packet, I have to not work on the site quite as much so that I have time to work on the project. With one site, that seems to be working out just fine. Or, at least passably. But, when I used to work on a big project in the past, it meant that I was barely working on a site or two and then totally ignoring other sites. Again, not a great business model.
7. Running fewer sites has been less expensive.
When running multiple sites, you typically (but not always) have more hosting costs, as well as the need to buy some things like plugins multiple times. (Paid plugins often have one cost for a single site and then a larger cost when you’ll be using it over multiple sites.) Having multiple sites can also increase the chance that you’ll need to hire help.
If you’re a blogger, how many sites do you have? What have you found to be the benefits and drawbacks of having that number?
Other Posts You Might Be Interested in:
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- 10 Benefits of Networking with Other Bloggers
- 10 Ways to Get More Followers on Pinterest
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Angie, a domestically challenged nerd and mom of three very fun kids, is the founder of Real Life at Home. Angie also listens to music every chance she gets, writes eBooks, podcasts, loves Pinterest, documents the little moments in life on Instagram, and occasionally sleeps. |
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I am doing this very same thing right now so I was so happy to see this post. I had about a dozen sites for homeschooling, one for math, science, language, etc. I wanted to keep the same design on all sites but I could only work on one at a time, so I had some with the new design, and some with the old. Like yours, my sites had been around for some time and I have a lot of material and the thought of combining seemed like a formidable task. I am just in the beginning stages of my merge but I feel like it’s the best move. The quality of my online presence has detriorated from being spread out, so I feel this is a good move to restore it.
It’s a ton of work getting it all put together in one place in an organized way, but I think that you’ll really enjoy having just one super site. 🙂
I tried to do several blogs at one time and it just didn’t work for me! I tried to do a blog with just book reviews and my main blog already had a section on books, so I said I should just close this other one down and do the reviews on my main blog. The other one was one I was testing, so it was a free blog, so it made since to just have the one blog and only pay for one blog. I am glad I seen your post because I now know that one blog is the way to go.
Excellent! I’m so glad that my post helped.
I’ve contemplated running separate blogs (motherhood, book reviews, etc.), but it seems like way more work than necessary. Thanks for confirming my assumptions.
I think those sound like topics that would pair together well into one site, and it would definitely be less work putting them into one site instead of multiple sites.
I’m always in awe of bloggers who run more than 1 site.
Mine alone, keeps me very busy.
I need to relaunch my consulting site though because it’s very different from my parenting blog.
I could totally see having a separate site for something like consulting. I think that makes perfect sense. Is your consulting site down right now or is it just that you want to fix it up?
I need to upgrade it and get a redesign.
I also HATE email, so I’m on the fence about how to manage another email account.
I merged my sites a few years ago and it has been “freeing” to not have to create as much content. And during the periods when I’m especially verbose and have lots of ideas, I can write and either schedule the posts for the future or backdate the posts and just send them out via social media rather than overwhelming my daily subscribers.
And I agree with you, promoting a blog post has drastically changed in the last 4-5 years. Where we used to just post and let RSS take care of things, now I have to post to 5 or more social media platforms when a post is live (and several times on many of those)!
It’s just exhausting to have to do so much promoting, isn’t it?
And, I totally agree about not having to create so much content! What a relief. How many times a week do you post to your site typically?
I generally aim to have at least one new post a week, two to three is preferred, and not more than four (not counting book reviews). I find that my stats don’t change much from 1-4 posts, but keeping my evergreen archives “watered” (i.e. circulating on Pinterest/Facebook) keeps my pageviews up.
It’s no longer about posting content on a daily basis for RSS readers but about keeping your content in front of the people searching for it via Pinterest and Google.
I have 4 sites. And yes I am thinking about this…great post!
Not sure mine all fit…but maybe my 3 photography ones together, then Blog Chicka Blog separate?
Something’s gotta give!
I hope this inspires you to think about making some changes, Jill. If you’re as stressed as I was, then you definitely need to start considering it. It’s still a ton of work (of course), but I feel so much better knowing that I can put all of that work into one site, rather than putting a ton of work into one site and knowing that it means that I am ignoring another site, or something like that. It’s just too physically exhausting. One of my best friends keeps telling me, “If it’s not fun anymore, then you’re doing it wrong.” While it shouldn’t be fun all the time, since it IS work, I thought that was a good thing to keep in mind. I was to the point where it was never fun anymore. I figured that just wasn’t right. Something had to change.
Thanks for this! Can you talk a little about managing multiple topics on the same blog? Maybe best practices, how it influences metrics, how to guide people to what they want if they’re only into one topic and not the others, etc. Thank you!
I’ve been fussing with the same thoughts. None of my sites have big numbers yet, but now that I have two graduates and my life is changing, I’m thinking I should consolidate before things get overwhelming. Thanks for sharing. This helps. I’m sharing it with Hubby & we’ll pray about it!
Yeah, I think consolidating before they’re too overwhelming is a great idea. What have your thoughts been about it over the last few weeks?