Hi!
I’ll respond to your questions with my personal opinion:
- I personally wouldn’t separate the website into multiple WordPress installs. It just adds too much time in terms of maintenance/updates.It they were different companies or domain names, then maybe, but in this case I think this would be overkill.
- Each individual DB will be smaller than the current one, yes, but speed may not increase. If the DBs are all on the same server, I wouldn’t expect much speed increase.
- Separating the current website into multiple should not really affect SEO if done correctly. BUT I think it’ll be better/easier to get SEO right if it is all in one install, since you can more easily link content to each other.
- If you separate them, you’d have one Admin Panel for each site, which would site as you say under “/software1/wp-admin”, “/software2/wp-admin”, “/software3/wp-admin” and so on. I don’t think this is a very efficient way.
I personally would recommend the following:
A) One single website, with a good structure for the products. I.E. have one top page for each software, and subpages to each of those for specifics:
software
│ │ │ │ │ ├───Software1
│ │ │ │ │ │ └───Sepcifics1
│ │ │ │ │ │ └───Specifics2
│ │ │ │ │ ├───Software2
│ │ │ │ │ │ └───Sepcifics1
│ │ │ │ │ │ └───Specifics2
│ │ │ │ │ ├───Software3
│ │ │ │ │ │ └───Sepcifics1
│ │ │ │ │ │ └───Specifics2
This would give you URLs such as:
www.domain.com/software/software1/
www.domain.com/software/software1/specifics1
www.domain.com/software/software1/specifics2
www.domain.com/software/software2/
www.domain.com/software/software2/specifics1
www.domain.com/software/software2/specifics2
The top page “software” is optional. I would only use it if the company offered more than just software.
B) One single installation of Wordpress Multisite. This would allow you to have ONE single Admin panel and create sub-sites for each software. This has some benefits such as:
- Each subsite caneither have it’s own domain (
www.software1.com), subdomain (software1.domain.com) or folder (www.domain.com/software1).
- Each sub-site can have it’s own design/layout (colours, fonts, images, etc) and plugins.
- Access can be give to specific members based on software.
On the other side, some disadvantages:
- Al sub-sites do reside on the same DB as them main wordpress installation, using it’s own prefix for some tables, but sharing others. This makes separating them if ever needed (exporting one of the sub-sites) a bit tricky.
- Although you can enable settings/plugins/themes globally, there’s always some customization to be done on each sub-site individually.
So there you have my opinion. There are more ways to solve your issue, but I think these two are the best options. Both have good things, and bad things.
I hope to have helped you.