How Hakim Group scaled site production 400% with Webflow MCP

Safeguarding the brand independence of 550+ practices across 450+ local brands

Hakim Group is the UK and Ireland's largest family of independent opticians. Founded in 2005 by Dr. Imran Hakim, the Group has over 500 individual partner practices who each retain their brand identity and clinical independence while accessing Hakim Group's centralized support.

Managing, migrating and maintaining a growing estate of more than 550 independent optician sites from a single platform was a complex multi-site governance challenge. Webflow Enterprise gave Hakim Group a platform proven at multi-site scale. Webflow agency Demandflow, which employs an MCP-driven migration process and specializes in developing sites for scale, worked closely with Hakim Group.

Deploying Webflow MCP pushed migration rates from six to eight websites a month up to 30. Hakim Group's relatively small team has been able to build websites and move faster than ever before.

When 500 individually branded websites become impossible to manage

We've inherited about 500 different individual small websites managed across so many different systems it was just absolute chaos. Everything from wild old Joomla sites that somebody had built in a basement to terrible WordPress sites. It was really hard to change anything.

— David Souliotti-Barker, Head of Growth, Hakim Group

When David Souliotti-Barker joined as Head of Growth, he inherited legacy Joomla builds, fragile WordPress sites, a partially completed migration to Wix, and a custom .NET/Umbraco platform that couldn't flex to fit the practices using it.

The operational cost was real. One year, with around 400 live sites, the team had to log into every single one manually to update Christmas opening hours, only to discover that whoever had built each site had linked opening hours to something else entirely. Every fix created a new problem. Custom integrations were a huge amount of management work for us, he emphasizes.

At first, David wanted to standardize everything: one template, locked in place and rolled out across the board. He quickly abandoned that approach. Hakim Group's practices do not operate like franchise units. Their patients are deeply loyal, third-generation regulars. Erasing 500 unique brand identities by forcing them into one uniform template would destroy the core value of these businesses. Each of our individual brands really need to resonate with the local community, so making sure that they have a distinct presence is very important, he explains.

Instead, he faced a more complex challenge: delivering uniqueness at scale. The goal was to keep every website distinct while ensuring the entire estate could be managed by a compact central team. As David explains, What we needed was an infrastructure which was scalable, buildable and centrally-controlled to optimize execution. We needed individuality at scale to offer uniqueness again and again.

Why Hakim Group chose Webflow Enterprise over building their own solution

It needed to be a solution that gave us something we could build in quite quickly and simply, but also had the ability to scale. It had a simplicity to the builder and also a depth of capability and the ability to write clean code, which meant we could do more in terms of scaling.

— David Souliotti-Barker, Head of Growth, Hakim Group

David Souliotti-Barker of Hakim Group and Stephen Wise, CEO of Demandflow had considered a number of digital experience platforms, but ultimately opted for Webflow Enterprise as Workspace-as-a-Service (WaaS), implemented without a requirement to hire twenty developers but allowing them to upskill those they had already.

As Webflow's MCP evolved it became more relevant to Demandflow's migration process. Wix is a really hard system to migrate from because it isn't stable code; the MCP meant we could push things through, explains David. Webflow's MCP allowed us to provide individuality at scale, to offer uniqueness over and over again, and support real individuality for each of our portfolio businesses. This was driven by our teams, who were empowered by the use of the MCP to drive value through the websites.

Webflow has a modest tech team without a great deal of coding resource so using Webflow's MCP allowed Hakim Group to deliver complex websites. Operating in the closed ecosystem of the MCP allowed Hakim Group to experiment, safe in the knowledge that they could revert to an earlier version of the site.

The agentic workflow in practice

Webflow MCP was used for agentic site migrations, which involved moving legacy WordPress, Wix, and Umbraco sites into the Webflow workspace programmatically, at a speed and scale that would not be achievable through manual Webflow builds. Demandflow imports AI-generated site designs directly into Webflow via MCP. That speeds up the build cycle for new practice sites and campaign pages, creating an end-to-end agentic workflow from design generation to live site.

The team model shifted too. Instead of everything routing through a central bottleneck, individual contributors own their own builds. It allows me to give individual people the access they need to actually be successful so they can empower themselves and drive value through the websites, rather than everything having to come through a choke point, says David.

500 distinct practices. One interconnected workspace

We can continue to support real individuality for each of our portfolio businesses on a brand by brand basis, but have it in a safe, stable and somewhat interconnected environment.

— David Souliotti-Barker, Head of Growth, Hakim Group

Demandflow and Hakim Group are working toward a workspace-level component and design system where updates to shared elements cascade across all practice sites simultaneously. The target architecture involves a centralized CMS layer integrated with Supabase or Airtable, enabling data-driven content at scale. David works closely with the Webflow MCP product team to stay ahead of new capabilities, building infrastructure that won't need to be rebuilt when the next feature ships.

As confidence builds David would like to see this become a regular cadence. We've seen a massive uplift in our productivity, and I think we will see it again now with the MCP. I can envisage a time when this will just be an always on seamless process. When tiny edits need to be made, the MCP is straight back on it and we're giving it enough context so that it's not changing any variables or altering any styles. It's an iterative flow which we want to see as a wave rather than a sprint. That is really our goal for the rest of this year, making the process smooth so our team can focus on being creative and engaged in what they're building at the end of the process, rather than focusing on the system that's building it.

What's next: owning symptom-based search for independent opticians

We really want to be part of the AEO conversation, making sure that we're feeding in really relevant content and funnelling people across to find their own local independent optician.

— David Souliotti-Barker, Head of Growth, Hakim Group

Hakim Group is in the middle of launching a national patient acquisition platform, built on Webflow, which will lean heavily on AEO integrations. The play is symptom-based and intent-driven search, routing patients to their nearest independent optician across both traditional search and LLM interfaces.

The 1,000-site goal is three to four years out. The build rate is already moving. Before Webflow we were managing a wildly fragmented estate. Now bringing it all into a single environment, it allows us to execute much quicker.