One School, One Website: The Case for Consolidating Your Department Sites

This problem is rarely intentional. It’s the natural result of decentralized growth. A business school, a public policy center, and the provost’s office all have distinct communication needs and, often, separate budgets. In the absence of a central digital strategy or a flexible-enough platform, the path of least resistance is to build something new. One real-world university we’ve seen was running its undergraduate and graduate business programs on two entirely separate domains. Another was managing its main site, president’s office, and provost’s office on three different platforms. This digital sprawl is a sign of success—your institution is growing—but it comes with significant hidden costs.

When each entity manages its own web presence, the university brand guidelines are ignored, logos are altered, and the user experience from one department to the next is jarringly inconsistent. Prospective students, who don’t know or care about your internal org chart, are forced to navigate a maze of competing designs and confusing menus. They aren’t discovering a world-class institution; they’re getting lost in a digital hall of mirrors.

Bringing disparate sites together is more than a cleanup project; it’s a strategic imperative. The primary benefit is creating a unified user journey. A prospective student interested in both an undergraduate arts program and a graduate policy degree should have a seamless experience on a single, authoritative website. They should be able to explore programs, compare offerings, and understand the institution’s value proposition without ever feeling like they’ve left for a different company.

Consolidation also solves critical technical problems. Managing multiple sites means multiple content management systems (CMS), each with its own security vulnerabilities, update cycles, and training requirements. One institution we encountered was running Storyblok, WordPress, and Umbraco simultaneously. This isn’t just inefficient; it’s fragile. When a key staff member leaves, they often take the unwritten “vendor memory” of how to keep a critical integration running with them—a form of technical debt that accumulates silently until it becomes a crisis. A single, modern CMS—like WordPress, the platform of choice for institutions like the University of Texas at Austin and BAMPFA at UC Berkeley—reduces this technical debt, streamlines content governance, and empowers non-technical staff to manage their own content within a consistent framework.

Finally, a consolidated site is better for search. When multiple department sites compete for the same keywords (“best engineering programs,” “business school admissions”), they cannibalize each other’s SEO authority. Google’s own site consolidation guidance confirms that a single, well-structured domain with clean URLs and a clear information architecture sends a much stronger signal to both Google and AI-powered answer engines.

Consolidation is as much a political challenge as a technical one. Departments feel ownership over their sites and fear losing control. A successful project requires a clear process and strong leadership from a central team like University Marketing and Communications.

The first step is a comprehensive content audit. You must analyze every page on every site and decide what to keep, what to retire, and what to rewrite. This process is not about lifting and shifting old content; it’s about curating the best, most relevant information and mapping it to a new, user-centric site architecture. The navigation should be based on what prospective students are looking for, not how your university is organized.

Choosing the right technology is the next critical step. While a “headless” architecture can sound appealingly modern, it often creates a dependency on developers for even minor content changes. For most universities, a traditional, enterprise-grade CMS like WordPress or Drupal is the more sustainable choice. It empowers marketing and communications staff to own their content, provides a vast ecosystem of support, and ensures the platform can evolve with the institution’s needs.

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