An 11-location restaurant franchise gave local editors their own sites back

Representative examplesEvery case study in this library is an illustrative composite of the kind of engagement we deliver — written to show our method and standards, not to name clients.

Where they started

Eleven fast-casual restaurants across one metro, operated by a franchise group with a small corporate marketing function. Each location needs its own menu, hours, and local offers online — that is where hungry customers actually look. Corporate owns brand and legal copy. A few years back, a manager broke a location site badly enough that corporate revoked location access entirely, and the eleven sites had been run from HQ ever since.

What it was costing

Corporate marketing made every change to all eleven location sites because local managers had once broken theirs. Menus went stale, local offers never shipped, and HQ's team spent hours each week on edits that belonged at the locations.

What they could see

• Menus online lagged the kitchen by weeks; most locations hadn't updated theirs in months.
• HQ spent hours every week typing menu edits that each location's manager could have made in minutes.
• Local offers — a lunch deal, a catering push — never shipped because there was no path for them.
• Managers had stopped asking; the change-request email template sat unused in their inbox.

The constraints we worked inside

• Corporate controls brand and legal copy; locations control menus, hours, and local offers — the permission line had to encode that split.
• Third-party ordering links were contractual and changed by the vendor without notice.
• The franchisee budget allowed no per-location developer retainer.

What had been tried before

After the worst breakage, corporate revoked every location's edit access and centralized all changes at HQ.

HQ couldn't scale to eleven locations' daily reality; menus went stale and managers stopped reporting changes because the queue was pointless.

A roles plugin was installed to allow limited location editing.

It fenced pages but not conventions — managers still broke layouts inside their allowed regions, so corporate tightened the fence again.

What we proposed

We proposed encoding the corporate-versus-location split into the structure itself: a WordPress setup where brand and legal sections are corporate-locked block patterns and each location edits only its menu, hours, and offers — nothing else is editable, so nothing else can break. The third-party ordering links move into managed fields with monitoring, so a vendor change surfaces as an alert rather than a broken button. Locations onboard one at a time against their own real menu page, on a staging clone, before touching live.

Just as important is what we ruled out, and why:

• A service-level agreement for faster HQ edits — Menus change with deliveries and offers with the week; no HQ schedule beats the person standing in the restaurant.
• Eleven separate WordPress installs with per-site roles — Brand and legal locking can't be enforced across disjoint installs, and per-site upkeep costs contradicted the franchisee budget.
• A multi-location SaaS site builder — Per-location subscription fees scale exactly like the retainer the franchisee budget ruled out, and the ordering-link monitoring had to be custom anyway.

How the work ran

Delivered by the systems pod — engineer + automation specialist over 8 weeks, with working increments reviewed with the client every week.

The stack, and the reasoning

WordPress

One install, eleven location sites, no per-location fees — the franchisee budget ruled out anything that charged by the door, and roles handle the split.

Block themes

Corporate-locked patterns and location-editable regions make the permission line structural; managers assemble from blocks that are already on-brand.

WP-CLI

Provisioning eleven locations' pages, migrating permissions, and running monitoring checks all scripted — bulk operations done by hand across eleven sites is how mistakes got made.

Uptime monitoring

The ordering vendor changes link formats without notice; a scheduled check surfaces a broken button to HQ before a hungry customer finds it.

What went wrong

How we worked together

Cadence

Weekly call with HQ's marketing manager; onboarding ran location by location, each manager in a 30-minute session on their own staging clone.

Client side

HQ's marketing manager owned the project and the brand-locked sections; one tech-comfortable manager piloted each change before the group rollout.

Decisions

The permission line was fixed in writing up front; disputes about what a location may edit went to the franchise director, not the inbox.

They provided

Access to the existing site, menu and offer data per location, the vendor's ordering-link contract, and manager time for the onboarding sessions.

What changed

The headline: support emails per month from locations to hq, measured over the first quarter — 40 → 6, read from HQ's support inbox. A second check: locations keeping menus current (was 4 of 11) at 11 → 11.

Menus change the morning the trucks deliver, because the person who knows is the person who edits. HQ's marketing manager plans brand campaigns instead of typing location edits, and managers stopped apologizing for out-of-date pages because staleness is no longer their default. Ordering-button alerts mean vendor surprises reach HQ before customers do. Managers now show their sites off to each other, which the HQ team reports as the strangest and best signal.

The result was read from HQ's support inbox against the pre-engagement baseline over the stated window, with a guardrail check on locations keeping menus current (was 4 of 11). Where platform-reported numbers and business outcomes differ, this record says which layer it is quoting.

What they own now

• The franchise site with eleven provisioned locations and the permission line enforced structurally.
• An onboarding recording of a manager rebuilding a menu page, used for new hires.
• Monitoring checks for ordering links, alerting to the HQ inbox, with a response card.
• A one-page brand-and-legal edit policy the franchise director can point to.
• WP-CLI scripts that provision a new location site from a template.