Branching out to different places to display your webcomic is always a good thing. Most places we branch out to are free webcomic hosts or places like Deviant Art. Having a mirror site with the majority of your archives is always a smart thing to do should your main site be inaccessible for a day or three. However, and this is big, there IS such a thing as “too many mirror sites,” and “doing mirror sites wrong.”

A mirror site should never have as much content as your main site, period. A mirror site is a fallback point in event of the worst, NOT a separate, independent site that is an exact duplicate of your main site. WHY is this important? Because if you don’t differentiate between main site and mirror site, all you’re doing is SPLITTING up your audience into little clumps.  The object is to get readers from multiple other places and BRING them to one place.  If you split up your audience, it only makes more work for you (constantly keeping multiple sites up to date) with less total outcome. By centralizing your audience, it’s like the Power Rangers’ many Zords become a MegaZord; it’s more powerful. You increase your total reputation. Everyone links to the same site. Your Alexa rank goes up, your adspace becomes more valuable, and your site grows faster than it would with all the audience split up.

Let us consider Comic Q, self-hosted at www.comicq.com.  Comic Q also has mirror sites on DrunkDuck, WebcomicsNation and ComicSpace. All of those mirror sites are kept up to date with Comic Q’s most recent page, so readers at all those mirror sites see no reason to leave there and migrate to the main address. The MAIN site ends up with less pageviews than any of the mirror sites, for the simple reason that all of the mirror sites are part of a larger webcomic community (a somewhat instant audience).  Why would Comic Q even continue having a main site if it gets less traffic than the so-called mirror sites?

Now, let’s take Comic X, self-hosted at www.comicx.com. Comic X also has mirror sites on DrunkDuck, WebcomicsNation and ComicSpace, but all of these mirror sites are WEEKS behind the main site.  So the audience that finds these comics on the mirror sites sees that there is MORE content on your home site, and goes there. In this case, the mirror sites function not only as duplicate archive, but also as a means of free advertising. People like what they see, and then want more! If more is available, why would they stay on the mirror sites?   They won’t! The creator of Comic X also knows the importance of NOT merely using mirror sites as only free advertising, because he/she knows that shamelessly whoring one’s comic in other comic communities is very impolite, and therefore makes an effort not to be completely overt in driving visitors to the main site.  (Warning, don’t go to anywhere and say, “this here is the first 10 pages of my comic. If you want more, go to my site.”  That is not a mirror site, that is a whore site. There is a big difference.)

In conclusion, people who have mirror sites need to decide what their goals are. First and foremost, mirror sites should be there in the event your main site is unreachable.  Another goal should definitely be to branch out to attract new readers, but whether you want to split your audience or centralize it will change how you go about updating/maintaining this mirror site. I will always recommend keeping all mirror sites weeks behind the main site (not just one update), and having little of the extra content of your main site. Be aware that extra web content alone will not be enough to drive visitors from mirror sites to the main site, it will require COMIC content.

One last note: mirror sites don’t make up for not backing up your work. Always remember to have backups of your site and your archives on disk or on an external harddrive.  You’ll never forgive yourself if your HD crashes and you lose all your layered, high-res files. You can always retreive web-quality archives from these sites, but nothing of higher quality.