Download websites that use Drupal Multisite

About Drupal Multisite

Drupal Multisite is a deployment shape rather than a product. A single codebase, shared infrastructure and one set of operational routines serve many hostnames, each with its own configuration, theme and content, and the whole arrangement exists to stop an organisation maintaining the same platform over and over again.

The feature has been part of the platform since 2005, and like the rest of it, the code is GPL v2 software written in PHP and stewarded by Drupal Association. Nothing here is licensed separately and nothing is bought, so the presence of the pattern reflects an operational decision inside an organisation rather than a purchase from a supplier.

A counting consequence deserves stating before the number. As of September 2026 the pattern shows up on 37,300 domains, but those domains do not map onto 37,300 independent web teams. A university, a ministry or a broadcaster can account for a long run of rows served from a single machine, which makes the population unusual: the meaningful unit is the estate, not the site. Grouping the export by shared infrastructure turns a domain list into an inventory of web estates, and that is a different object entirely.

Presence implies a particular kind of buyer as well. Central IT owns the platform, decisions get made once and applied to many properties, and the people running individual sites are usually editors rather than developers. Higher education, government at every level, media groups and large enterprises with many brands are the shapes that recur. Procurement in those organisations is slow, centralised and large, which is a very different sales motion from selling to a single site owner with a company card.

Recognising a multisite estate is inferential, and the caveat is a real one. The signal comes from shared core fingerprints, repeated asset patterns and hosting characteristics that recur across otherwise unrelated hostnames, and an estate that separates its front ends carefully will look like a set of ordinary independent installations. What the list identifies is domains that look like part of a shared estate, not a verified inventory of installations, and the error runs toward undercounting.

Country distribution reflects where large institutional estates sit, with 12,258 of the domains in United States and registrations weighted toward the .com zone. Accessibility auditors, migration vendors, hosting consolidators and support firms selling retainers all aim at exactly this pattern, and each of them needs to see an estate whole rather than one hostname at a time. A per-domain lookup can confirm that a site runs the platform. A shared estate, by definition, only becomes visible when many domains are compared at once, which is the one thing a lookup service cannot do and a full download does by default.