What's Different About a Website for a Multi-Location Business
A multi-location business website has to solve three problems most other sites don't: making it easy for a customer to find their nearest branch, keeping the brand consistent across sites while letting each one feel real, and structuring the content so each location can rank locally on Google. Get any one of these wrong and the site quietly loses enquiries to closer, sharper competitors.
Most website advice assumes one business, one location, one homepage doing all the work. Multi-location businesses — hospitality groups, salon chains, gym franchises, service businesses with multiple branches, dog daycare, dental practices, tutoring centres — need something structurally different. The website is doing double duty: representing the brand at the group level, and helping each individual location earn its own customers locally.
Here's what tends to be different about a multi-location business website redesign in the UK.
How does a multi-location website differ from a single-location one?
Three structural things.
First, the site has to answer "where's my nearest branch?" before anything else. Customers arriving at a multi-location business are usually looking for one specific location, not the group. A homepage that doesn't quickly route them to their local site is a homepage that adds friction most competitors don't.
Second, each location needs its own indexed page for local SEO to work. Google ranks local businesses at the location level, not the group level. A multi-location business with one shared "our locations" page ranks nowhere locally. A multi-location business with a well-built page per location ranks in each of them.
Third, the content has to scale as the business does. Adding a new location shouldn't mean redesigning the site. Removing one shouldn't leave broken links. The site's architecture has to anticipate change.
The brand consistency vs local flavour tension
The single most common failure mode is treating each location as a mini-website of its own. Every location page ends up with different photography, different tone, different structure — because whoever set them up did so at different times, with different priorities.
The result is a brand that reads as inconsistent across sites, even when the underlying business is coherent. Customers who visit two branches of the same business feel the disagreement — the London branch reads premium, the Manchester branch reads discount, and the group brand pays for both perceptions.
The fix is a location-page template — shared structure, shared typography, shared imagery style — with a small controlled area for genuinely local content (staff photos, opening hours, local phone). Consistency at the frame level, local flavour inside the frame. The same principle that makes brand redesigns hold up over years applies here in miniature — every location is another surface the brand has to hold.
What multi-location websites need for local SEO
Four things, minimum, per location:
A dedicated page with the location name in the URL (/locations/london rather than a query string)
The full address, phone number, opening hours, and directions — in text, not just in an image
A Google Business Profile linked to that page
Reviews or testimonials specific to that location, where possible
Doing this properly across ten locations is significantly more work than doing it once for one location. It's also where the ranking upside actually sits — a multi-location business that treats each location page as thin doesn't rank locally, no matter how good the group site looks.
How much does a multi-location website redesign cost?
For most independent studios working with UK multi-location businesses, the useful bands are:
2–3 locations, standard scope: £8,000 – £15,000
4–10 locations with a shared template: £12,000 – £25,000
10+ locations with bespoke local content and integrations: £25,000+
The main variable is the number of location pages and whether they share a template. Template-driven website redesigns scale better; bespoke approaches read as more premium but rarely justify the additional cost after five locations. We recently rebuilt the website for Wag Club, a UK multi-location service business, on a location-page template so adding new sites is straightforward.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a separate website for each location? Usually no. A single well-structured site with dedicated pages per location is almost always better than multiple standalone sites — cheaper to maintain, better for group brand consistency, and often better for local SEO because the group site has more overall authority.
How do I handle opening a new location on the website? Ideally, add a new location page to the existing template rather than restructuring the site. This is where a well-designed multi-location site earns its keep — new locations should be an hour of work, not a project.
What CMS is best for a multi-location website? Squarespace and Webflow both handle 2–10 locations well. Beyond that, WordPress with a proper location taxonomy structure tends to scale better. For enterprise-level multi-location groups (50+ sites), a headless CMS with a custom front-end is usually the right architecture.
Should each location have its own domain? Almost never. Splitting into separate domains fragments the SEO authority of the group brand and multiplies the maintenance work. Sub-pages under a single domain (business.com/london, business.com/manchester) rank better and are cheaper to maintain than separate sites.
If you're running a UK multi-location business and your website has stopped keeping up with how the group has grown, we'd be glad to talk it through.