I’ve spent the better part of two decades building software for higher education web teams. In that time, I’ve watched the web evolve dramatically, from static brochureware to dynamic, personalized experiences, from desktop-first to mobile-first, from SEO to AI-driven search.

Technology has changed enormously. Many of the mistakes, on the other hand, haven’t.

Across hundreds of institutions, the same patterns come up with remarkable consistency: websites bloated with pages that nobody visits, navigation designed around org charts rather than user needs, content that hasn’t been touched in years, and redesigns that fix the visual surface while leaving the underlying problems intact. Everyone usually knows these are problems. And yet, the next site looks a lot like the last one, at least after a few months post-launch.

Why does this keep happening?

This is a structural issue rather than a technology issue, at least in most cases. And until higher ed addresses the structures that produce these outcomes, the outcomes likely won’t change.

Decisions by Committee

The higher ed website is one of the only digital products routinely governed by a committee of people who don’t share a common goal.

Admissions wants conversion, naturally. Marketing wants brand. IT wants stability and security. Academic Affairs wants representation for every program. Student affairs wants their events featured. The provost’s office wants visibility for strategic initiatives.

Clearly, none of these are unreasonable. However, when every stakeholder has equal standing, the result is almost always compromise, and in web design, compromise usually produces something that serves no one particularly well.

Navigation items accumulate. Homepages become crowded, and content that should be cut gets kept because someone fought for it.

Until institutions are willing to designate who actually owns the web experience (and give that person or that group real authority) committees will keep producing committee websites.

Decentralized Content Ownership

At most universities, the central web team controls the template and the CMS, but content is created and maintained, or not maintained, by dozens of departments operating largely autonomously. Don’t get me wrong, I am a huge proponent of distributed content management and contribution, because higher ed has so many incredible subject matter experts and so many diverse voices that it would be a shame to neglect to feature them.

But there is no shared standard for what good content looks like, no consistent review cycle, and no real accountability for pages that go stale.

A prospective student might click on a tuition page managed by the financial aid office, only to find a conflicting rate on a specific program page. (Note that this is not just bad for the user experience, but also bad for Answer Engine Optimization.)

A Collection of Silos

The result is a website that reflects institutional complexity rather than user need.

Every department has its own microsite aesthetic. Every college has its own version of what a program page should contain. The experience a collection of silos.

The fix isn’t centralizing everything. That creates different problems and rarely survives contact with institutional culture.

The fix is governance: clear standards, defined content ownership, regular audits, and consequences for non-compliance.

But governance is frequently misunderstood. Many institutions implement it as centralization, meaning funneling all decisions through a small central team, when what actually works is the opposite: embedding guardrails into the system itself so the right people can manage the right content without creating bottlenecks.

When governance means two people are responsible for reviewing everything, you’re creating a (growing) backlog.

Risk Aversion Masquerading as Process

Higher education institutions are, by nature, risk-averse. Shared governance, long planning cycles, and the need for broad consensus are features of academic culture.

But when that same culture is applied to digital products, it produces websites that are outdated before they even launch  and significantly behind within eighteen months.

The problem is when caution becomes a reason to avoid decisions altogether.

Navigation restructures get tabled because someone might be upset. Content strategies get watered down because it’s easier to keep existing pages than argue for removing them. Redesigns stretch for years because no one is empowered to make a final call.

The institutions with the best digital experiences tend to share a common trait: somewhere in the organization, someone has the authority and the will to make decisions, handle the complaints, and keep moving, usually with explicit or implicit support from senior leadership.

Redesigns That Treat Symptoms

The higher ed website redesign follows a familiar arc.

The current site is acknowledged to be outdated. A vendor is selected. A year (or more) of discovery, design, and development follows. The new site launches, and everyone claps.

Within two years, the same complaints resurface: too much content, unclear navigation, no one maintaining anything.

Redesigns are necessary and valuable, but they only address the surface. The structural issues, like committee governance, decentralized ownership, risk aversion, and lack of accountability, move right through the redesign process and reassert themselves on the other side.

The new site inherits the old problems because the organization behind it hasn’t changed.

The institutions that break the cycle treat redesigns as an opportunity to fix structure, not just design. They establish governance frameworks, clarify ownership, reduce page counts intentionally, and build the internal capacity to maintain what they’ve created.

That work is so much harder than picking a new color palette or a new font. But it’s also the only part that lasts.

What Would Help

None of this is news to the people doing the work. Higher ed web professionals are, hands-down, some of the most talented and frustrated people in digital.

They’re talented because they’ve had to become expert problem-solvers in constrained environments. They’re frustrated because they can see exactly what needs to change and rarely have the authority to change it.

What would help is executive leadership that treats the website as a strategic asset and governs it accordingly. It’s a willingness to make the structural changes that allow good work to happen  and persist.

It’s the recognition that the website problem is, at its core, a leadership and culture problem.

The technology to build a great higher ed website has existed for years and continues to evolve, now more than ever. The question is whether an institution is structured to maintain one. The institutions that are, and will continue to be, successful are the ones that have established clear ownership, measure success, regularly remove outdated content, empower people to make decisions, and view the website as a living product rather than a completed project.

What am I missing? What are some other mistakes that we’re making with higher ed websites?