DrupalCon Seattle 2019: Deep Cleaning: Creating franchise model efficiencies with Drupal 8

COIT offers cleaning services and 24/7 emergency restoration services and their 100+ locations serve more than 12 million homes & businesses across the United States and Canada.

It had been years since the COIT site had been updated, and it posed a host of technical challenges. Franchise content optimizations resulted in 30+ redundant updates for the SEO team. The mobile experience wasn’t optimized for conversions. There was a mountain of custom technical debt. And despite the current content administrative challenges, the localized experience lacked the level of context-awareness that consumers have come to expect.

It was time for COIT to clean up its own mess.

In this case study we will cover the more technical parts of this Drupal 8 implementation. A multinational but distinctly separate brand presence was critical to both maintain and improve across Canada and the US, including enhanced geolocative features. Each of the 35+ franchises at COIT offered promotions, and needed to maintain custom promotions tailored to each franchise location while still being aware of strategic content at the corporate level. It was also critical to not disrupt the existing hard-won SEO and SEM business drivers that the current site facilitates. This was a paramount business concern, and ensuring that re-architecting the site to better meet Drupal best practices and to ease centralized content management didn’t result in franchises losing their hard-won visibility on search engines was a critical metric for project success.

Because the site was a corporate hub with 100+ microsites, Drupal 8 was the perfect choice to accommodate all the complex requirements and also enable custom execution, all while allowing for a focus on conversion optimization and a flexible design system.

Attendees of this session will leave with an understanding of:

The challenges of migrating content from a multi-site architecture to a domain-access driven model
How to create a “single site” experience for users in a certain geographic area that marries corporate-level messaging with a local based interface
Using Paragraphs and entity cloning to strategically cut down on architectural complexity
Planning and implementing dynamic SEO-performant sitemaps on a per-franchise and aggregate basis


This session is an excellent fit for:

Anyone evaluating Drupal 8
Planning a large scale Drupal 8 implementation
Planning to build or have multiple sites
Those who want to learn about managing regionalized and SEO-rich content

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