Star Pubs & Bars by Heineken

230+ pubs spread across England, Scotland and Wales, backed by one of the world’s biggest brands, each one still unmistakably its own

Star Pubs is Heineken UK’s pub-owning business and part of one of the largest pub companies in the country.

Across all pubs, the warmth and character weren’t coming through online. Built one at a time, their websites had fallen behind long before anyone could keep pace with an estate of this size.

People searching for their local pub often couldn’t find its site at all, and there was no way for individual pubs to add their own content or stand out from the rest of the huge estate. Star needed a way to give every pub a strong, discoverable website, and room to speak for itself, without starting from scratch each time.

We built three templates on headless WordPress and Next.js, then rolled them out across more than 230 sites at speed, doing in weeks what commissioning site after site would have taken years to achieve.

Three templates didn’t mean three looks. Each carries its own colour scheme, so a Star pub on one side of the country can feel completely different to one on the other, while the system underneath stays exactly the same. A global CMS lets the central marketing team manage the whole estate from one place, while individual pubs get their own login to write and publish blog content, finally giving each pub somewhere to show off its own local character.

That same attention to detail runs all the way down to the smallest feature. A pub’s sports page automatically lists only the broadcasters that pub actually shows- Sky, TNT or Amazon- no manual updates, no guesswork, just the right information for that pub, every time. It’s a small thing, but it’s exactly the kind of detail that turns a one-off visit into a regular one: someone who checked online, found what they needed, and knows they can trust it next time too.