How many websites can you have in one Optimizely DXP CMS cloud solution?
There are multiple consideration here to dive into
- License
- Content editing
- Performance
- Team productivity and architecture evolution
License
From a license perspective it's possible to have multiple sites in DXP without an addditional cost. The cost is however depending on page views. For minor sites that isn't used much it can be a good solution to share a DXP instance to reduce costs.
https://world.optimizely.com/documentation/developer-guides/digital-experience-platform/development-considerations/
Content editing
Optimizely CMS has good support for editing experience with multiple sites. It's possible to restrict access rights easily so that editors can only work with content they should work with. It's possible to share common content across multiple sites if needed using blocks for instance. It's also possible to build news feeds etc that combines content from multiple sites easily. Content editing across multiple sites will not be an issue normally even with hundreds of editors.
Performance
Performance it's good to understand that the sites are hosted together using the same resources in the background. They use the same SQL server and the same app service in Azure. With good coding there are really no technical limits to performance if you use caching and CDN correctly. But the larger the codebase is, the more difficult it will become to keep it optimized for performance. This is true for both frontend and backend.
A single site with a couple of integrations and a simple frontend is easy. 10 sites with 100s of backend integrations and shared frontend becomes very tricky.
Generally it's not the amount of content that is a limit but the additional complexity of the code as the codebase grows that will be the limit. That additional complexity will start hurting the performance and later also the availability of the site.
From a technical perspective it's advised to keep this is mind when expanding the functionality of the site or even the number of sites. Is the solution starting to become too complex? A good measurement for this will be given below.
Team productivity and architecture
First it's good to be aware of that organization and software architecture are two sides of the same coin. This is known as Conways law:
Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.
The not so uncommon decay process of a single monolithic solution is:
Larger solution => more complex => developers can't grasp the whole solution => bad performance => difficult to fix => replace development partner => lose know-how => worse performance => hurts conversion rate => replace solution and build new
As long as you are not near a standing devops team of around 10+ developers, feel free to keep adding sites and features to your DXP instance. There are no technical,editorial or license limits with DXP. After 10+ developers, your development organization however is a limiting factor. Above team size of 10+, team work considerations and long term architecture evolution and application lifecycle start becoming more important. Merely dividing the developers into multiple teams on paper will not help since the teams will be as tightly coupled as the solution they work in. This is where breaking off suitable functionality into subsites and similar starts to become a better idea from a business perspective.
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