What Consolidation Actually Means
When we talk about consolidating a university’s web presence, we’re talking about something bigger than choosing a CMS or writing a style guide. We’re talking about unifying the way your institution communicates outward—to prospective students, families, donors, partners, and the broader public—across every digital touchpoint that carries your name.
That includes the main .edu site, college and department sections, program pages, admissions and financial aid content, microsites, event pages, alumni portals, and the dozens of smaller properties that accumulate over time. It includes the platforms they run on, the people who manage them, the standards they follow, and the brand they collectively represent.
Governance is part of the picture. But the real opportunity is broader: it’s about making a deliberate decision to present your institution as one coherent organization online, rather than allowing every unit to build and maintain its own version of the story.
The fragmentation most institutions live with didn’t happen because people made bad decisions. The dean who built a microsite needed to recruit for a new program and couldn’t wait eight months for the official process. The department that published contradictory requirements was responding to a faculty request with a 48-hour deadline. The outdated PDF getting cited in Google AI overviews? Someone created it to solve a real problem three years ago. These are rational responses to systems that weren’t designed for the volume and complexity of modern content needs. Consolidation is the opportunity to build a system that actually works.
The dean who built a microsite needed to recruit for a new program and couldn’t wait eight months for the official process. These are rational responses to systems that weren’t designed for the volume and complexity of modern content needs.
You Already Have a Brand Strategy. Now Apply It to Your Web Ecosystem.
Somewhere in your institution there is probably a brand platform. It has positioning language, brand pillars, voice and tone guidelines, and a visual identity system. It may have been developed during a campaign, a presidential transition, or a previous enrollment initiative. It represents real institutional thinking about who you are, what you stand for, and how you want to be perceived.
The problem is often “brand drift’.” Every college, department, and office that builds its own web presence is, in effect, creating its own version of the institutional story causing the power of your brand story to drift slightly off course.
Consolidation is the mechanism that closes that gap. It takes the brand strategy your institution has already invested in and makes it operational across your digital presence. Shared templates carry the visual identity. Content standards enforce the voice and tone. A common information architecture ensures that the way students navigate your site reflects your institutional priorities, not the org chart.
One of the most common objections to web consolidation is that it will require a massive new branding effort. It doesn’t have to. What it requires is a decision to take the brand work you’ve already done seriously enough to apply it everywhere and the operational infrastructure to make that possible.
Consolidation gives you the platform to demonstrate your brand is an experience that prospective students encounter at every touchpoint. It means your college’s story gets told within a framework that makes the whole institution look strong, which lifts every program.
What Your Institution Gains from a Unified Web Presence
The case for consolidation isn’t primarily about what you’re avoiding—it’s about what you’re building. Institutions that bring their outward-facing communication into a shared framework unlock advantages that compound over time.
A stronger, more trustworthy brand
When every major entry point—homepage, admissions, financial aid, program pages, visit and apply flows—delivers a consistent visual experience and a coherent institutional story, prospective students and families experience your institution as reliable and well-run. Consistent web experiences are one of the strongest signals of institutional quality in a prospective student’s digital journey.
Consolidation doesn’t mean erasing the identity of individual colleges or programs. It means making sure that when a student moves from the School of Nursing to the Financial Aid page to the Visit Campus form, the experience feels like one institution, not three different organizations that happen to share a logo.
A smoother student journey with far less friction
Consolidation directly improves the experience prospective students have when they interact with your institution online.
A student’s path from first search to enrollment isn’t linear, and it doesn’t happen in one visit. They search for a program, land on a department page, explore financial aid, compare your institution to others, come back weeks later to schedule a visit, and eventually apply. You’re creating a multi-visit experience where users need to pick up where they left off, and that requires clear actions, understandable terminology, and navigation that stays consistent across your entire site.
In a fragmented web environment, that journey breaks. The navigation style changes between the sites. The visual design shifts. The terminology is different, one area calls it “Financial Aid,” another calls it “Student Financial Services.” A prospective student who was building confidence and momentum can get confused or frustrated and the institution never knows it happened.
This matters especially for the students many institutions are working hardest to reach. About one in five first-generation college students don’t find college websites helpful—not because the information isn’t there, but because they don’t know what to look for or how the process works. Fragmentation makes that worse. A consolidated site with consistent language, intuitive navigation, and a clear path from interest to action lowers barriers for everyone, but especially for students who don’t have a college-educated family member guiding them through the process.
The friction doesn’t stop at enrollment, either. Between 10 and 40 percent of accepted students fail to complete the enrollment process over the summer—a phenomenon known as summer melt. A major driver is disengagement: students hit confusing handoffs between admissions, financial aid, registration, and orientation systems that feel like different organizations. A consolidated web presence with coordinated messaging, consistent design, and clear next steps at every stage keeps that momentum going instead of letting it dissipate.
Consolidation also creates the foundation for the kind of academic pathways that today’s career-focused students are looking for. When your programs, career outcomes, course sequences, and support services all live within one coherent site structure, you can build guided journeys that connect a student’s career goal to a specific program to a clear enrollment path.
Even incremental improvements to the highest-traffic student journeys—admissions, financial aid, program exploration, visit and apply—can produce measurable results while you work toward a more comprehensive consolidation. The key is ensuring those improvements happen within a shared framework so they compound rather than create yet another layer of disconnected fixes.
About one in five first-generation college students don’t find college websites helpful. They don’t know how the process works. Website fragmentation makes that worse.
Better performance in AI search
This is where consolidation becomes especially timely. Nearly 70% of modern learners now use AI tools for educational research. These systems don’t navigate your site the way a human would—they use what Google calls a “fan-out” method, simultaneously scanning your admissions page, department sites, faculty pages, archived content, and forgotten PDFs to synthesize a single answer.
A unified web presence gives AI systems exactly what they reward: one authoritative page per program, consistent schema markup, clean URL hierarchies, and strong signals of expertise and trustworthiness. When AI encounters consistent information across your .edu, it reinforces your authority. When it encounters contradictions, it has to guess which version is right—and the student has no way to know.
AI systems look for specific, factual, well-structured information they can confidently extract and cite. A consolidated site gives them that. The authority signals that AI platforms evaluate—expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness—are strengthened when your institution speaks with one voice and undermined every time conflicting information appears across your domain.
When AI encounters consistent information across your .edu, it reinforces your authority. When it encounters contradictions, it has to guess which version is right.
A realistic path to Title II compliance
The DOJ’s updated ADA Title II rule requires public colleges and universities to make their web content, mobile apps, and digital course materials conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA, with compliance deadlines starting in April 2026. The scope covers your main site, microsites, online course content, portals, forms, transactions, and most active PDFs, including services delivered through third-party vendors.
When your web presence is consolidated around shared templates, a common design system, and unified QA workflows, accessibility remediation becomes a manageable, systematic program rather than an endless game of whack-a-mole. You fix an accessibility issue once in the design system, and that fix rolls out everywhere. In a fragmented environment, you’re fixing the same issue fifty different ways across fifty different sites—if you even know those sites exist.
A Self-Assessment
Take stock of your environments. Ask yourselves “What are we paying for right now that we wouldn’t need to pay for if we consolidated?”
Here’s a practical exercise you can do with your team
Count your platforms
How many CMS instances does your institution maintain? Include the main site, college and department sites, microsites, and any third-party platforms used to publish institutional content. Each instance carries its own licensing or hosting cost, its own upgrade and security patching cycle, its own technical support needs, and its own pool of people who need to know how to use it. Proprietary CMS licenses in higher education have annual costs associated with them. Even open-source platforms carry real costs in hosting, maintenance, and development. Every CMS you eliminate through consolidation removes an entire layer of recurring expenses.
Count your vendor and agency relationships
How many outside vendors or agencies does your institution engage for web-related work: design, development, hosting, content, SEO, accessibility? How many of those relationships are managed outside central marketing, in individual college or department budgets? Each vendor relationship carries its own overhead. Consolidating to a smaller set of strategic partners doesn’t just reduce direct costs, it concentrates institutional knowledge and eliminates the coordination tax of managing parallel relationships that often duplicate each other’s work.
Count the hidden staff hours
This is often the largest cost category, and the least visible. How many people across your institution spend meaningful time on web-related tasks—writing content, troubleshooting CMS issues, coordinating with vendors, managing hosting, whose primary job description is something else entirely? Research on university web team structures consistently shows that the total staff time devoted to web tasks across a fragmented institution almost always exceeds what a well-staffed central or hybrid team would require—it’s just spread thin enough across enough people that nobody adds it up.
Count the compliance and risk exposure
Every independently managed site is a separate surface that needs security monitoring, accessibility compliance, and content accuracy. With Title II deadlines approaching, ask: how many of your current sites can you confidently say meet WCAG 2.1 AA? How many have you even audited? For each site that sits outside your governance, the cost of bringing it into compliance is separate. Consolidation collapses that work into a shared effort with shared templates, shared tools, and shared accountability.
Add it up and frame the conversation
When you tally the CMS licenses, the vendor contracts, the staff hours, and the compliance exposure, you’re building a picture of what fragmentation actually costs your institution every year. That number is almost always larger than people expect—because the costs have been invisible, distributed across budgets and job descriptions where nobody was tracking them.
For leadership, this is the business case. You’re showing that the institution is already spending this money—it’s just spending it inefficiently, with weaker brand outcomes and higher risk. Consolidation redirects those same resources toward a more coherent, more effective, and more sustainable web presence. Research from Watermark Insights and FormAssembly confirms what most higher ed leaders already intuit: consolidation reduces infrastructure and licensing duplication in ways that compound into meaningful savings within three to five years.
What’s Next in This Series
This article makes the case for why consolidation matters. The next two parts cover how to do it.
Part 2: How to Choose a Web Consolidation Approach, and Get Your Campus Behind It
We compare three governance models (centralized, hybrid, and unmanaged) with honest trade-offs, then dive into the change management strategies that determine whether your chosen model actually takes hold. Stakeholder discovery, executive sponsorship, building a communication plan, and getting campus-wide buy-in.
Part 3: From Plan to Practice, Launching and Sustaining a Unified Web Presence
The practical execution playbook: mapping your ecosystem, defining ownership, pre-launch socialization, training requirements, ongoing governance councils, and the long game of shifting the web team’s campus reputation from order-takers to strategic partners.
Frequently Asked Questions
Consolidating a university’s web presence means unifying platforms, content standards, design systems, and brand communication across colleges, departments, and offices so the institution presents a coherent experience to prospective students, families, donors, and the public. It goes beyond technical governance to encompass how the entire institution communicates outward through digital channels.
It depends, but the majority of institutions already have a brand platform, positioning language, and visual identity guidelines. Consolidation is the mechanism that makes that existing brand strategy operational across the full web ecosystem. The effort is in applying and enforcing the strategy, not in creating a new one.
Start by counting your CMS instances, vendor and agency relationships managed across departments, staff hours spent on web tasks by non-web employees, and the number of sites that haven’t been audited for accessibility. This self-assessment typically surfaces costs that are larger than expected because they’ve been distributed across budgets where no one was tracking them as a total.
Fragmented web environments create friction at every handoff in the student journey, inconsistent navigation, shifting visual design, conflicting terminology, and confusing paths between program exploration, financial aid, and application. This disproportionately affects first-generation and underrepresented students who lack a guide to interpret institutional structure and nomenclature.
AI search systems scan your entire web ecosystem simultaneously to synthesize answers. A consolidated site with one authoritative page per program, consistent schema markup, and unified URL structures sends stronger authority signals than a fragmented site where competing pages offer conflicting information.
The DOJ’s updated Title II rule requires public colleges and universities to make web content, mobile apps, and digital services conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA. This covers public-facing pages, portals, course content, forms, and services delivered through third-party vendors. Compliance deadlines begin in April 2026 for larger institutions.
