Every franchise in the network had a website, and no two were the same. Some ran current WordPress, some had not been updated in years, and each had been built by whichever agency the outlet happened to hire. Head office could not change a legal disclaimer without contacting dozens of separate owners. ELIVTECH consolidated the estate onto a single WordPress multisite where brand assets are governed centrally and each outlet still controls the things that are genuinely local.
The client franchises a retail brand across a wide territory, with each outlet responsible for its own local marketing. That autonomy had produced an estate of independently built sites on divergent WordPress versions, plugin sets and hosting arrangements, several carrying unpatched vulnerabilities. Brand consistency was requested by email and complied with unevenly. ELIVTECH migrated the estate to one WordPress multisite on AWS with a shared parent theme and a block library, introduced a governance model that separates brand-owned content from outlet-owned content, and gave each outlet a WooCommerce storefront with local pricing, stock and collection options. Elasticsearch provides store and product search across the whole network from any entry point.
At a glance
The challenge
Local autonomy had produced an estate nobody could update, secure or measure as a whole.
Unpatched sites carrying brand risk
Outlets ran different WordPress versions with plugin sets nobody had inventoried. Several sites had gone without updates long enough to carry known vulnerabilities, and because each was hosted separately, head office had neither visibility of the exposure nor a mechanism to close it.
Brand changes delivered by request
A pricing disclaimer, a corrected product claim or a campaign asset reached the estate as an email asking owners to make the change themselves. Compliance was partial and unverifiable, so the brand's public presentation depended on how many outlets acted and how accurately.
Visual identity drifting per outlet
Each agency had interpreted the brand guidelines differently. Typography, spacing, button treatments and photography style varied enough that customers moving between two outlet sites could reasonably doubt they belonged to the same business.
No consistent way to sell online
A minority of outlets had e-commerce, each built differently, with local pricing and stock maintained by hand. Most had no online sales at all, so customers researching a product locally were sent to a phone number and a set of opening hours.
Customers could not find their nearest outlet
Store discovery depended on which site the customer landed on. There was no network-wide store finder and no way to ask whether a product was available nearby, so a customer on the wrong outlet's site had no path to the one that could actually serve them.
Performance measured nowhere
With separate hosting and separate analytics, nobody could compare outlets or establish what good looked like. Slow sites stayed slow because no one was accountable for a number that did not exist, and Core Web Vitals varied widely across the estate.
Our solution
One codebase, one design system, and a clear line between what head office owns and what the outlet owns.
Estate Audit and Governance Model
Three weeks inventorying every site: WordPress and plugin versions, custom code, content worth preserving, redirect maps and traffic value. That produced the governance model the platform is built around, drawing an explicit line between brand-owned content that syncs from the network parent and outlet-owned content that each franchise controls, with a small negotiated set that can be locally overridden.
Multisite Foundation and Block Library
A WordPress multisite was built on AWS with one parent theme and a block library covering the layouts outlets actually need. Blocks carry design tokens rather than free-form styling, so an outlet composes a page from approved components and cannot drift from the identity. Brand-owned blocks render from the network source, which means a central edit propagates without any outlet action. Outlet editors see those blocks in place but locked, with an explanatory label rather than a silent failure, so the governance model is visible in the editing experience instead of being enforced invisibly.
WooCommerce per Outlet on a Shared Catalogue
Each outlet received a WooCommerce storefront reading from the network product catalogue, with local price, stock and collection options held per site. Product content, imagery and compliance copy are maintained once centrally. Outlets manage the commercial decisions that are legitimately theirs without being able to alter regulated product information.
Network Search and Automated Delivery
Elasticsearch indexes products and outlets across the network, so a store finder and product availability lookup work identically from any entry point. Infrastructure is defined in code, updates roll out through a pipeline that runs automated checks against representative sites, and Core Web Vitals and error rates are reported per outlet on a shared dashboard. Plugin updates are staged against a sample covering the busiest outlets and the most customised ones before reaching the estate, because a multisite turns one bad update into an estate-wide incident.
Technology stack
Results
Measured once the full estate was migrated and serving from the multisite.
Before and after: platform engineering measures
- Dozens of codebases on divergent WordPress and plugin versions
- Security patching dependent on each outlet acting independently
- Brand changes distributed by email and applied unevenly
- Visual identity interpreted differently by each original agency
- Online selling available at a minority of outlets, built ad hoc
- No network-wide store finder or availability lookup
- No comparable performance or error data across the estate
- One multisite codebase with a shared parent theme
- Patches applied once and verified across every outlet
- Brand-owned blocks render from the network source automatically
- Design tokens enforced through an approved block library
- Every outlet has a WooCommerce storefront on the shared catalogue
- Elasticsearch store and availability lookup from any entry point
- Core Web Vitals and error rates reported per outlet on one dashboard
Project timeline
Estate Audit and Governance Design
Inventory of every outlet site, plugin and custom code review, content and traffic assessment, redirect mapping, and agreement on which content is brand-owned, outlet-owned or locally overridable.
Multisite Foundation and Design System
WordPress multisite on autoscaling AWS infrastructure defined in Terraform, shared database architecture, Redis object cache, parent theme with design tokens, and the first tranche of the block library.
Commerce and Network Search
WooCommerce per outlet against the shared catalogue, local price and stock model, click-and-collect options, Elasticsearch indexing of products and outlets, and the store finder with availability lookup.
Content Migration and Redirects
Scripted migration of retained content per outlet, media consolidation to object storage, redirect maps applied and verified to preserve accumulated search value, and outlet editor training on the block library.
Phased Cutover and Enablement
Outlets migrated in waves with the legacy site retained until each was verified, accessibility and Core Web Vitals checks in the pipeline, per-outlet monitoring dashboards, and handover documentation for the central team.
Key takeaways
What shaped the engineering decisions
- Govern content ownership before writing the theme: Deciding block by block who owns what turned brand consistency into a system property. Without that agreement the multisite would have been the same divergence problem with shared hosting.
- Design tokens in blocks, not guidelines in documents: A style guide outlets are asked to follow was rejected because that is what had already failed. Blocks that expose approved options and nothing else make the consistent choice the only available one.
- Shared catalogue, local commerce: Separate catalogues per outlet were rejected because product and compliance copy would immediately drift. Holding product content centrally while keeping price, stock and collection local puts each decision with whoever is accountable for it.
- Index outlets alongside products: Modelling stores as searchable documents next to products means one Elasticsearch query answers what a customer wants and where they can get it, rather than a store finder bolted on beside an unrelated catalogue search.
- Migrate in waves, keep the old site warm: A single estate-wide cutover was rejected as unrecoverable at scale. Migrating outlets in waves with the previous site retained meant a problem affected one wave and could be rolled back without touching the rest.
- Protect accumulated search value deliberately: Redirect maps were built per outlet during the audit and verified after each wave, because consolidating an estate silently discards years of accumulated ranking if old paths are allowed to break.
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