How to add a second site to your SGEN account

How to provision a second site under one account in five minutes

Adding a second site under your SGEN account opens the multi-site doorway. Whether you run a brand portfolio, an agency, or need a separate site for a new product line, the second-site flow takes about five minutes from click to working admin.

Most teams reach this page when they already have one site working and want to spin up another without creating a separate account. SGEN's multi-site model keeps a single billing record, a single admin team, and a single audit trail across every site you provision under your account — while the sites themselves stay fully separated in content, design, and public delivery.

This guide walks through the second-site setup end-to-end, names every field on the provisioning form, and explains what changes (and what stays the same) when your account moves from one site to many.

What is this for?

A second site under your SGEN account is the entry to multi-site management. The platform's account-level cockpit at the SG-Dashboard lets you provision, monitor, and govern every site you control from one place — but each site stays content-isolated, design-isolated, and visitor-isolated.

The reasons teams add a second site usually fall into one of these buckets:

• Brand portfolio. Acme Coffee Roasters has a parent brand site and wants a separate site for their wine label. Same operator team, two public-facing brands, two sets of products, two visitor analytics streams.
• Staging-and-live for a new project. A team is building a new marketing campaign and wants a separate live site for it — not just a staging slot under the existing site.
• Agency operations. An agency manages SGEN sites for multiple clients and uses the agency's own SGEN account to consolidate billing and oversight.
• Geographic split. A business operates in two markets with distinct regional content and wants each market on its own site so SEO signals stay clean.
• Acquisition rollup. Your company acquired another brand and wants to keep its identity separate while consolidating tooling and billing under one account.
• Event microsites. A trade show, product launch, or seasonal campaign warrants a focused single-purpose site that lives and dies on its own timeline.

The platform does not impose a "primary site" or "secondary site" relationship. Every site you provision sits at the same level under your account. There is no parent-child hierarchy between sites — order in your dashboard is the only sequencing.

Good use cases

What NOT to use this for

How this connects to other features

Before you start

A short checklist before clicking Add Site:

• Confirm your plan tier supports a second site. Lower tiers have a one-site cap; Growth and above unlock multi-site. Check your plan's site limit at Account → Billing → Plan.
• Have the second-site domain ready. Either own the domain at a registrar (custom domain) or be willing to use a SGEN-hosted subdomain during initial setup.
• Decide whether the second site shares team access or not. By default new sites inherit your account team. You can scope down per-site after provisioning.
• Have an idea of the site's purpose. Naming matters — a clear brand-or-purpose name is better than Site 2. The name shows on the SG-Dashboard list and is rarely changed once set.
• Allow about five minutes for provisioning to complete. The new site's admin is fully usable within minutes of clicking Add Site.
• Confirm billing is current. Provisioning halts if your account has an unpaid invoice. Pay or update payment first.
• Pick a starter approach. Empty, template, or clone. Decide before opening the form so you do not stall mid-create.
• Brief your team. Anyone with inherited team access sees the new site appear in their dashboard. A two-line heads-up prevents confusion.

Where to go

The Add Site action lives in the SG-Dashboard at the account level.

SG-Dashboard → Sites → Add New Site

Or directly from the Sites list, click the + Add New button at the top right.

You must be signed in at the account level (not inside a specific site's admin) to see the action. If you are inside a site, click the account name in the top breadcrumb to step up to the account dashboard.

Steps — Add a second site end-to-end

1. Open the Add Site form

Click SG-Dashboard → Sites → + Add New at the top right of the Sites list. The provisioning form opens with sensible defaults. The form is short — five required fields and a few optional choices.

If you do not see the Add New button, check your account role. Only account-level admins can provision new sites. If you are scoped to a specific site, you cannot add sites at the account level. Ask the account owner to either upgrade your role or provision the site for you.

The form opens as a focused screen, not a modal. Closing the tab without saving discards the form — there is no draft state.

2. Name the site

The Site name field is what shows on your Sites list, on the Cross-site analytics view, and in account-level reports. Pick a name your team recognizes at a glance — Acme Coffee — UK reads better than Site 3 when you have ten sites under one account.

You can rename a site later, but the rename does not propagate to per-site analytics history (the old name appears in older reports). Make a good first call.

Naming conventions worth borrowing:

• Brand-region — Acme Coffee — UK, Acme Coffee — US.
• Brand-purpose — Acme Coffee — Retail, Acme Coffee — Wholesale.
• Brand-campaign — Acme Wine — Spring 2026, Acme Wine — Holiday.
• Client-deliverable (agency) — Bookstore — Site, Bookstore — Events.

Avoid raw numbers (Site 2), version markers (v2, new), or anything that becomes misleading the moment another site joins.

3. Pick a domain

Two choices: bring your own custom domain or use a SGEN-hosted subdomain.

• Bring your own. Type the domain. SGEN provisions a temporary subdomain on the SGEN-hosted namespace immediately so the admin works, and starts polling DNS for your custom domain. Once DNS resolves and certificate provisions, the public site moves to your custom domain.
• Use SGEN subdomain. Leave the custom-domain field blank. The site lives on the SGEN-hosted subdomain. Useful for testing; upgrade to a custom domain when you commit.

Custom-domain DNS records appear on the next screen after you save. The platform shows the exact records to add at your registrar — both an A record (or set of A records) and a CNAME for the www variant. Add them in your registrar dashboard; propagation usually completes within minutes but can take up to an hour.

A domain can belong to only one site at a time. If the same domain is currently pointing at another site under your account or under a different account, the platform refuses to set it until the conflict resolves.

4. Choose the plan tier

Each site has its own plan tier. The second site can be on a different tier than the first — Acme Coffee might run on Growth while Acme Wine starts on Starter and upgrades later as traffic grows.

Tier changes are reversible. Pick a starting tier that matches expected traffic and feature needs; bump later when you outgrow it.

Tier picks usually go:

• Starter for new ventures, microsites, and proof-of-concept brands where monthly traffic is unknown.
• Growth when you expect steady traffic from launch and want the full feature set on day one.
• Pro for high-traffic sites, ecommerce at scale, or sites that need the priority support window.

The plan tier affects what features the site has available, the included visitor budget, and the support tier. It does not affect the admin chrome — every site looks the same in the admin regardless of tier.

5. Decide on team access

By default, every admin on your account gets admin access to the new site. This is the right call for most teams — one team, one set of sites.

Uncheck Inherit team access when:

• You are setting up a site for a separate client (agency case) and want only specific account members to see it.
• You are building a private test site and want only yourself on it initially.
• The new site has more sensitive content or pricing than the rest of your portfolio and you want a smaller team on it.

You can change team access per site after provisioning at Site → Settings → Team. Adding a teammate to a site they did not previously have access to does not require them to re-sign-in; the site appears in their dashboard on next page load.

Inherited access is one-way: it sets the starting roster but does not stay synced. A new account member added after the second site exists is not auto-added to that site unless you also re-run inheritance or add them manually.

6. Pick starter content

Three options:

• Empty. The site starts blank. You build from scratch. Default for most operators.
• Use template. The site starts with a pre-built design from the Templates library. Useful for fast launches.
• Clone from existing site. The new site starts as a copy of one of your existing sites. Useful when you want to set up a second site with the same design but new content.

Cloning copies design, settings, and template content. It does not copy form submissions, analytics history, or media files (media stays scoped to the source site). The clone is a one-time snapshot — changes to the source after cloning do not propagate.

If you clone, the source site stays untouched. The new site is a true copy that can be edited independently.

7. Click Create Site

The platform provisions the site. You see a progress indicator for about 60-120 seconds while the platform sets up the site's database, admin shell, public render path, and initial configuration.

When provisioning completes, the form redirects you to the new site's admin landing page. You are now inside the new site, ready to build.

The redirect can briefly look like you have lost access to your original site. You have not — the original site is still listed at SG-Dashboard → Sites and one click away.

8. Configure DNS (custom domain only)

If you brought your own domain, the next screen shows the DNS records to add at your registrar. The records have two parts:

• An A record for the apex domain (the bare domain without www).
• A CNAME for the www subdomain so visitors who type the www variant reach the same site.

Copy the records exactly as shown into your registrar's DNS dashboard. The platform polls every few minutes — once DNS resolves, you see a green check on the domain status and the public site moves from the temporary subdomain to your custom domain.

Certificate provisioning runs automatically once DNS resolves. You do not handle the certificate yourself; the platform requests, installs, and renews it.

9. Verify the second site renders publicly

Open the public domain in a separate browser tab. The site should render the placeholder homepage (or the template homepage, if you picked a template). The same admin chrome you know from the first site is at /sg-admin/ on the new site's domain.

If the public site shows a default placeholder for longer than five minutes after DNS resolved, refresh hard (clear cache) — your browser may be holding the old DNS for the temporary subdomain.

What success looks like

What to do if it does not work

A few cases that need a deeper look:

Worked example — Acme Bookstore adds an events site

Acme Bookstore has run a single retail site for three years. The retail site sells books, hosts a blog, and lists store hours across two physical locations. The team decides events deserve their own home — a separate site dedicated to author talks, signings, and book-club meetups — because the retail homepage was getting crowded and event traffic patterns differ from book-sales traffic patterns.

Here is the path the operator walked:

• Day 1 — Decision and naming. The team picked Acme Bookstore — Events as the new site name. They drafted the new domain at their registrar and pre-purchased it the night before so DNS records were ready.
• Day 2 — Provisioning. Signed in to SG-Dashboard, clicked Sites → + Add New, typed the name, pasted the events domain, chose Starter tier, left Inherit team access checked (the three-person retail team would also manage events), picked Clone from existing site with the retail site as the source so the design language carried over.
• Day 2 — DNS. The post-create screen showed two records. The operator copied them into the registrar dashboard, refreshed three minutes later, and saw the green check. Five minutes later the events domain rendered the cloned design at the new URL.
• Day 2 — Cleanup. The cloned retail homepage said "Best-selling books this month" which made no sense on an events site. The operator opened the events site admin, swapped the homepage to an upcoming-events grid, and removed the bookstore product pages. The retail site stayed untouched throughout.
• Day 3 — Team check. Two staff members noticed the new site in their dashboard and pinged the operator. They confirmed access was intentional (inherited from the account team). Both started managing event listings the same afternoon.
• Day 4 — First event publish. The first author talk went live on the events site. Analytics started counting visitors. The retail site analytics stayed unaffected — separate site, separate stream.

Two weeks later the operator pulled a cross-site report from SG-Dashboard and saw retail traffic flat, events traffic ramping. The split surfaced what a combined site would have hidden — events visitors came from different referrers and converted on different days of the week.

Notes on quotas and tier limits

Each site counts against your plan's site cap. Plans cap by site count, not by traffic or content size per site. The plan tier of each individual site governs that site's own visitor budget, storage, and feature ceiling.

Worth understanding upfront:

• Site count. Counted across all states (Active, Setup pending, Soft-deleted within restore window). Permanently-deleted sites do not count.
• Plan tier per site. The account's overall plan does not force every site to share a tier. A single account can have one site on Pro, two on Growth, and one on Starter — each billed at its own tier.
• Visitor budget per site. Each site has its own monthly visitor budget tied to its tier. Exceeding it does not block the site — it triggers a notification and rolls into next-tier billing if you cross-hit the threshold.
• Storage per site. Each site has its own storage budget for media, backups, and content. Storage is per-site; nothing shares automatically between sites.
• Concurrent admin sessions. No hard limit on how many sites you have open in different tabs. Each tab opens its own admin session scoped to that site.

Account-level limits to watch:

• Total site count cap on your plan. Starter accounts cap at one site (no multi-site). Growth and Pro raise the cap. Enterprise can negotiate.
• Team member count. Account-level admin seats are pooled. Adding teammates to the account makes them eligible to access any site.
• Backup retention window. Per-site backups follow each site's tier. Account-level rolled backups are a separate feature, available on higher tiers.

Common questions

Can a teammate be on site A but not site B? Yes. After provisioning, open Site → Settings → Team on each site and add or remove members per site. The account-level role list is separate; per-site overrides are how you scope access.

Can I delete a second site if I no longer need it? Yes. Open Site → Settings → Site → Delete site and follow the confirmation flow. Deleted sites enter a soft-delete window — restorable from SG-Dashboard → Sites → Trash — and clear permanently after the window expires.

Will adding a second site affect the first site's traffic? No. The two sites run independently. Provisioning a new site does not move, pause, or restart the first site.

Can I move pages from site A to site B? Not as a direct move action. The clone-from-site option copies all pages once at create time. After that, individual pages are not transferable between sites — you would copy the page content manually.

Can two sites share a domain? No. One domain, one site at a time. Subdomains are separate domain entries — events.yourdomain.com on one site and shop.yourdomain.com on another is supported.

Can I rename a site? Yes. Site → Settings → Site → Site name. The rename takes effect immediately on the SG-Dashboard list and per-site headers. Historical analytics records the old name in older reports until those reports roll off.

Does adding a second site change my billing immediately? The new site adds to your next invoice. Mid-cycle additions are prorated for the remaining days of the cycle.

Can I clone from a site I do not own? No. Clone-from-site requires the source site to be under the same account. Cross-account cloning is not supported.

What happens if I hit my plan's site limit? The Add New button is disabled and the form shows a tier-upgrade prompt. Upgrade or archive an unused site to free a slot.

Can the second site have a completely different theme from the first? Yes. Each site has its own theme, design system, and template choices. Nothing is shared by default.

Is there an undo for site creation? Yes — the soft-delete window. Newly-created sites can be deleted and restored within the window without losing setup work. Use this if you provisioned by mistake.

Adding a second site sets the foundation for multi-site work. From here, read about cross-site analytics for the rollup view, or jump to multi-site permissions to scope team access correctly across the portfolio. For agencies onboarding the first few client sites, the Agency client portfolio setup guide walks through the patterns most agencies converge on after a few months of practice.

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