Pivot Health Services is a leading provider of health and wellness services focused on getting people back to normal activity, preventing injury and staying fit where they work, live and play. The umbrella of Pivot Health Services included 3 primary focus areas:

  1. Physical Therapy – Physical therapy, aquatic therapy, and sports medicine services with more than 250 locations throughout the East Coast.
  2. Occupational Health – Specializing in the treatment and management of work related injuries and employee health.
  3. Onsite Innovations – Implementing customized solutions combined to promote a healthier workforce that is more productive and engaged.

Each focus area had robust, dedicated websites but lacked cohesive design and user experience. In addition, the administrative burden of juggling multiple hosting providers and multiple content management systems was increasingly challenging.

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Services

  • Front End Development
  • CMS Implementation

Enter: WordPress Multisite

WordPress Multisite allowed administration of all 4 websites — Health Solutions, Physical Therapy, Occupational Health, and Onsite Innovations — within a single dashboard on a single hosting provider. More importantly, Pivot’s bespoke theme is used across all of the websites. This provides uniform design and brand identity, and establishes reusable interfaces and components that become familiar as users navigate across all the websites.

Grid describing and providing links to Pivot Physical Therapy, Pivot Occupational Health, and Pivot Onsite Innovations.

WordPress Multisite also had an added benefit of allowing queries across the websites, as the websites share one database. This allowed Pivot to flag blog posts with a specific category, e.g. Featured, across the blogs of all 4 websites and have those blog posts appear in one location on the Health Solutions homepage. I developed a custom plugin to perform this aggregation.

Custom blog aggregator plugin, pulling posts from the Physical Therapy and Onsite Innovations blogs.

The Nitty-Gritty

WordPress Multisite was not without its challenges, especially at launch when the primary domain changed from a temporary domain to pivoths.com. I am thankful for the community resources, especially this HostGator knowledgebase article that clearly outlines the exact steps necessary to change a WordPress Multisite primary domain.

In addition, non-www to www URL redirects needed to get added to the .htaccess file.

For example:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^pivoths.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.pivoths.com/$1 [L,R=301]

However, the non-www to www URL redirect unexpectedly broke my ability to access the Network Admin dashboard. To fix this, I needed to edit the wp-config.php file, specifically:

define( 'DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE', 'pivoths.com' );

needed to be:

define( 'DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE', 'www.pivoths.com' );

Bmore Creative, Inc. partnered with Waldinger Creative for the websites.