Guide
Consolidating websites after an acquisition
You bought the practices. You inherited the websites. One platform for the group, local control where it is needed, without losing the search presence of the sites you acquired.
Every acquisition arrived with another website.
The group now runs eight sites on eight platforms, built by eight local agencies. Head office cannot change a template once and see it everywhere. Local managers cannot update hours without raising a ticket. Nobody has a complete list of logins. Consolidating this is not a nice-to-have rebuild — it is an integration task with budget already allocated.
What is usually behind it
No shared architecture
Each site was commissioned as a one-off. None of them were built to be part of a group, so brand, permissions and enquiry routing were never designed to scale.
Access sits with former suppliers
Domains, CMS accounts and analytics still belong to previous owners or agencies. A simple change turns into an email hunt.
Local SEO was never treated as an asset
Each site has its own URLs, Google Business presence and enquiry forms. Folding them badly is how groups lose the visibility they paid for when they bought the practice.
Enquiries route wherever the original builder pointed them
Forms land in personal inboxes, a former owner's address or a CRM nobody at group level can see. Demand by location becomes impossible to measure, which makes it impossible to manage.
Inherited pages carry claims nobody has reviewed
Pricing, credentials, policies and regulated wording were written by the previous owner. Once the group owns the site, it owns the claim on it — and in most cases nobody has audited what is actually published.
What a consolidation involves
One platform, many locations. Head office sets brand, templates and permissions. Each site keeps local pages, local search presence and its own enquiry routing. Sites move one at a time, so a problem on one never becomes a problem for the group.
- Inventory of every inherited domain, CMS, plugin and integration
- A site template with roles for head office and local editors
- Content and URL migration per site, with redirects tested before that site goes live
- Booking, CRM and practice systems left in place where they still work
- One source of location data — addresses, opening hours, contact details — so a change is made once
- Enquiry routing and reporting at group level, split by location
- A migration order agreed in advance, so the largest or most exposed site is not the first to move
- The next site starts only once the last one is stable
What it costs to find out
The Headless Assessment maps every inherited site and sets the order they should move in. £1,500, fixed. You keep the document even if you do not proceed to a build.
How we do this work
For groups that have grown by acquisition and inherited a different website with every site. One governed platform, local control where it's needed, head office control everywhere else.
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Common questions
Can each site keep its own name?
Yes. Some groups keep the local name because it carries the reputation; others move to the group brand over time. The platform supports either, including a phased rename site by site.
We are still acquiring. Will this cope with sites we have not bought yet?
That is the reason to build from a template. Once it exists, adding an acquisition becomes a migration and content exercise rather than a new website project.
Do local managers still edit their own pages?
Yes, within limits you set. Hours, team and local copy can sit with the site. Templates, brand assets and anything carrying a clinical, legal or pricing claim can stay under head office approval.
What happens to each location's Google Business Profile?
They stay per location — they are one of the assets you bought. The work is keeping the name, address and phone number consistent between the profile and the new site, and updating the linked URL as each site moves so the profile never points at a redirect for longer than it has to.
Do all the sites have to move at once?
No, and we would advise against it. Sites move one at a time so each cutover can be checked properly, and so the template improves with each one. A group of eight typically moves over several months rather than in a single launch.
Who ends up owning the domains?
The group should. Inherited domains are often still registered to a previous owner or their agency, which is a real risk at renewal. Consolidating registrar access is usually one of the first things worth doing, and it can happen before any migration work starts.
One of our sites is tiny. Is it worth moving?
Sometimes the answer is to fold it into a location page on the group site and redirect the old URLs, rather than rebuild it. That keeps whatever search presence it had without carrying a whole site for one location. The assessment says which sites are worth moving and which are worth absorbing.
Find out what you are actually dealing with.
The Headless Assessment maps every inherited site and sets the order they should move in. £1,500, fixed. You keep the document even if you do not proceed to a build.
No lock-in. No obligation.