Franchise Website Design: Website Design for Franchises, Every Location and the Brand

Updated October 2026 · Written and maintained by the Progression Agency strategy team

Website design for franchises is the planning, design and build of one website that represents a franchise brand nationally, gives every franchised and company-owned location an accurate page of its own, and sells new franchises without breaking the disclosure rules that govern franchise sales. It is written for franchisors, franchise marketing leads and multi-unit operators, and it produces a brand site, a location page system, a location finder, a franchise development section and the permissions that decide who can change what. Progression Agency is based in New York City and works with clients across the United States and worldwide.

What is website design for franchises?

It is the design of a single site that has to satisfy three audiences at once: a customer looking for the nearest location, a franchisee who needs their unit shown accurately, and a prospective franchisee deciding whether to invest. The brand controls the system; each location supplies the facts only it knows.

A standard business website assumes one business, one address and one person who edits it. A franchise system breaks all three assumptions. There may be forty or four hundred addresses, several hundred owners with different levels of interest in the website, and a franchise sales process that sits under federal disclosure rules. Web design for franchises is mostly the work of deciding where each of those differences lives in the site, and then building templates that keep them apart.

The brand layer customers see first

The home page, service pages, offers, story and careers sections belong to the franchisor. They carry the national message, the design system and the legal pages, and they link down into the locations. A customer who lands here should reach a nearby location in one or two clicks, whether they arrived from a national campaign, a branded search or an AI assistant’s answer.

The location layer franchisees depend on

Every unit gets its own page with its own address, hours, services, team, photos and reviews. These are the pages a local search for the brand should land on, and the franchisee is usually the only person who knows when the hours change, which services that unit offers this season or who joined the team last month. The design job is to make those facts easy to keep current and impossible to break the brand with.

The franchise sales layer prospective owners read

The franchise development section explains the opportunity: the concept, the investment range, the support, the process and how to request the disclosure document. It is advertising to prospective franchisees, so what it can say about money and about existing owners is set by the Federal Trade Commission’s Franchise Rule, covered in its own section below.

The operating layer nobody sees

Underneath sit the roles and permissions, the location data feed, the integrations with booking, ordering and phone systems, the analytics that report by location, and the workflows that move a franchisee’s change request to a published page. When this layer is missing, the site still looks fine at launch and drifts out of date within months.

The website is one part of a wider marketing system. National campaigns that route to locations, co-op budgets, franchisee support, brand fund reporting and lead attribution by territory are covered on our franchise marketing agency page. Everything on this page is about the site itself: how it is structured, designed, built, governed and priced.

How franchise brands search for a web design partner

With short, plain phrases. In Ubersuggest data for the United States, franchise web design is the largest at about 390 searches a month, followed by website design for franchises and web design for franchises at about 320 each.

The bids tell a slightly different story from the volumes. Advertisers pay about $22.46 a click for franchise website development, nearly twice the $11.53 paid for website design for franchises, which suggests the development phrase is typed by people closer to commissioning a build: a franchisor with a system already running and a technical problem to solve. The design phrases are earlier in the decision and broader in intent.

Franchise web design or a web design franchise?

Word order changes the meaning. Franchise web design is a service for franchise brands. A web design franchise is a business opportunity: someone buying the rights to run a web design company under another firm’s name. Searches such as website design franchise and web design franchises draw about 210 and 320 searches a month respectively, and some of that demand comes from would-be franchisees rather than franchisors. This page is for brands that need a website built for their system, not for anyone looking to buy into a design business.

Multi-location site architecture for a franchise system

Put every location on the brand domain, in a predictable folder, behind a crawlable directory. Separate franchisee websites are the exception that needs a reason, because they split brand control, analytics and maintenance into as many pieces as there are owners.

Architecture is the decision that is hardest to reverse. It sets the URL of every location page, decides whether a design change reaches every unit at once, and determines whether the franchisor can see the whole system in one analytics property. The five options below cover nearly every franchise site in use.

Location pages in subfolders of the brand domain

The structure we recommend by default. A folder pattern such as /locations/texas/austin/ keeps every unit under one install and one template set, so a fix to the template fixes every page. The franchisor owns the code, the hosting and the analytics; franchisees log in to a restricted editor that shows only their own location’s fields.

Multisite networks with one codebase

Some systems, especially those with regional master franchisees or several brands, run a network of sites from one installation. In WordPress terms that is a Multisite network, built on sub-domains or sub-directories, where the WordPress handbook notes that an individual site can activate themes and plugins but cannot install them. That split suits franchising: the network administrator decides what exists, and each site chooses within it.

Subdomains per location

Subdomains such as austin.brand.com feel tidy and are sometimes requested by franchisees who want a site that looks like their own. They are workable when hosted centrally on the same codebase, but analytics, internal linking and reporting become more fragmented than folders, and they add little that a well-designed location page does not already provide.

Franchisee microsites on separate domains

This is the pattern consolidation projects exist to undo. Each owner buys a domain and a template, the brand’s look drifts, copy is duplicated from the national site, and the franchisor cannot fix anything without asking several hundred people. When a unit is sold or closed, the microsite often stays online with stale hours and phone numbers that no longer connect.

Directory pages by state, metro and city

Between the locator and the unit pages sits a directory: a page per state or region that lists its locations, and a page per metro or city where several units share a market. These pages give people and crawlers a browsable path to every location, and they are the natural home for market-level content such as service areas and local promotions.

Where location pages turn into doorway pages

Google’s spam policies describe doorway abuse with examples that read like a warning to franchise sites: multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page, and substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a browsable hierarchy. A page per real location with real local facts is not a doorway. A page per nearby town where no unit operates, with the town name swapped in, is the pattern the policy describes.

This section covers how the site is built. How the same structure ranks, including the brand, service and location keyword layers, Business Profiles at scale and what happens in search when units open and close, is on our franchise SEO page.

Location page design: what every unit page has to carry

Enough local fact that a customer can act without calling to check, and enough structure that hundreds of pages stay consistent. That means a fixed set of modules, filled with data that belongs to the location rather than copy that belongs to the brand.

Website design for local business units inside a national brand

Each location page has the same job as a small company’s whole website: answer where, when, what and how much, then make the next step obvious. The difference is that good web design for local business usually means custom copy and photography, while a franchise has to deliver that local specificity through a template. The answer is structured fields with prompts, so a franchisee writes two sentences about the neighborhoods they serve instead of a blank page they will never fill.

Hours, holiday hours and temporary closures from one source

Wrong hours cost a customer’s trust quickly. The location record should hold regular hours, holiday hours and temporary closures in one place and publish them to the location page, the locator and, through an integration, the Business Profile. A franchisee who changes hours twice should never have to do it in three systems.

Services, menus and prices that vary by unit

Not every unit offers everything. A location page that lists the national service menu by default will send customers to locations that cannot serve them. The template should show only the services the unit has switched on, from a list the brand controls, and should handle local prices only where the franchise agreement lets franchisees set them.

Team and photos that prove the location is real

Photographs of the actual storefront, the actual team and the actual work are what separate a location page from a templated listing. Set minimum photo standards in the brand guide, give franchisees a simple upload with review, and replace stock photography wherever a real picture exists.

Reviews on location pages: what the rules allow

Showing reviews on location pages works, as long as the display is honest. The FTC’s rule on consumer reviews, 16 CFR Part 465, makes it a violation for a business to misrepresent that the reviews displayed on its site represent most or all of the reviews submitted when reviews are being suppressed because of their rating or negative sentiment. Filtering a review feed to four and five stars is the obvious way to cross that line. Separately, Google’s review snippet guidelines limit review rich results for local businesses to sites that capture reviews about other businesses, so star ratings marked up on a brand’s own location pages will not produce stars in search.

Structured data for every location

Each location page should carry LocalBusiness markup generated from the location record, using the most specific subtype that fits, such as Restaurant or HealthClub, as Google’s local business structured data documentation recommends. The same documentation describes a department property for businesses with departments that keep their own hours or phone numbers, which suits a unit with a separate service desk or drive-through. Markup must match what the page shows.

Matching the Business Profile link

Google’s Business Profile guidelines ask for a website that represents the individual business location and say not to use URLs that redirect or refer users to landing pages other than the actual business. For a franchise that means each profile links to its own location page, not to the home page or the locator. The same guidelines ask chains to keep names and categories consistent across all locations that provide the same service, which the location record should enforce.

Location finders that people and crawlers can both use

A good locator answers the nearest-location question in seconds on a phone and still leaves a plain list of links that crawlers and screen readers can follow. A map with no links behind it hides every location page from search.

Locators fail in predictable ways: they load a heavy map before the visitor has typed anything, they ask for location permission with no fallback, and they render results in a script that leaves no crawlable link to any location page. Google Maps Platform publishes a store locator architecture guide covering search, autocomplete and directions, including Locator Plus with an engagement report, and the same principles apply whichever mapping provider you choose.

A crawlable directory behind the map

Every location page should be reachable through ordinary links: from the state or region page, from the city page and from the locator’s list view. The map is a convenience layered on top of that directory, not the only way in.

Search by ZIP code, city or current location

Design for a phone first. Offer an address box with autocomplete, a use-my-location button that asks for permission only when tapped, and a list sorted by distance that works even if permission is refused. Show hours and an open-now status in the results so many visitors never need to open the location page at all.

When nobody serves the address

A search with no nearby location is not a dead end. Show the nearest units, offer online ordering or shipping where the brand has it, and record the searched area. Those zero-result searches are some of the most useful data a franchise development team can get.

Routing service-area searches to the territory owner

Home-services and other service-area systems sell by territory, not by storefront. Here the locator should match a ZIP code to the franchisee who owns that territory and route the quote request accordingly, with the territory map maintained by the franchisor so that two owners never receive the same lead.

• Results usable without granting location permission.
• A text list of locations under the map, with ordinary links.
• Open-now status, hours and a call button in each result.
• Keyboard and screen reader access to the search box and results.
• Zero-result searches logged by area for franchise development.
• Territory matching for service-area units, maintained centrally.

Franchisor and franchisee control: who can change what

The franchisor owns the design system, the code, the legal pages and the data model. The franchisee edits a defined set of fields for their own location, inside guardrails, with a review step only where a mistake would hurt the brand.

Locked brand components and editable local fields

The simplest guardrail is to give franchisees fields, not pages. A field for hours cannot break the layout; a free-form page editor can. Lock headers, footers, typography, colors and calls to action at the template level, and expose only the content that genuinely varies by location.

Roles and approvals that do not become a bottleneck

An approval queue that holds every change for a head-office reviewer can fill up quickly, and when it does, franchisees stop using the system. Reserve review for changes that carry brand or legal risk, such as promotions, prices and free text, and let factual updates publish at once. Multi-unit owners and area developers need a role that spans their locations without seeing anyone else’s.

When a franchisee asks for a website of its own

Sooner or later a franchisee asks. The answer starts in the franchise agreement and the disclosure document: Item 11 of the FTC Franchise Rule requires franchisors to disclose the circumstances in which they permit franchisees to use their own advertising material. A location page with genuinely useful editing rights removes most of the reasons owners ask, and a written policy covers the rest.

Transfers, resales and closures

When a unit changes hands, the outgoing owner’s access ends and the new owner’s begins on the same day, and the page itself never leaves the franchisor’s control. A closure needs a decided treatment for the page, the locator entry and the profile, set out in the operations manual rather than improvised each time.

Franchise website development: platforms, integrations and data

Choose the platform by how location data, permissions and integrations will work, not by how the home page looks. Most franchise builds succeed or fail on the data model behind the location pages.

Franchise web development on WordPress, Webflow or a headless stack

Franchise web development usually lands on one of three foundations. WordPress offers the widest choice of developers and a mature roles system; Webflow gives designers tight control with a smaller editing surface; a headless build pairs a content management system with a custom front end for systems that need speed and integrations at scale. Our WordPress development, Webflow development and headless WordPress pages go deeper on each.

Is a franchise website builder enough?

A franchise website builder, meaning hosted software that generates location pages from a feed, can be the right answer for a young system with a handful of units and no developer budget. The trade-offs appear later: design is limited to the vendor’s templates, integrations are limited to the vendor’s list, and leaving means rebuilding. If you start on one, keep the location data in a format you can export, and own the domain.

Location data as a feed, not a spreadsheet

Names, addresses, phone numbers, hours, services and coordinates should live in one location record that feeds the site, the locator and the Business Profiles. Google describes its Business Profile APIs as managing listings from one location to hundreds of thousands, with notifications for new reviews and updates to location data. Wiring the site and the profiles to the same record ends the problem of three different sets of hours.

Booking, ordering, CRM and call tracking

Integrations are where franchise builds go over budget, because each location may use a different booking calendar, ordering account or phone number. Map them per location during discovery, decide which are system-wide and which are local, and name each one in the scope. Our booking website design and visitor tracking pages cover the details.

Performance budgets for hundreds of templated pages

A slow template is slow everywhere. Google’s Core Web Vitals guidance sets good thresholds of Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads. Agree those numbers as a budget for the location template and test them on a phone, because maps, review widgets and chat tools are the usual culprits.

Hosting, security and who holds the keys

The franchisor should own the domain, the hosting account, the code repository and the analytics property, with agencies and franchisees given access rather than ownership. Single sign-on, role-based access and an audit log matter more here than on a single-business site, because the number of people with a login runs into the hundreds. See website security for monitoring and hardening.

Franchise sales pages and the FTC Franchise Rule

The franchise development section is advertising to prospective franchisees, and the Federal Trade Commission’s Franchise Rule at 16 CFR Part 436 limits what it can say about earnings and about existing owners. We build these pages inside those limits, and the franchisor’s counsel signs off on the content; nothing here is legal advice.

Can a franchise sales page show earnings figures or average unit volume?

The rule’s definition of a financial performance representation covers any representation to a prospective franchisee, including in the general media, of a specific level or range of actual or potential sales, income, gross profits or net profits. Under 436.9, such a figure may be disseminated only if the franchisor has a reasonable basis and written substantiation at the time and the representation is in Item 19, with a clear and conspicuous admonition that a new franchisee’s results may differ. A headline average unit volume on a franchise sales page states a level of sales to prospective franchisees, so it is a disclosure question, not a design choice.

Franchisee stories and testimonials

Owner stories are among the most persuasive content a franchise sales site has, and the rule leaves room for them. What it prohibits is misrepresenting that a person bought or operated a franchise, or that someone can give an independent and reliable report about the franchise. Use real owners, with written consent, describing their own experience. Keep revenue and profit figures out of the stories unless they mirror Item 19.

Delivering the FDD through the website

The rule lets a franchisor furnish the disclosure document by giving directions for accessing it on the Internet, as long as that happens at least 14 calendar days before the prospect signs a binding agreement or pays anything. Under 436.6, the document has to be in a form the prospect can store, download or print, and the electronic version may include scroll bars, internal links and search features but not audio, video, animation, pop-up screens or links to external information. A gated download that records when access was issued serves both the rule and the sales team.

Online ordering, territories and Item 12

If the brand site takes orders or bookings from customers inside a franchisee’s territory, that is a channel of distribution the disclosure document has to describe. Item 12 asks whether the franchisor uses or reserves the right to use other channels, such as the Internet, to make sales within the franchisee’s territory, and what compensation it pays for doing so. Online ordering and lead routing should follow what Item 12 says, territory by territory.

Who pays for the franchise sales site

If the brand fund pays for the website, remember what Item 11 requires: disclosure of how advertising funds were used in the last fiscal year, including the percentages spent on production, media placement and administration, and the percentage used principally to solicit new franchise sales. Budget the franchise development section separately so that figure is easy to report.

State filings for franchise advertising

Some registration states add their own layer. California’s Corporations Code section 31156 bars publishing an advertisement offering a franchise subject to registration unless a true copy was filed with the commissioner at least three business days before first publication, unless the advertisement is exempted by rule. Franchise counsel should confirm which pages and campaigns need filing before launch.

Accessibility and privacy across hundreds of pages

Build them into the template, because the template is the only place a franchise can fix them hundreds of times at once. The Department of Justice treats the websites of businesses open to the public as covered by the ADA.

The Department of Justice’s guidance on web accessibility and the ADA, published March 18, 2022, says businesses open to the public must provide full and equal enjoyment of their goods and services to people with disabilities and that this reaches what they offer online. It gives businesses flexibility in how they comply and points to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and the Section 508 Standards as helpful technical guidance. For a franchise, every location page inherits the template’s accessibility, good or bad.

Accessibility built into the template

Work to WCAG 2.2 Level AA from the first wireframe. Two of its criteria catch franchise templates often: text contrast of at least 4.5 to 1 against its background, and pointer targets of at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels, which rules out the tiny map pins and icon-only buttons common in locators. Our ADA compliant website design page covers audits and remediation.

Lead data that moves between brand and unit

A quote request submitted on the brand site may be stored by the franchisor, passed to a franchisee and copied into two CRMs. The privacy notice, the consent wording on forms and the retention rules have to describe that journey accurately, and the system has to send each lead only to the owner of the relevant territory or location. Settle the data flow with counsel before the forms are designed.

Legal pages written once and inherited everywhere

Privacy notices, terms of use, accessibility statements and any ownership statement your franchise agreement requires, such as a line noting that each location is independently owned and operated, belong in the template. When counsel updates the wording, every location page changes together.

Designing for the action each franchise category needs

Decide the one action that matters most for a customer in your category, and build every location page around it. A restaurant page that buries online ordering, or a home-services page without a quote form, is a design failure however good it looks.

One primary action per page

Every extra button dilutes the main one. Pick the primary action for the category, place it at the top of the location page and repeat it after the reviews, and keep secondary options such as directions or careers visually quieter.

Routing every inquiry to the right owner

A form submitted on the Austin page must reach the Austin owner within minutes, and the brand needs a copy to measure response. Build routing from the location record, test it for every unit before launch, and alert head office when a location stops responding.

Web design for service business franchises

Service franchises such as cleaning, restoration, lawn care or tutoring sell by territory and by trust, so their location pages lean on proof: licensing where it applies, insurance, reviews and before-and-after photos. The general principles of web design for service business websites are on our service website design page; a franchise adds territory routing and brand controls on top.

AI answers: how assistants describe franchise brands and their locations

AI assistants answer two kinds of franchise questions: customers asking which location is nearest and open, and candidates asking what a franchise costs and how it works. Both answers are assembled from pages that state facts plainly and consistently.

Customers ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Google’s AI Overviews questions such as which branch near them is open on Sunday or which location offers a particular service. Prospective franchisees ask what it costs to open a unit, what the royalty is and what owners say about the support. The answers draw on location pages, Business Profiles, franchise directories, news coverage and the brand’s own franchise pages. When those sources disagree, an assistant has no reliable way to tell which one is current.

Customer questions about the nearest location

Location pages with consistent names, addresses, hours and services, matching the Business Profiles, give assistants one version of the truth. Unit-specific details, such as which services or menu items a location offers, are what let an assistant recommend a particular branch rather than the brand in general.

Candidate questions about owning a unit

Publish the investment range, fees and process as plain text on the franchise sales pages, consistent with the current disclosure document, and keep them updated when the FDD changes. A figure that appears only in a PDF or an image is harder for an assistant to read reliably and easier for a directory to misquote.

What to publish so assistants get it right

Google says pages need no additional technical requirements to appear as supporting links in its AI features beyond being indexed and eligible to show with a snippet. Other assistants use their own crawlers: OpenAI’s OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Anthropic’s Claude-SearchBot. Check that robots.txt and any firewall rules let them reach the location pages and the franchise sales section.

• A crawlable page for every location, with facts in text rather than images.
• Consistent names, hours and phone numbers across site, profiles and directories.
• A services list per location that matches what the unit actually offers.
• Investment, fees and process stated in plain text and matched to the FDD.
• A franchise FAQ that answers the questions candidates actually ask.
• Search crawlers allowed in robots.txt and at the firewall.

The full method for AI visibility in a franchise system, including the prompts to test and how to measure citations, is on our AEO for franchises page.

How much does website design for franchises cost?

As planning figures, a multi-location site runs $20,000 to $50,000 over 8 to 14 weeks, custom-coded or headless builds $25,000 to $100,000, and enterprise multi-site platforms with localization and governance $100,000 to $500,000 or more. Every number is confirmed in a written scope.

These are the planning ranges published on our website redesign, custom website development and website development cost pages. They are not quotes. A franchise system’s number depends mostly on the count of templates, the integrations per location and how much location content has to be written or migrated.

What pushes the number up or down

The cost drivers published on our website development cost page apply directly to franchise builds. The largest swings come from features and integrations, because a booking or ordering connection multiplied across locations is a project in itself.

Recurring costs after launch

Plan for hosting, maintenance, security monitoring and performance monitoring as separate monthly lines. Our published ranges are $50 to $300 a month for hosting a business lead-generation site, $75 to $2,500 a month for website maintenance, $150 to $1,000 a month for security monitoring and $200 to $1,000 a month for performance monitoring. A franchise sits toward the upper end because of its page count and number of editors.

Who pays: franchisor, brand fund or franchisee

The answer is in the franchise agreement. The options include paying for the platform from the brand fund, charging a technology fee per unit, or billing franchisees directly for their local pages. Whatever the model, it has to match what the disclosure document says about advertising funds and required payments, so agree it with counsel before the proposal is signed.

How long does a franchise website take?

Our planning timeline for a multi-location site is 8 to 14 weeks from signed scope to launch, longer for headless builds or systems with many integrations. Location data and franchisee content are the usual causes of delay, not design or code.

Rolling out locations in waves

A system with hundreds of units does not have to launch every location page on one day. A pilot of a few willing franchisees in different categories of market finds the template’s problems early, and later waves go faster because the editor and training are proven.

Launch day for a multi-location site

Launch day is a checklist: redirects tested, every location page returning a 200 status, Business Profile website links updated to the new location URLs, forms submitted for a sample of units, analytics recording by location, and a support channel open for franchisees who find something wrong.

Redesigning or consolidating a franchise website

Inventory before you design: every location URL, every franchisee domain and every page that earns traffic or links. Then map each one to its new home before development starts, so nothing is lost at launch.

Most franchise redesigns are also migrations. Old location URLs change, franchisee microsites are retired into the brand domain and the platform often changes too. Our website redesign services and website migration services pages cover the method in general; the franchise-specific parts are below.

Inventory every location URL and microsite first

Pull every URL the current site serves, every domain franchisees have registered with the brand’s name in it, and the pages that receive search traffic or links. Ask franchisees to declare every domain they hold that uses the brand name.

Redirects for retired microsites and old location URLs

Google’s site move documentation recommends server-side permanent redirects such as 301 or 308, redirecting straight to the final destination rather than through a chain, and keeping redirects generally for at least a year. For a franchise, every retired microsite and every old location URL should point to the matching new location page, never to the home page.

Keeping franchisees informed through the switch

Owners notice changes to their location pages before head office does. Tell them the launch date, show them their new page and editor in advance, and give them one place to report problems in the first two weeks. If rankings dip after launch, our guide to traffic drops after a redesign explains what to check.

Measuring a franchise website

Measure leads, calls, bookings and orders per location, and qualified franchise inquiries for the development section. A single system-wide traffic number hides the locations that need help.

Reporting by location, not one blended number

Franchisees judge the website by their own leads. A dashboard that shows each owner their location’s inquiries and calls, next to the system average, builds more support for the website than any national traffic chart. Our marketing analytics page covers how to set that up.

Locator searches as franchise development data

Every locator search for an area with no unit is a small piece of evidence of demand. Aggregated by month and by region, those searches can show the development team where customers are already looking for the brand, which is a stronger conversation starter with a candidate than a map of empty territories.

How to choose a web design partner for a franchise system

Choose the partner who can show you live location pages they have built, explain their permissions model and talk sensibly about the franchise sales rules. Visual portfolios alone say little about whether a site will survive four hundred editors.

Plenty of web design companies in the USA build excellent single-business sites. That experience matters less here than evidence of multi-location builds, data handling and governance. Use the table below in the first conversation.

Questions for the first call

How many location pages have you built on one system? How does a franchisee change their holiday hours? What happens to a location page when a unit is sold? How would you handle a franchisee who insists on their own domain? Which parts of our franchise sales pages would you want counsel to review?

Warning signs in a proposal

A proposal that prices location pages per page without mentioning the data model, offers to create pages for towns where no unit operates, or leaves domain and hosting in the agency’s name is describing a different kind of project. So is one that never mentions the disclosure document. Our guide to choosing an SEO company covers similar warning signs for the search side.

After launch: maintenance, new locations and template releases

Treat the website as a product with releases, not a project that ends at launch. New units, new services and new rules arrive every quarter, and the site has to absorb them without a rebuild.

A new-location kit inside the CMS

Opening a unit should be a form, not a project: create the location record, upload photos, switch on services, connect the booking or ordering account and assign the owner’s login. The page publishes when the record is complete, on the date the brand chooses.

Template releases on a schedule

Bundle template changes into scheduled releases, tested on staging against a sample of real locations, and tell franchisees what is changing in advance. Ad hoc edits to a shared template are how a franchise site breaks on a Friday afternoon.

• Monthly: plugin and platform updates, security scans, broken-link and form checks.
• Monthly: location data audit against the Business Profiles.
• Quarterly: template release with accessibility and speed regression tests.
• Quarterly: review of franchisee editing requests and support tickets.
• Each FDD update: franchise sales pages checked against the new document.
• Each opening or closure: location record, locator, profile and redirects.

Working with Progression on a franchise website

We scope franchise websites in writing, design and build them as one team, and leave the franchisor owning everything. The terms below are the ones published on our website design and development page.

That page commits to a redirect map produced before development starts, an open CMS you can take anywhere, a scope document that lists what is excluded as well as what is included, QA against WCAG 2.2 AA, integrations named individually in the scope with an allowance against each, hosting in your name and source files on final payment. Progression Agency is based in New York City and works with franchisors and franchisees across the United States and worldwide. See website design and development for the full standard.

Related services

Pages that sit next to franchise website design, for the parts of the job this page does not cover.

• Franchise marketing agency: national and local campaigns, brand fund and franchisee support.
• Franchise SEO: rankings for the brand and every location.
• AEO for franchises: how AI assistants describe your brand and units.
• Website design and development: our build standard and fixed-scope prices.
• Website redesign services: when to repair and when to rebuild.
• Landing page design: campaign pages for national and co-op advertising.
• Website maintenance: updates, backups and monitoring after launch.
• Website migration services: moving platforms and domains without losing traffic.
• ADA compliant website design: accessibility audits and remediation.
• Multilingual website design: for systems with units in more than one language market.
• Website speed optimization: Core Web Vitals for heavy templates.
• Local SEO services: the single-location method behind every unit.
• Google Business Profile optimization: profiles that match the location pages.
• Review management: asking for and answering reviews at every location.
• Conversion rate optimization: testing location page layouts.
• UI and UX design: franchisee portals and editing interfaces.

Frequently asked questions