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I have a business with two products, lets say boat engines and car engines. Direct from the home page one can click on either cars engines or boat engines. The subpages of each section are then not related. It is almost like two sites with one home page. However there are pages which should be common to both such as "About us" or "Vacancies" etc.

My web-designer/programmer built this website with two CMSs. One for boat engines and one for car engines. Both were done with Wordpress.

My question is: besides double-entering of content for the common pages, what are the pros and cons of having two CMSs. I expect 40% of my company sales to come through this website, therefore any information about the impact on SEO (positive or negative) would be welcome too.

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I can't think of a single good reason for doing what you describe. (Caveat: we obviously don't know exactly what your dev was thinking.)

Even if the two "sub-sites" somehow had such different requirements(eg. for the templates) that they'd need this much segregation, WordPress has multi-site capabilities that could break them up under a single installation.

Before even getting into multi-site config, this could probably have been done with custom post types or even just categories, depending upon how different the product information needs are.

Further cons:

  • Increased admin load, eg. maintaining two copies of WordPress, any plugins, etc.
  • Increased user load, eg. changing passwords, updating profile info.
  • Any external connections also have to be maintained twice, like authorizing access to a Twitter account for auto-posting of blog updates(if relevant).

besides double-entering of content for the common pages

Why double-entering? If the pages really are shared site-wide, just decide they'll be managed by one of the sections and deal with them there, the same way one of the WP installs is currently responsible for the homepage. (I assume.)

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  • Thank you. Do you have any information about the effect on SEO?
    – Concerned Client
    Aug 23, 2012 at 21:28
  • On the whole, the search engines don't care what's going on in the back-end. As long as your dev's doing the usual things like configuring reasonable URLs and submitting sitemaps(again, all this has to be done twice), etc. it shouldn't have any effect.
    – Su'
    Aug 23, 2012 at 22:01
  • Ok. However there remains the issue that SEO/Google does not like repetitive text. So, does having one website with about 7 pages - About Us, Vacancies, Management etc etc with identical text twice, effect ranking/SEO?
    – Concerned Client
    Aug 24, 2012 at 8:15
  • This would be in URL such as: www.mysitename.com/carengines/aboutus and www.mysitename.com/boatengines/aboutus
    – Concerned Client
    Aug 24, 2012 at 8:15
  • Sorry, just the be clear - it must be double-entering. I dont know why but thats what he said
    – Concerned Client
    Aug 24, 2012 at 8:17

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