Higher education institutions face unique pressures in the digital landscape. They must deliver accessible, secure, and scalable experiences while balancing the diverse needs of students, alumni, faculty, and donors. Yet many still rely on legacy systems that struggle to meet modern expectations for compliance, governance, and agility.
To overcome these constraints, institutions like Cornell, Harvard Business School, and Purdue approached digital modernization by transforming outdated infrastructure into resilient, flexible platforms. From their achievements, we can identify lessons that any institution can apply to build a stronger digital foundation.
For a deeper framework on how to put these lessons into practice, download our companion resource: The Modern Higher Ed Web: A Blueprint for Digital Success.
Why Higher Ed Institutions Are Moving Away from Legacy Systems
Digital expectations in higher education have evolved faster than many campus systems can adapt. What once felt dependable now limits accessibility, collaboration, performance, and new features. As digital experiences become inseparable from an institution’s reputation, standing still has a cost, prompting universities to reexamine how their platforms support long-term growth and inclusion.
We’ve found that these issues align around four key areas:
- Accessibility & Inclusion: Outdated systems make consistent, accessible experiences difficult across dozens of departmental sites, creating unnecessary legal and ethical risk.
- Scalability & Performance: As digital properties grow, older infrastructure struggles to keep up, leading to slow load times, performance bottlenecks, and technical debt increases.
- Security & Reliability: Legacy platforms create gaps in your defenses, increasing the potential for security breaches, vulnerability risk, and operational failures.
- Collaboration & Flexibility: Rigid CMS structures slow down content updates, delay new feature rollouts, and create friction and inefficiency between marketing, communications, and IT teams.
These shared challenges explain why institutions like Cornell, Harvard Business School, and Purdue are leading the shift toward modern, secure, and scalable WordPress solutions which are designed to address these fundamental issues.
Lesson 1: Accessibility and Inclusion Are Foundational
Universities support incredibly diverse audiences, including students, faculty, donors, and researchers, all of whom expect and deserve an equitable digital experience. Achieving this requires more than just meeting regulations, however, as accessibility serves as a foundation for the mission of higher education. This pillar ensures every visitor can engage without barriers.
Cornell University faced the challenge of numerous disparate sites, which created inconsistent experiences and compliance risk. To solve this, they unified major properties—including Alumni, Giving, and Engineering—onto a multisite network. (For a deeper look at the complete platform transformation, see the full Cornell case study.) This transformation was built on several key outcomes:
- They implemented a flexible design system that allowed departments to maintain their unique identity while enforcing consistent accessibility standards across the entire network.
- They brought previously print-only publications online, ensuring a more inclusive experience for all audiences.
- The sites were developed to be compliant with WCAG v2.2, ensuring the highest standards of accessibility were met while future-proofing the platform against evolving legal requirements.
Lesson: Accessibility is the cornerstone of a modern, inclusive higher ed presence, not merely a compliance requirement.
Lesson 2: Scalability Enables Agility and Growth
Higher ed websites must balance content complexity with performance demands while supporting the rapid expansion of academic and research properties. Scalability ensures that a platform can support a university’s mission without becoming a rigid barrier to growth and performance, enabling true agility.
Harvard Business School needed to scale and support the rapid, flexible growth of the D^3 Institute’s dynamic network of research lab microsites. This was a task their legacy infrastructure was not equipped to manage. We first established platform capability with a proof of concept on the high-performance Student Dashboards. (For a deeper look at the full platform modernization, see the full HBS case study.) Next, we integrated a flexible design system that seamlessly scaled across the entire D^3 network. The modernization delivered several notable outcomes:
- The scalable architecture supports rapid network expansion, from dynamic Student Dashboards to the unified D^3 Institute’s lab microsites.
- A flexible design system with curated block styles empowers content creators to rapidly launch new pages, events, announcements, and research lab sites.
- Performance tuning supports complex, data-rich integrations, unlocking new possibilities for engagement and innovation across all digital experiences.
Lesson: Scalability enables innovation and long-term growth by extending beyond traffic management.
Lesson 3: Security and Stability Strengthen Trust
Trust is fundamental to every university’s digital reputation. Modern platforms safeguard sensitive data, reduce maintenance risk, and ensure operational continuity when disruptions occur. Security, therefore, is the essential foundation that builds confidence with both external audiences and internal teams.
Cornell, with its vast digital platform, recognized that inconsistent management across their network of sites created significant security and reliability risks. Their modernization effort focused on centralizing platform management and governance into a unified, resilient framework. (For a deeper look at the strategic platform transformation, see the full Cornell case study.) This strategic move delivered several critical outcomes:
- They established centralized governance to streamline updates and systematically reduce vulnerability risk across the extensive network.
- The new platform implemented automated backups and security monitoring, ensuring continuous operational stability aligned with updated disaster recovery protocols.
- They centralized and updated user roles and permissions, giving control where needed while at the same time protecting data across the entire network.
Lesson: A robust, secure platform reduces organizational risk and builds the foundational trust necessary for institutional resilience.
Lesson 4: Flexibility Empowers Collaboration
Modern digital ecosystems thrive when marketing, communications, and IT teams can collaborate seamlessly. Flexibility and intuitive workflows are the key to reducing bottlenecks and empowering distributed departments to keep content current and aligned with institutional priorities.
Purdue University faced the common challenge of inefficient and restrictive editorial workflows, which slowed content updates and created operational friction across their many distributed teams. Their modernization effort focused on creating a unified web platform that streamlined governance while providing teams the autonomy and confidence to manage content. This transformation fostered alignment and productivity. (For a deeper look at the comprehensive platform strategy, see the full Purdue case study.) The system delivered several significant outcomes:
- The platform transitioned from static layouts to a more dynamic presentation of university stories, easily integrating articles, videos, events, and podcasts.
- Seamless editorial workflows were developed to enable rapid collaboration and streamline publishing of diverse content aligned with institutional strategy.
- Customizable blocks were integrated into flexible landing page layouts, enhancing user experience while maintaining strict brand consistency.
Lesson: Flexible, collaborative platforms are the critical tool for aligning diverse teams with a unified institutional mission.
Common Threads Across Successful Migrations
Across every successful higher ed migration we’ve seen, four principles consistently rise to the surface:
- Accessibility: Ensures that every audience—students, alumni, faculty, and donors—can engage without barriers, reinforcing equity and trust.
- Scalability: Allows institutions to evolve gracefully, accommodating new programs, technologies, and initiatives without rebuilding from scratch.
- Security: Protects both reputation and reliability, giving teams the confidence to innovate.
- Collaboration: Bridges the gaps between marketing, IT, and academic departments, aligning people and purpose across campus.
Together, these principles form the foundation of the modern higher ed web. They represent a cultural shift toward unified, flexible platforms that are secure, accessible, and sustainable by design. Institutions that embrace all four pillars are strengthening their digital infrastructure to support their mission for years to come.
The Path Forward: Building the Modern Higher Ed Web
The achievements of these institutions show that digital transformation is a cultural shift of continuous improvement. They show what’s possible when accessibility, security, scalability, and collaboration work in harmony, leading to long-term resilience.
Ready to start your own modernization journey? The next step is clarity: defining goals, assessing legacy systems, and creating a detailed roadmap for change.
To confidently transition from legacy systems and apply these four principles, we’ve prepared an essential resource. Download our in-depth guide, The Modern Higher Ed Web: A Blueprint for Digital Success, which helps to outline your transformation steps and move your institution from planning to expert execution.
