Synchronized franchise websites

The project

• Mrs.Sporty, a franchise company with currently around 250 clubs in Europe, has commissioned our partner, the digital consultancy Forte Digital, to create new websites for the fitness chain.
• In addition to a central Mrs.Sporty website there will be a separate club website for each location – perspectively several thousands.
• The websites are to be connected, in such a way that the headquarter has full control over the branding.
• At the same time, some of the content shall be controlled by the headquarter (e.g. blog articles, FAQs, etc.), while other areas (e.g. employees, opening hours, etc.) are to be maintained locally by the individual clubs. And there shall be centrally controlled elements which the individual clubs can, but do not have to use (e.g. special offers, price packages, landing pages).

The previous setup

• The previous website was based on Typo3 with custom functionality built by an agency.
• Mrs.Sporty had lots of issues with SEO, which was either very complicated or not possible at all due to the lack of flexibility in Typo3.
• Any changes in design or functionality needed to be requested from the agency, which made quick improvements nearly impossible.
• In general, the previous setup was expensive, not flexible and inefficient.

Goals & requirements

• The primary goal of the website relaunch was to increase conversion rates.
• The customer had to ensure that the brand standards were maintained across all club websites. Not just in terms of colors and fonts, but also about details such as button styles and the general user experience of the websites.
• There should be centralized content management – wherever general company information is concerned or content that should be identical on all sites. The technical implementation is also important, e.g. to avoid negative impact on the search engine ranking through duplicate content.
• The customer must be able to efficiently implement design adjustments and content adaptations without having to edit thousands of sites. It should also be ensured that all sites are always up-to-date and, for example, that new offers can be published simultaneously on all club websites.
• At the same time, the individual clubs must be able to maintain local information individually on their respective club sites.
• For certain offers that are only offered by individual clubs, there must also be a way to provide content centrally, but to be able to decide individually for each club whether the content should be displayed on the respective website or not.
• Local content maintenance in particular must be as simple as possible and ideally should not require any knowledge of WordPress, as this is usually carried out by local club employees.

The implementation

Forte Digital decided in favor of Greyd.Suite to implement the project. The headless features (“Global Content”) were the main deciding factor. The system was set up as a multisite project. This allows the digital consultancy to manage all 250 websites centrally via one platform (Greyd.Hub).

Using the native Greyd.Suite function, several custom post types were created, e.g. for club news, trainer profiles, club master data and testimonials.

Next, all required website sections were created as “Dynamic Templates“. These are templates that are set up only in terms of layout, regardless of their subsequent content. All elements (e.g. headline, text, button) are set to “dynamic” so that they can be flexibly filled with content later on.

The individual pages could now be set up using the templates created. The templates were filled directly with content wherever texts, images and the like were to be identical on all websites. Where the content was to vary on the individual club websites, dynamic tags and dynamic images were used as placeholders.

The completed pages and post types were then converted into global content using the Global Content features. The procedure differed depending on the section:

• Pages have been converted into Global Content as a whole so that they are visible in the backend of the individual club sites but cannot be edited.
• Some post types, including the associated posts, have been converted into Global Content when the individual posts are to be identical on all club sites.
• For post types whose content is to be maintained by the individual clubs (e.g. master data, coaches), the posts were not included in the Global Content conversion.
• A small custom snippet has been written for content that should be globally specified but locally selectable. This automatically changes the post ID of the content concerned when a specific pricing plan is selected in the master data of a club. As a result, only offers that are actually offered by the respective club are displayed on the respective site. Such customizations are easy to implement in Greyd.Suite with the help of code snippets.

Step 2: Creation of the individual club websites

The individual websites for the various club locations could now be created via the Greyd.Hub. The global design settings were transferred from the master site to the club sites using 1-click import/export.

Next, the global content was imported to the sites via the Global Content dashboard.

• The global pages can be viewed at club site level, but cannot be edited.

• The globally imported posts cannot be edited or deleted either. However, clubs have the option of creating additional posts, which are then only displayed on their own site.
• The local information (e.g. trainers, opening hours, etc.) can be easily maintained without WordPress knowledge using the corresponding fields in the backend. The dynamic tags set in the Dynamic Templates are then automatically displayed on the pages in the specified layout.

• The local clubs can select the optional Global Content (e.g. pricing plans) via the post type master data. The appropriate content is then automatically displayed on the corresponding sites.

In order to make work as easy as possible for the local clubs, Forte Digital has created a custom user role “Club” with the user management feature integrated in Greyd.Suite, with which only those parts that can be maintained locally are visible in the backend. The user roles can be customized in such detail that, for example, form entries can be viewed, but the associated forms cannot be edited.

Two potential scenarios

The following two scenarios are intended to illustrate how the customer benefits from the set-up described not only initally, but above all during ongoing operation.