How I built infrastructure for 500+ microsites and reduced site delivery to under a week

Problem

The usual way to launch a new website is to treat it as a new project. A designer prepares the layout, a developer builds it, content is added, and the site goes live. For one website this is a sensible process, because each site has its own needs.

The contradiction appears when a business needs not one site but hundreds of SEO properties. Building and maintaining them manually repeats the same development work for every property, produces inconsistent design, slows publishing, and adds to the infrastructure that someone has to look after. A site-by-site model would not scale. What happens to a team when the hundredth site takes as much effort as the first? And what happens to quality when every site is slightly different from the last?

Action

The better principle is to build the system that produces websites, and let each individual website become a configuration of that system. I designed a reusable publishing system that combines Figma-based design workflows, PayloadCMS, block-based page architecture, reusable components, collaborative content workflows and serverless deployment infrastructure.

For the rehab-industry workflow, the design-to-development process centred on wireframes, interactive prototypes, validation, collaboration and reusable PayloadCMS blocks. Teams reuse content and design patterns across properties instead of rebuilding them for each one, and the system supports more than 500 SEO microsites.

Result

More than 500 microsites are supported on serverless infrastructure. New website development was reduced to less than one week, reusable block architecture replaced repeated one-off development, and design, content, SEO and development teams could work from the same system.

The lesson

When the same kind of work is repeated many times, the repetition is a signal about where the real product is. Building the system once, with clear reusable parts, costs more at the start and removes the cost from every site that follows.