Graham Lewis of Hannon Hill recently highlighted a critical truth about higher education websites: “A full redesign every 3–5 years won’t fix stale or inconsistent content. Teams that win are the ones that can update quickly, safely, and at scale.”
He is exactly right. A shiny new homepage won’t fix a broken foundation. Tackling your content debt and establishing a strong governance practice is how you actually win.
In our 30+ years of scoping web projects (20+ for higher education), we see a recurring pattern: when budgets get tight, the first service line cut is content. We don’t just mean rewriting a few top-level pages; we mean the heavy lifting of content hygiene. This includes deep-dive audits, retiring outdated content, improving in-page UX, fixing accessibility issues, and optimizing for search and GEO.
Why does this happen? Because explaining the value of infrastructure to leadership is difficult. A new homepage might easily secure a $50k+ budget, but asking for $100k+ to clean up the foundation is a tough sell when leadership can’t immediately see the impact. They don’t realize that addressing content debt is what actually increases page speeds, search visibility, and AI accuracy.
As another industry peer, Prakash Ja of Konabos, recently noted, a large percentage of any redesign budget is traditionally spent just getting your new site back to the baseline, leaving very little room for meaningful improvements. This is especially true for higher education websites burdened by massive page bloat.
How do you get leadership to back this critical work? We’ve seen two approaches succeed:
1. Fix the foundation quietly. If you are part of a capable web team trusted by leadership, just do it. It will take time, but your team will own the process. You can cultivate champion content authors across campus to improve your governance over time and prevent recurring bloat.
2. Build consensus before pixels. Use your marketing experience to show leadership why this infrastructure must be addressed.
You need to sell the value of the foundation. Lean on your vendor partners to provide the data, patterns that succeed, and industry expertise to help you make your case.
How to Build Consensus with Leadership
To get leadership buy-in, you need to show them the cost of saying “no.” Give them a clear path forward, and align the effort with institutional goals.
Let’s look at a simple example. If a teenager wants a $400 VR headset, asking “Can I have $400?” rarely works. But pitching it as an educational investment — “This headset will let me immerse myself in world history and language practice to prepare for my SATs” — completely changes the conversation. You have to sell the outcome, not the tool.
Here is how to apply that framework to your content debt.
1. Understand the Real Cost of Doing Nothing
Before you can build your business case, you must understand the consequences of your current state. Here are a few realities of content hoarding we regularly see in higher education:
- Wasted capacity: Your team and contributors across campus are burning valuable capacity maintaining irrelevant pages. Without clear governance, they waste hours deciphering outdated, cumbersome documentation instead of doing meaningful work.
- Lost enrollment and trust: Prospective students are dealing with decision fatigue. If they struggle to navigate your content bloat, they will abandon the site before applying. Even worse, if your website contradicts the emails they receive from admissions, you lose their trust before they even enroll.
- AI and search visibility risks: AI search tools synthesize answers using your live content. If your foundation is full of outdated or contradictory information, AI engines will generate the wrong answers or default to third-party sources.
- Technical decay: Content bloat tanks your site search accuracy, SEO rankings, and accessibility scores.
- Redesign roadblocks: Hoarding content makes future structural updates nearly impossible and more expensive. You cannot effectively apply new user interface patterns or redesign a site when you have to manually QA tens of thousands of pages.
2. Build Your Business Case
Once you understand the risks, translate the cost of saying “no” into a positive vision. Tie the cleanup directly to institutional goals like enrollment, donor trust, or operational efficiency. As industry peer Jamie Hunt, of Solve Higher Ed, recently outlined in her framework for protecting annual budgets, tying your requests to strategic outcomes is how you win. Here’s a template to get you started:
The Pitch: We currently manage 10,000 web pages. By conducting a deep-dive content audit and reducing this volume by 40%, we will recover the capacity needed to strengthen our digital foundation. This effort allows us to:
- Focus on prospective student engagement and clear enrollment pathways
- Improve content pacing, accessibility, and SEO strategy
- Ensure our website is accurate and builds trust by aligning with our other outbound communications.
- As part of this project, we will establish clear governance. We will train campus-wide contributors to help audit, improve, and maintain our digital infrastructure to prevent future hoarding.
The Outcomes: The return on this investment will be:
- Higher accessibility scores to mitigate compliance risks.
- Improved page speeds, SEO, and GEO for AI generative search.
- Stronger trust with our target audiences.
- Fewer abandoned tasks and reduced decision fatigue for prospective students.
- Recovered capacity for our internal team and campus contributors.
The Request: The investment for this project is [Budget] and will take [Timeline]. We [will / will not] need to bring in an outside partner to build this foundation because [Reason].
A shinier silo is still a silo. Securing leadership buy-in to clean up your content debt is how you stop treating symptoms and finally fix your digital foundation.
Still need help convincing leadership or understanding how you might approach your mountain of content debt? Reach out, we’re happy to discuss and share our ideas.
About Sarah Ailes
Sarah is a connector, strategist, and longtime champion of building things that work for people. As Executive Vice President (EVP), she leads business development and account strategy—ensuring that client relationships are rooted in trust, collaboration, and clear communication.
Posted on June 1, 2026 by Sarah Ailes in Commentary
Graham Lewis of Hannon Hill recently highlighted a critical truth about higher education websites: “A full redesign every 3–5 years won’t fix stale or inconsistent content. Teams that win are the ones that can update quickly, safely, and at scale.”
He is exactly right. A shiny new homepage won’t fix a broken foundation. Tackling your content debt and establishing a strong governance practice is how you actually win.
In our 30+ years of scoping web projects (20+ for higher education), we see a recurring pattern: when budgets get tight, the first service line cut is content. We don’t just mean rewriting a few top-level pages; we mean the heavy lifting of content hygiene. This includes deep-dive audits, retiring outdated content, improving in-page UX, fixing accessibility issues, and optimizing for search and GEO.
Why does this happen? Because explaining the value of infrastructure to leadership is difficult. A new homepage might easily secure a $50k+ budget, but asking for $100k+ to clean up the foundation is a tough sell when leadership can’t immediately see the impact. They don’t realize that addressing content debt is what actually increases page speeds, search visibility, and AI accuracy.
As another industry peer, Prakash Ja of Konabos, recently noted, a large percentage of any redesign budget is traditionally spent just getting your new site back to the baseline, leaving very little room for meaningful improvements. This is especially true for higher education websites burdened by massive page bloat.
How do you get leadership to back this critical work? We’ve seen two approaches succeed:
1. Fix the foundation quietly. If you are part of a capable web team trusted by leadership, just do it. It will take time, but your team will own the process. You can cultivate champion content authors across campus to improve your governance over time and prevent recurring bloat.
2. Build consensus before pixels. Use your marketing experience to show leadership why this infrastructure must be addressed.
You need to sell the value of the foundation. Lean on your vendor partners to provide the data, patterns that succeed, and industry expertise to help you make your case.
How to Build Consensus with Leadership
To get leadership buy-in, you need to show them the cost of saying “no.” Give them a clear path forward, and align the effort with institutional goals.
Let’s look at a simple example. If a teenager wants a $400 VR headset, asking “Can I have $400?” rarely works. But pitching it as an educational investment — “This headset will let me immerse myself in world history and language practice to prepare for my SATs” — completely changes the conversation. You have to sell the outcome, not the tool.
Here is how to apply that framework to your content debt.
1. Understand the Real Cost of Doing Nothing
Before you can build your business case, you must understand the consequences of your current state. Here are a few realities of content hoarding we regularly see in higher education:
2. Build Your Business Case
Once you understand the risks, translate the cost of saying “no” into a positive vision. Tie the cleanup directly to institutional goals like enrollment, donor trust, or operational efficiency. As industry peer Jamie Hunt, of Solve Higher Ed, recently outlined in her framework for protecting annual budgets, tying your requests to strategic outcomes is how you win. Here’s a template to get you started:
The Pitch: We currently manage 10,000 web pages. By conducting a deep-dive content audit and reducing this volume by 40%, we will recover the capacity needed to strengthen our digital foundation. This effort allows us to:
The Outcomes: The return on this investment will be:
The Request: The investment for this project is [Budget] and will take [Timeline]. We [will / will not] need to bring in an outside partner to build this foundation because [Reason].
A shinier silo is still a silo. Securing leadership buy-in to clean up your content debt is how you stop treating symptoms and finally fix your digital foundation.
Still need help convincing leadership or understanding how you might approach your mountain of content debt? Reach out, we’re happy to discuss and share our ideas.
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About Sarah Ailes
Sarah is a connector, strategist, and longtime champion of building things that work for people. As Executive Vice President (EVP), she leads business development and account strategy—ensuring that client relationships are rooted in trust, collaboration, and clear communication.