My father keeps bees. It’s now his way of life in retirement. Every summer when I visit my parents in Romania, I help him tend the hives. He is not a particularly patient man, but ask him anything about bees, and you will get more than you bargained for. He is an encyclopedia of knowledge about these remarkable creatures, and he has never once turned down an opportunity to share it. 

Here’s one that has stayed with me: the queen bee and the worker bee are genetically identical. Same DNA. Same starting point. The queen isn’t born royal – she’s made royal. As a larva, she’s fed a substance called royal jelly, a secretion produced by worker bees specifically to activate her full potential. Without it, she becomes one of tens of thousands of worker bees – useful, hardworking, and gone within six weeks after producing about a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime.

But feed that larva royal jelly, and she grows larger, lives up to five years, and becomes the architect of the entire colony. She doesn’t simply produce – she directs. Every bee in that hive exists because of her. 

Same larva. Radically different outcome. All because of what she was fed. 

I’ve been thinking about this lately, because I keep hearing a version of the same question from prospects:

“Is WordPress still the right solution? Shouldn’t we look at something more… modern?”

I understand the instinct. WordPress has been around since 2003, and to some people, longevity reads as stagnation. But WordPress in 2026 is not WordPress in 2003 – or even WordPress three years ago. The core improves constantly, driven by an open-source community that answers to no single owner. What people are usually picturing when they dismiss it is something else entirely: the downloaded theme from whatever web store is running a sale. The paint-by-numbers setup where you fill in the boxes and call it a website. A worker bee doing a worker bee job. Useful. Functional. A teaspoon of honey. 

But that’s not what I’m talking about when I talk about WordPress. And it’s not what any serious developer is talking about either.

WTF Moment: Your Website Is Not WordPress

Here’s the thing most people get wrong: your website is not its CMS. WordPress – or Squarespace, or Wix, or Shopify, or whatever platform you’re on – is just the larva. It’s the starting material. It can become many things.

What makes it a queen is what you feed it.

And royal jelly, in website terms, is your strategy.

It’s the information architecture that tells Google exactly what you do and where. 

It’s the directory structure that lets 200 location pages share authority instead of fighting each other for scraps. 

It’s the governance model that lets your brand control what corporate controls – and lets a franchisee’s office manager update their holiday hours without calling IT. 

It’s the lead flows that capture the right person at the right moment and put them in the right sequence. 

It’s the local landing pages that answer “near me” searches instead of just confirming your brand name to people who already know you. 

It’s how AI understands your brand – and what it says about you when a consumer is researching their options at 11 pm and never visits your website at all.

All of this (insert wide gesture here) is not a CMS feature. It’s a strategy brought to life by a CMS.

The truth is, you can arguably do that on any platform. But some platforms have a ceiling – and in franchising, you’ll hit it faster than you think.

Squarespace is elegant. For a boutique, a portfolio, a local restaurant – genuinely lovely. But it wasn’t built for a system of 50, 150, or 400 locations that need to share authority, enforce brand standards, and scale without a developer on call for every change.

Wix and Shopify have the same problem. Great-looking. Limited governance. When it’s time to add new locations, push brand updates across the system, or build an architecture that actually ranks – they choke.

I worked with a tech entrepreneur once (not in franchising) who refused to migrate his website to WordPress because he thought it was obsolete. He was investing in quality content. His traffic was almost entirely branded: people searching for the company by name, not finding him through anything else. We couldn’t convince him. He fired us and stayed on Squarespace.

Last I checked, that company was acquired, rebranded, and rebuilt – on Lovable, a one-page AI site builder. It has fewer than 100 visits a month (he lost those branded searches, too, duh). Almost no AI visibility. Which is… poetic, for a tech company in the AI space.

The platform didn’t kill his results. The lack of strategy did. But the platform made it easier to ignore the problem – because it looked fine. And whether the acquisition was a win or an exit is anyone’s guess – but the website they have now tells its own story. 

When You Feed It Royal Jelly

We recently rebuilt a website for a professional services franchise – proper WordPress setup, directory structure, localized landing pages for every location, basic but intentional.

The results came in during their high season, year over year.

Their top non-branded keyword – the “[service] near me” version of what they do – went from roughly 5,000 impressions to over 18,000. Nearly 3.6x. Their clicks tripled.

A secondary non-branded keyword went from under 2,000 impressions to nearly 7,500. Close to 4x.

Their branded search stayed strong. But for the first time, they weren’t dependent on it. People who had never heard of them were finding them – because the architecture finally gave Google something to work with. (See receipts below.)

Same brand. Same services. Different strategy. Different outcome.

Royal jelly.

On-the-Cuff Advice: What Royal Jelly Actually Looks Like

If you’re evaluating your website – or about to build one – here’s what strategy-as-royal-jelly means in practice:

✅ Directory structure over subdomains. brand.com/city, not city.brand.com. Every location protected by the queen, not fighting her.

✅ Localized landing pages. Not copy-pasted with the city name swapped. Actually localized – service area, local team, real reviews, and their local Chamber of Commerce logo.

✅ Governance built in from day one. What can corporate change globally? What can a franchisee edit locally? This has to be decided before you build, not after 300 locations are live.

✅ Lead capture that goes somewhere. A form that emails an inbox is not a lead flow. Know where every lead goes and what happens next.

✅ AI and structured data. Schema markup, Google Business Profile alignment, and content that answers the questions AI is pulling answers from. This is the 2026 version of “being on page one.”

✅ A CMS your team can actually use. If updating a service page requires a developer, you have a governance problem masquerading as a technical one.

None of this is about WordPress specifically. It’s about choosing and configuring whatever platform you use to function like a queen – not just look like one.

If you think WordPress is outdated, I will push back: you’re thinking of the worker bee. The open-source community that powers WordPress updates it constantly. Nobody owns it. You own your website, your theme, and your data. And I have yet to encounter a single franchise scenario – governance, integrations, brand standards, multi-location scalability – that it cannot handle.

But the platform is still just the larva.

Feed it the right strategy, and it will run your hive.

Warmly, 

Madalina “Royal Jelly Dealer” Iordache 

CEO at Bright Pink Agency