From 2,000 Sites to One Vision: How Cambridge Tamed Its Digital Estate

Picture this: A brilliant high-school senior googles "physics at Cambridge" and lands on a promising course page. But when they try to find application details, they're bounced between different sites with varying designs, navigation systems, and content quality. By the time they've clicked through multiple departmental websites, college pages, and administrative portals, their enthusiasm has turned to frustration.

This scenario was all too common at the University of Cambridge until recently. With over 2,000 websites sprawled across their digital estate, even the world's brightest prospective students were getting lost in a maze of disconnected online experiences. It was digital chaos.

But Cambridge's story isn't unique. It's a microcosm of the digital governance challenges facing higher education institutions worldwide. The question isn't whether universities need to modernize their digital presence. The real challenge is how they can do it without stifling the academic freedom and departmental autonomy that makes them great.

The Organic Growth Problem

"We were there at the start," explains Barney Brown , Head of Digital Communications at Cambridge. The university's first website, captured in 1997, was refreshingly simple: basic information about the university, contact details for the computer service department, and a phone number that "probably still works, but don't call it right now."

Like many institutions, Cambridge's web presence grew organically from these humble beginnings. Each department, research group, and college developed its own approach to digital communication. Innovation thrived. When content management systems became available, spinning up a new website took minutes. And everyone did it.

"The person that wrote that probably went out and bought the components and built the web server that it was hosted on," Brown recalls. This DIY ethos reflected the university's culture of innovation and independence. But it created a fundamental challenge. How do you maintain institutional coherence when you have 2,000+ websites, each operating as its own digital island?

The User Journey Nightmare

The fragmentation wasn't just an internal headache. It was actively harming the user experience. When Cambridge's team tried to map a simple user journey for prospective physics students, "our walls were just filled with this long user journey map," Brown describes. "There were so many different touchpoints that a potential student may have to go through in order to get the information they needed."

This scattered approach creates what digital strategists call "cognitive load." Users have to constantly reorient themselves as they navigate between different sites, designs, and information architectures. For universities competing for the world's brightest minds, this friction can be the difference between an application and an abandoned search.

The problem isn't unique to Cambridge. Josh Koenig , Co-founder of Pantheon, the platform that now powers many of Cambridge's sites, draws a parallel from his own life. Managing his daughter's swim team activities requires navigating four separate websites with different platforms, logins, and organizational systems. "As an end user, I'm just like these are radically different... it's very hard to know what lives where."

The Governance Dilemma Between Freedom and Consistency

Universities face a unique challenge that most organizations don't: balancing institutional consistency with academic freedom. As Brown puts it, "When you talk to people like that and say okay, well where the web is concerned we want you to all do everything in exactly the same way, it's very counter to that way of thinking."

This tension is at the heart of digital governance in higher education. Academic departments need the flexibility to communicate their unique research, programs, and perspectives. But visitors to university websites don't think in terms of organizational charts. They just want answers to their questions, regardless of which department technically owns that information.

The solution lies in what Will Huggins from Zoocha (Cambridge's digital agency partner) calls "providing some governance to help the different teams... do it in a way that is consistent... but doing it in a way that reduces friction for those teams so that they're not constantly coming up against barriers that prevent them from doing their job."

The Hidden Workforce Challenge

One of Cambridge's most pressing challenges was also one of the most overlooked: who actually maintains all these websites? The answer revealed a troubling pattern repeated across higher education.

"In many cases, we have departments that... wouldn't have somebody called a web editor, but they might have somebody who's an administrator who's already working across a lot of other different areas of the department, but then they also have to edit the website as an addition to their additional responsibilities," Brown explains.

This shadow workforce of accidental web editors poses real risks. Administrators, researchers, and support staff juggling website maintenance alongside their primary duties. Without proper training in accessibility standards, user experience principles, or content strategy, even well-intentioned updates can create barriers for users or compliance issues for the institution.

Cambridge's Solution Using Drupal Distribution

Cambridge's approach to taming their digital estate centers on what's called a "Drupal distribution." Essentially a standardized toolkit that provides consistency while preserving flexibility. Built on the open-source Drupal platform and hosted on Pantheon's infrastructure, this solution gives departments the freedom to manage their own content while ensuring institutional standards are maintained.

The distribution includes Cambridge's brand guidelines, accessibility standards, security protocols, and integration with campus systems. All baked into the platform rather than enforced through policy documents that may or may not be followed.

"You don't just use Drupal," explains Josh from Pantheon. "It's your Drupal distribution with your brand included, some native things that integrate with the systems on campus, but then delivered not as a single instance that everyone has to share on monolith, but a distribution that the campus can adopt."

This approach addresses the core governance challenge. Instead of choosing between freedom and consistency, universities can have both.

Building Community Around Content

Technology alone doesn't solve governance challenges. People do. Cambridge has developed what they call a "Content Community of Practice" that provides training, resources, and peer support for staff across the university who create digital content.

This community approach serves multiple purposes. It upskills the distributed workforce that actually maintains university websites. Creates consistency in content quality and accessibility standards. And builds buy-in for institutional digital strategies by involving the people who implement them daily.

The engagement has been remarkable. "Whenever I put a call out to say... we're about to look at what's going to happen for the next five years, would he be interested in helping that discussion move it forward, we get hundreds of people wanting to come along to workshops," Brown reports.

The Migration Challenge: 500 Sites and Counting

Cambridge is currently in the middle of a major technical migration, moving nearly 500 websites from the aging Drupal 7 platform to modern Drupal 10 and 11 versions. This isn't just a technical upgrade. It's an opportunity to consolidate, standardize, and improve the user experience across their digital estate.

The migration process embodies Cambridge's new governance philosophy. Rather than automatically recreating every existing site, the team now asks departments: "What are you trying to achieve? Are you aware that we have 2,000 websites over here? Is there a place that your information could better slot into?"

This question represents a fundamental shift. From the "Department of Yes" approach that created the current sprawl to a more strategic "Department of What Are You Trying to Do" philosophy.

The Financial Reality

Higher education institutions operate under increasing financial pressure, making smart technology investments more critical than ever. The open-source approach offers significant advantages in this environment.

The key is thinking strategically about digital investment. "Think about what's the landscaping bill for the university and how much do we spend on our physical estate," Josh suggests. "I'm not saying you should spend as much on the digital estate, but compare the two because they're increasingly equivalent in importance."

Digital Estate as Institutional Responsibility

Perhaps the most important shift in Cambridge's approach is treating their digital presence as seriously as their physical campus. Brown draws a powerful analogy: "If there was an accessibility ramp into one of our buildings and it was left to deteriorate and it was no longer able to be used... there would be legal ramifications... I want those heads of institutions to have that same responsibility for digital accessibility."

This mindset shift is crucial for sustainable digital governance. Viewing websites not as optional marketing tools but as essential institutional infrastructure. Just as universities have facilities management, grounds keeping, and building maintenance, they need systematic approaches to digital estate management.

The Path Forward

Cambridge's journey offers valuable lessons for higher education digital leaders:

Start with the user journey, not the org chart. Map how people actually navigate your digital estate to find information. Then design systems that support those pathways rather than reflecting internal departmental boundaries.

Provide frameworks, not restrictions. Give departments the tools and training they need to maintain quality standards while preserving their ability to communicate uniquely about their work.

Invest in your distributed workforce. The people who actually publish content on your websites are often not professional web editors. Support them with training, community, and tools that make success easier than failure.

Think holistically about costs. Compare digital infrastructure investment to other institutional spending. A modern, well-governed digital presence may cost less than you think and deliver more value than traditional investments.

Embrace open source strategically. Platforms like Drupal offer the flexibility universities need while providing the community support and vendor independence that align with academic values.

Cambridge's transformation from 2,000 disconnected sites to a coherent digital experience isn't complete. It's an ongoing process that requires sustained attention and investment. But their approach offers a roadmap for other institutions grappling with similar challenges.

The goal isn't to eliminate all variety in how departments communicate online. It's to ensure that variety serves users rather than confusing them. In higher education, as in few other sectors, the balance between institutional consistency and intellectual freedom isn't just a nice-to-have. It's essential to the mission itself.

As universities continue to compete globally for students, faculty, and funding, their digital presence becomes increasingly critical. The institutions that master digital governance providing both consistency and flexibility will have a significant advantage in that competition.

Cambridge's approach proves that even ancient institutions can learn new tricks. That the same innovative spirit that drives academic discovery can be applied to digital transformation. The key is recognizing that in 2025, your digital estate isn't separate from your institutional mission. It's central to achieving it.