One website. Every town on it.

Not when the migration is planned first, and that is where we start rather than where we finish. Before design begins we map every existing URL to its destination, keep the page structures that already earn traffic, preserve titles and schema, and stage the site so redirects can be tested before launch. Then we monitor daily for the first weeks and fix anything that moves. It matters because more than 70% of organic traffic in a mature local program comes from regular organic listings — visibility worth protecting deliberately.

Their own page, yes; their own domain, almost never. Separate sites split the authority the company has built, compete with each other for the same local search, and leave nobody able to update the network when something changes. One website with a genuinely local page per location gives owners the visibility and personality they want — their team, their hours, their reviews, their booking link — while the company keeps one asset that compounds and one set of credentials that survives a transfer.

Ask three questions. How will a new location get published — an answer involving a developer is an answer about your future bottleneck. What happens to our existing search visibility during migration? And which parts will franchisees be able to edit? Then ask to see a component library and a field map from real work rather than a portfolio of homepages. The design matters, but the operating model is what you live with for the next five years.

A fixed project fee scoped to the number of templates, the number of locations to migrate and how much content needs rebuilding, quoted before anything starts. The design system is the bulk of the investment and it is paid once; locations after that are cheap because they inherit it. Where the honest engagement is a structure and template project on your existing platform rather than a full rebuild, we scope it that way and say so. Design files, code and accounts stay in the company's name.

Usually Webflow or WordPress, and the choice follows how your team works rather than our preference. Webflow suits marketing teams who want to publish without developers and a design system enforced by structure. WordPress suits companies with existing plugins, integrations or an internal development team. For very large systems with franchise management software in the middle, we will sometimes recommend a headless setup. Whatever we recommend, you get the training and documentation to run it without us.

Because the template is a frame and the content is local. Each page pulls the real team, hours, service area, services actually sold there, reviews from those customers, photos of that unit, and answers to questions specific to that area. We collect it through a short intake with the owner instead of a merge field, and the template has room for genuinely local sections. Pages built this way read as local to a visitor, which is the same thing search engines are trying to reward.

Fast enough that an impatient person on a phone outside your competitor's door still chooses you. We work to field Core Web Vitals measured on real devices rather than a lab score, keep imagery and third-party scripts under control, and re-check monthly rather than at launch only. The commercial case is well documented: Google's Milliseconds Make Millions study found a 0.1 second load time improvement lifted retail conversions 8% and travel conversions 10%, and franchise traffic is mostly mobile.

Yes, within a defined set of fields, and that balance is decided in the structure workshop rather than argued about later. Owners typically control hours, holiday notices, team photos, local offers and their booking link. The company keeps design, legal, trademark elements, service descriptions and page structure. Everyone edits through a simple form-style interface, not a page builder, so nothing breaks visually and no franchisee can accidentally publish a layout the design system does not support.

Each one is published from the location template with its own content, usually within a day of receiving the owner's intake form. The launch checklist covers the page, the schema, internal links from regional pages, the finder entry, tracked contact details and the connection to the Google Business Profile. Because the system is built for this, an opening is an operational task for your marketing team rather than a project, which is the whole point of paying for a design system once.

Yes, and it is one of the few areas where a company's exposure multiplies with location count. We build to WCAG standards — contrast, focus states, keyboard navigation, form labels, alt text rules — test with real assistive technology rather than an automated badge, and document the standard so future pages stay compliant. It also happens to help everyone: clear contrast and obvious tap targets are what make a location page usable in bright sunlight with one hand.

Directly, and per location. Most franchise systems already run a booking platform, a call centre or a franchise management system, and the website's job is to route each enquiry to the right unit with the right data attached. We integrate the booking flow, map form submissions and tracked calls to the location, and pass source information through so marketing spend can be judged on booked work. Where an integration is genuinely not worth the engineering, we say so and use a simpler routing rule.

Nothing dramatic, because the page belongs to the territory rather than the person. On a transfer we update the owner, team, hours and any local offers while the URL, reviews and accumulated visibility stay put. On a closure the page is redirected to the nearest serving location or the regional page rather than the homepage, the finder is updated, and internal links are cleaned up. Access is held by the company throughout, so no transition depends on tracking down an old password.

Yes, and we keep them separate from the consumer experience because the two audiences want different things. A prospective owner is reading about investment levels, support, territory availability and validation, and they will compare several brands in a tab each. Given an average cost per franchise sale of $13,757 in the 2025 AFDR, a development section that answers questions honestly and loads quickly is one of the cheapest improvements available in the whole recruitment funnel.

Often, and we will say so if that is the better use of the budget. Plenty of franchise sites have a sound platform and a reasonable design but no component library, a broken finder and hand-built location pages. In those cases we introduce the structure, rebuild the location template, fix speed and accessibility, and leave the rest alone. It costs less, ships sooner and usually moves enquiries more than a redesign that changes how everything looks and nothing works.

More than most companies expect. Search engines read the same structure users do: a crawlable finder, one indexable page per location, clean headings, schema and fast pages are the foundation everything else is built on. Paid media depends on it too — sending advertising clicks to a generic homepage wastes budget that a proper local landing page would convert. We build the site with our franchise SEO and franchise PPC teams so the design decisions and the marketing plan agree.

That each visitor finishes the job they arrived with, quickly. Customers want hours, distance, price signals and a way to book. Prospective owners want investment detail and validation. Job seekers want the careers page. Existing customers want an account or a phone number. We design each of those journeys explicitly, test them with real users where budget allows, and remove the interruptions — unnecessary pop-ups, long forms, social media widgets that push the phone number below the fold — that get between an interested person and a business.

We can, and for many franchise brands the website is where an ageing identity finally shows its age: three logo versions in circulation, no photography standard, and colours that fail contrast checks. Our branding and graphic design teams can refresh the identity and asset library alongside the build, or work purely within the brand guidelines you already have. Either way the design system documents the decisions, so franchisees and future agencies have one source to follow instead of a folder of custom files.