The Case for Multisite Management in Higher Education

Many colleges and universities are posed with the challenge of managing hundreds, if not thousands, of disparate websites. Departments, research centers, and administrative units all need their own sites, often having specific preferences on functionality and design. However, managing them independently leads to inconsistent branding, accessibility gaps, and wasted resources. 

During a time of economic uncertainty, funding constraints, and dwindling admissions, having the ability to manage a sprawling digital ecosystem with ease, without the need to invest in additional headcount and resources, becomes critical. A multisite or centralized web platform allows institutions to reign in control of their websites and accomplish more with less resource spend.  

At a recent, higher ed focused session hosted by Jakala, current and former higher ed digital leaders shared how they’ve navigated the shift toward centralized, multisite web platforms. Their conversation sheds light on the opportunities, challenges, and best practices for institutions considering this model.  

Read on for highlights and clips from the presentation, which included speakers like Jill Moraca (Princeton WDS), Mandee Englert (JAKALA, formerly Penn State), and Chaney Moore (JAKALA, formerly Stanford and UC Berkeley). 

Building each individual website from scratch is tedious, inefficient, and leads to problems with governance and design cohesion over time across sites. A multisite approach helps improve this process. Multisite management can be defined as building a single, shared foundation of code and design that can be reused across websites or subdomains on a single web platform. 

This leads to several key benefits: 

• Content management efficiency: Instead of coding each site from scratch, teams spin up new sites from a proven foundation. 
• Design Consistency: Brand, design, and accessibility standards are built into the system from the start. 
• Scalability: From a handful of subdomains to over a thousand sites, institutions can scale web presence without multiplying maintenance work. 
• Resource and cost savings: Each site can quickly be added, maintained, or updated without piecemealing the effort; reducing necessary headcount and costs to do so.  
• Better experience for content editors and site users: Content editors enjoy an easier editing experience while staying true to the university brand, and site visitors have a consistent experience wherever they venture on the site.  

A multisite approach can be likened to a car factory: every website rolls off the same production line, but each can be customized with features and options. This balance allows departments to maintain their individuality while benefiting from shared resources. 

The problem with buying your websites from an in-house university vendor.  

Many institutions are now veering away from a common model in university settings where different departments can go to get a website from a unit within the institution at a discounted price. This is referred to as a chargeback model.  

While cost-effective at first, these chargeback units often have difficulty keeping up with modern web development consistency and changing leadership within university structures. When each department or unit of the university is in charge of its site, or when leadership changes, this can result in a lot of custom requests for the chargeback unit. Without a holistic approach or strategy, these custom requests across sites result in severely disjointed web and brand experiences.  

By contrast, centralized platform ownership treats the university’s web presence as a continuously evolving product, rather than managing disparate websites. This approach enables: 

• A strategic roadmap instead of piecemeal requests for features or website changes 
• A user-centric approach with consistent user experiences across sites 
• Shared governance that balances flexibility with guardrails to help users stay consistent with branding 
  

A centralized approach balances control and consistency with flexibility to create more efficiency for internal teams to manage site content, while improving the experience for students or other site users. 

• Resource efficiency: At Princeton WDS, a team of 14 manages over 1,000 websites, thanks to a single multisite codebase. The ability to accomplish more with less resources is especially important with budget cuts. 
• Accessibility compliance: A central foundation with built-in accessibility guidelines makes updates and testing consistent across the institution. 
• Brand cohesion: Departments maintain individuality while reinforcing the university’s identity. 
• Faster launches: What once took six months to build can now be spun up in days—or even minutes. 
• Resource efficiency: An improvement to the web platform can benefit the entire campus network. Training is rolled out much more easily.  

From the user perspective, the ABCs—Accessibility, Branding, and Consistency—are what make this model powerful. For internal teams, easy updates, increased efficiency, and better ROI provide the greatest benefits. 

The greatest challenges with a centralized approach are often related to people management and getting decision-maker and stakeholder buy-in across the institution. 

Multisite tends to be a great option for higher ed institutions with many sites that share common structures, need brand consistency, or face budget and resource constraints. However, a centralized platform for the full university isn’t always the right solution. 

A multisite approach might be less suited for an institution so decentralized that every unit has their own web and marketing team. These can also be highly specialized units with deep technical integration (i.e. health systems) that the central platform can’t yet support. In cases like this, each unit might have its own centralized team within the unit itself. 

Still, even within decentralized environments, hybrid approaches, where design systems or content models are shared, can deliver significant benefits.