There’s a question that exposes more about the health of a university than almost any accreditation review, board presentation, or strategic plan:
How many websites does your institution
operate right now?
Not approximately. Exactly.
Some institutions genuinely don’t know the number. Plenty of others do, and that can be worse, because knowing the count and feeling unable to govern it is its own kind of stuck. Either way, the number is rarely the hard part. The hard part is everything attached to it: who owns each site, what it actually costs, and where it may put you at risk.
We’ve been in the room when this question gets asked. The CIO pauses. IT pulls a spreadsheet that’s clearly being updated in real time. Someone mentions “the old conference site” and three people look at each other. A number gets offered, 80, maybe 120, and then someone from a college dean’s office says, “Wait, are we counting the research center sites?”
The actual number, when someone finally runs a real audit, is almost always double what anyone expected. One university we worked with came back with 214 sites across 14 hosting vendors. Nobody was shocked that it was high. They were shocked that nobody had ever counted.
The problem at a glance
01
$2M–$4M
A year in web infrastructure spend, invisible because no one adds it up.
02
2x
The real number of sites versus what leadership expects.
03
8 seconds
All a prospective student needs to judge your institution.
Why universities end up with so many websites
Universities accumulate websites one reasonable decision at a time, which is exactly why the problem is so hard to unwind. Every new WordPress install is a story. A department that couldn’t get what it needed from central IT fast enough. A dean who hired a local agency that later disappeared. A researcher who needed a web presence for a grant deliverable and did the most reasonable thing available, stood something up on a $12-a-month hosting plan.
None of these decisions were wrong at the time, and that’s what makes the problem so persistent. Everyone was solving real problems with the tools and timelines they had, and what you end up with is an architecture nobody designed, nobody approved, and nobody can fully describe.
It looks like a technology problem. It’s really a governance problem: who owns what, and who decides.
Why web governance is hard
Fixing sprawl requires something harder than a migration: getting three groups to agree on who owns what. And those three groups have fundamentally different incentives. All three are right, which is exactly what makes it hard.
IT
Wants stability, security, and fewer things to manage.
Marketing
Wants brand control, speed to market, and a consistent experience.
Departments
Want autonomy: to launch what they need, when they need it, without waiting eighteen months.
IT + Marketing + Departments → one shared platform.
The universities that have actually solved this didn’t pick a winner among those three perspectives. They built a model that serves all three at once, then sequenced it: you don’t consolidate 200 sites at once, you consolidate the five that matter most and make them so obviously better that other departments ask to join rather than being dragged in.
The real cost
The $4 Million Ghost
A mid-size university with 150+ web properties typically spends $2M–$4M a year on web infrastructure once you add it all up: hosting, vendor contracts, agency retainers, staff time, redundant licensing, and the emergency remediation that happens two or three times a year.
A CFO would never see a single entry that says “websites: $3.2 million.” They’d see fourteen small charges that each seem reasonable in isolation. This is the ghost in the budget: real money, significant money, invisible because no one has ever aggregated it.
What a 17-year-old sees
The most expensive consequence of web sprawl never shows up in a budget. It shows up in enrollment. Picture a high school junior researching universities, and the path they actually take:
An outdated microsite
They Google a program and land on a page that is out of date.
“request info” returns a 404
The one link that matters is broken.
Brand Confusion
The main site has different navigation, visual language, and tone. Nothing matches.
This student doesn’t think “they have a web governance problem.” They think “this place feels disorganized,” an impression formed in eight seconds that competes against every dollar the enrollment team spent on brand advertising that month. For a growing share of prospective students, the web presence isn’t a reflection of the institution, it is the institution, at least until they have a reason to look deeper.
A fragmented web presence is, functionally, a fragmented brand, and brand coherence is no longer optional.
Find your real number
A free diagnostic of every site you run. No login, results in minutes.
What university website consolidation looks like
Consolidation works best as a move onto one platform built for how universities operate, a higher ed CMS many departments can publish to without losing their independence. This isn’t theory for us. When Academic Partnerships needed to launch and manage personalized university sites without overwhelming a central team, we built a single open-source platform to run all of it.
92%
Reduction in
production time
50+
Sites on one platform
22%
Increase in university partnerships
7-figure
Projected savings
Free diagnostic
Find your real number
A free diagnostic that surfaces every website you run, its current health, and where it’s exposed. No login, results in minutes.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many websites does a university typically have?
More than almost anyone expects. A mid-size university usually runs well over 150 web properties once you count department, college, research center, and campaign sites, and a real audit often returns close to double the number leadership estimates.
Why do universities end up with so many websites?
Because individual decisions that were each reasonable add up. A department needed something central IT couldn’t deliver fast enough, a dean hired an outside agency, a researcher stood up a site for a grant. None were wrong at the time, and together they create an architecture no one designed or governs.
What is a higher ed CMS, and how is it different from a regular CMS?
A higher ed CMS is a content platform built for the way universities actually operate: many sites, many independent publishers, and strict security and accessibility requirements, governed centrally without stripping departments of their autonomy. The goal is one platform that serves IT, marketing, and departments at once.
How do universities consolidate multiple websites without a disruptive migration?
By sequencing, not by moving everything at once. You consolidate the handful of sites that matter most onto one platform, make them measurably better, and let other departments opt in because they want to, rather than forcing a single cutover.
Does an open-source higher ed CMS save money?
Often, yes. Consolidating onto one open-source platform removes redundant licensing, hosting, and agency costs, and it removes the lock-in of proprietary systems. One institution we worked with projected savings in the seven figures after unifying more than 50 sites.
What is a university website audit?
A diagnostic of every web property an institution runs: how many sites exist, who owns them, their current health and security exposure, and where the infrastructure is working against enrollment. It’s the honest inventory that should come before any RFP or redesign.
What the audit answers
How many sites you actually have, and who owns each one.
The real total cost across every department.
Where the security gaps and orphaned installs are.
Which properties are helping enrollment, and which are hurting it.
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See where your sprawl is costing you
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Victoria Fleischer
