Head office owns the brand and the locations own their opening hours. Both need to change things, and neither should be able to break the other's work.
The whole problem is a boundary: what belongs to the brand, and what belongs to the location.
A brand change is made once and rolled out across every location rather than repeated forty times. The rollout is staged, so a mistake is caught on two sites instead of all of them.
Local staff need to edit hours, offers and staff photos, and nothing else. Permissions are scoped per location so a franchisee cannot change the theme or reach another site.
Locations often want their own domain or subdomain. Mapping and certificates are issued and renewed automatically rather than being forty separate jobs.
One franchisee installing a heavy plugin should not affect the network. Sites are resourced so a local problem stays local.
Backups are per site, so recovering a location that went wrong does not mean rolling every other one back with it.
The failure mode on a franchise network is not downtime. It is a brand update applied to forty sites at once that turns out to be wrong on all forty.
A network is only manageable if the sites are independent enough that one going wrong is one support ticket rather than forty.
Each row is about the line between what head office controls and what a location does.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Template deployment | Pushed from one source, staged before network-wide | A brand change applied to forty sites simultaneously is forty broken sites when it is wrong, and it is wrong often enough to matter. |
| Role scoping | Location managers limited to their own content | Franchisees need to edit hours and offers without the ability to change a theme or reach another location's site. |
| Domain mapping | Certificates issued and renewed per location automatically | Locations want their own address, and forty manual certificate renewals is a job that will eventually be forgotten on at least one of them. |
| Resource isolation | One location's load kept off the others | A franchisee installing something heavy should be their own problem rather than the network's outage. |
| Backups | Per site rather than per network | Restoring one location that went wrong should not roll back the thirty-nine that did not. |
Every plan includes free migration, daily backups, SSL and 24/7 support.
Move the locations across — migration is free, every site included.