The brief
ApproveMe is the company behind WP E-Signature, a private WordPress plugin for legally-binding electronic signatures. I came in via a local WordPress Slack community in 2019. The team was running twelve interconnected WordPress sites stitched together with reverse proxies — each one nominally independent, collectively a mess to keep coherent.
The owner was emphatic: no WordPress Multisite, even though the situation made the case for it. So the brief was sharper than usual — keep the autonomy, drop the chaos, and find an architecture that let twelve sites move like one network without the Multisite shortcut.
What I built
A managed VPS migration. The network originally ran on Pagely. Real DevOps work to lift it onto a VPS we configured ourselves — same uptime, about a thousand dollars a month off the bill.
A global theme that auto-deployed across every site. Each site got its own child theme for site-specific overrides — autonomy where it mattered, DRY everywhere else. Cross-site CTAs that fed back into the sales funnel lived in the global theme, so a copy change shipped to all twelve at once.
Atomic BEM, all the way down. Inside the global theme, an atomic-design CSS architecture: atoms, molecules, organisms, page templates. Molecules and organisms did triple duty — custom template parts, custom Gutenberg blocks, and ACF field groups. One definition, three editorial entry points.
Per-component asset compilation. The piece I was most proud of: the build pipeline emitted CSS and JS per component, with compression, lazy-loading, and tree-shaking pre-performed at deploy time. Components a site didn’t use never shipped to that site. The network stayed fast as the catalog of organisms grew.
A coordinated sale-state engine. A formalized network-wide sale state that, when toggled, propagated across the entire network — pricing changes, custom modals, header and footer treatments, dynamic merchandising. A small marketing team could coordinate a promotion across twelve sites without touching twelve themes.
A heavily-customized Easy Digital Downloads checkout. EDD was the e-commerce spine; Stripe under the hood. The entire checkout, pricing logic, CRM sync, and email-marketing handoff were custom.
What’s notable about it now
The architecture honored the constraint. Twelve sites moved like a network without sliding into Multisite, which is what the owner asked for and what the team got. The global + child theme split kept additions DRY for years; the per-component asset pipeline meant performance didn’t decay as the catalog grew; the sale-state engine gave a small marketing team coordinated control across the whole network. And the infrastructure savings held — the VPS migration paid for the engagement many times over.