Last Updated on August 14, 2024 by James Castro
Introduction:
As your franchise business grows, so does the complexity of managing your online presence. What works for a single location often doesn’t scale well when you are managing dozens or even hundreds of sites. Fortunately, WordPress Multisite offers scalable solutions that grow with your business. However, in our experience, sometimes you need just a bit more than what’s built-in to grow your franchise and save yourself a few headaches.
The Challenge:
Managing multiple websites individually is time-consuming and costly. As your franchise expands, you need a solution that allows you to maintain consistency and efficiency without sacrificing quality. Still, the out-of-the-box multisite just isn’t enough for fast-growing franchises that need a bit more oomph.
Three plugins you might not know about that are worth consideration:
- One Dashboard, Many Sites: WordPress Multisite allows you to manage all your franchise sites from a single dashboard. This makes handling updates, branding, and content distribution easier as you scale. However, out of the box, there are several missing features you might like. The first plugin to mention is WP Ultimo. WP Ultimo is a useful plugin that can help you easily launch your websites quickly. While it’s primarily targeted to people operating WaaS solutions, it’s a powerful website management tool for many use cases, including multi-location businesses and franchises, especially if you’re charging your franchisees for their unique website access or if you want to send messages to all website admins from right within the WP Ultimo platform. It will also allow you to offer completely unique website templates you control to different owners based on their needs, scale, or investment. In other words a franchisee could choose to invest in the site with 20 pages or 10 pages, with XYZ feature, or without XYZ feature. It’s a gold mine of power and control you never knew you needed!
- Efficient Content Management: Unlike managing separate installations, Multisite shares resources like themes and plugins across your network. This not only saves server space but also simplifies maintenance. But one thing it doesn’t do out of the box is share content across sites. So, another useful plugin for your multisite is Broadcast. Broadcast is fantastic when you want to allow each of your franchisees to create content on their site, share that content across other sites in the same network, and, even more importantly, share the corporate content on all child sites (franchisee sites).
- Scalable Network Plugins: Plugins like WP Multi-Network used to work well to manage networks of multisites, but unfortunately, its no longer actively supported. There is missing spot in our heart for multi-network multisites, which can be helpful for international franchises who have master franchise owners and their own list of franchisees that they manage (like a micro franchisor). The multi-network plugin gave you an MLM esque level of control and God-like power over as many multi-sites as you needed. Don’t fret, if you’re that large give us a call. We have a few work-arounds 😉
Conclusion:
Scaling your franchise’s online presence doesn’t have to be a daunting task. With WordPress Multisite and some pre-built solutions like the three we shared with you today, you can grow your website network alongside your business, ensuring that your online operations are as efficient, epic, and scalable as possible.
Ready to scale your franchise websites? Contact us to learn how we can help!
