Bloated, sprawling and soon illegal: What to cut from your website (and how to win the fight)

Without you knowing it, your university's website has sprawled into tens of thousands of pages — the vast majority of which do nothing to help a student apply, enroll or stay. It's become a tangled blob of duplicated info, outdated content (that nobody owns) and a search experience that buries the one page that matters. In a few months, that mess becomes a legal liability: A new federal rule requires public universities to make their sites accessible by April 2027. There's not enough time for a lean team to find, let alone repair, a bloated site.

And there's no shortcut. You can't fix it with a site crawler and a delete key, because the real cause isn't laziness; it's your org chart. Universities are federated & mdash; i.e., every college, division and department hoards its own corner of the site, laddering to its own goals instead of the institution's, and nobody deletes across unit lines. This session shows you how to subtract, how to decide what dies and how to win the cross-campus political fight to make the cuts stick.

Your website doesn't need more content. It needs a reckoning.

Learning objectives

• Learn to separate content that moves students to apply, enroll or stay from the pages that only add clutter and risk.
• See how a decentralized, multi-unit campus steadily produces an unmanageable website, so you fix the structure, not just the symptoms.
• Leave with approaches for getting colleagues and campus leaders to sign off on removing content they'd rather protect.