Tag: Rebuild

  • Your .Edu Website Isn’t Converting — Should You Rebuild or Refine?

    Your .Edu Website Isn’t Converting — Should You Rebuild or Refine?

    Your website is one of your institution’s most valuable assets, and also one of its more expensive and labor-intensive. It serves as the front door for prospective students, a resource hub for current ones, and a critical platform for driving enrollment.

    But when performance drops — conversions are low, traffic is declining, or user experience feels outdated — many institutions assume a full redesign is the only solution.

    Before you make that call, take a step back. A complete rebuild isn’t always the smartest or most cost-effective path. Sometimes, targeted improvements to your existing site can deliver significant results without the high price tag.

    So how do you decide if it’s time to rebuild or if your current site simply needs smarter strategy and support?

    Let’s walk through what to look for.

    Spot the red flags early

    When a site isn’t performing, you need to pinpoint why. These common red flags often indicate underlying issues that should prompt a deeper evaluation:

    • Low conversion rates on key actions like inquiries or application starts.
    • Declining keyword rankings that limit visibility and discovery of your programs.
    • Shallow engagement signals (short sessions, low scroll depth, minimal interaction) suggesting content isn’t meeting visitor needs.
    • Slow load times that frustrate prospective students and drag down SEO performance.
    • Critical details hidden or unclear (tuition, admissions, deadlines) due to weak information architecture, vague content, or content bloat.
    • Sprawling pages with little to no traffic, indicating wasted effort, an inflated site footprint, and diluted authority.

    To be clear, none of these should be considered death sentences for your website. But they’re strong signals that further evaluation should take place.

    Start with a strategic assessment

    A clear-eyed look at your site’s current state can help determine whether optimization or a rebuild makes more sense. Start here:

    • Is your foundation strong? Review your CMS, CRM, analytics, integrations, and subdomains. Make sure data is flowing between systems and nothing is falling through the cracks.
    • How is your performance? Look at conversion metrics and user flows. Are visitors finding what they need? Are all programs and forms being tracked—or are subdomains masking key performance data?
    • Is your content working for users and AI? Evaluate content from both a human and machine perspective. Does it speak directly to prospective students? Is it structured and search-optimized to surface in AI-powered tools?
    • Are you ready for AI and personalization? Assess your schema markup and structured data. These elements are foundational for enabling personalized user experiences and AI-fueled engagement strategies.
    • How strong is your governance? Review how your site is managed on a day-to-day basis. Do you have the right people, tools, and workflows to keep content accurate, accessible, and up to date.

    Price your options strategically

    If your site’s foundation is sound, targeted improvements may deliver high ROI at a lower cost. But if technical debt, poor UX, or fragmented infrastructure are holding you back, a rebuild could be the better investment.

    Keep these ballpark figures in mind:

    • A good rule of thumb today is to allocate 6–12% of your total marketing budget to website management and optimization each year.
    • For institutions with a $1 million marketing spend, that’s $60,000–$120,000 annually.
    • A comprehensive redesign can range from $100,000 to $500,000, depending on complexity, number of pages, and integrations.

    Also consider the hidden costs of delay — missed inquiries, lower conversions, and outdated experiences that don’t meet student expectations.

    A side-by-side cost-benefit analysis, grounded in performance data and institutional goals, is the best way to determine your path forward.

    Partner with experts who know higher ed

    Deciding between a website refresh or a rebuild is a big decision, and it shouldn’t be made in isolation. A strategic partner with deep higher ed expertise can help you evaluate your current digital ecosystem, identify gaps, and recommend the most cost-effective solution.

    At Collegis, we work with colleges and universities to optimize digital experiences that convert. Whether you’re refining an existing platform or building from the ground up, our web strategy team can help you create a future-ready site aligned with student needs and institutional goals.

    Let’s talk about how to get your website working smarter.

    Innovation Starts Here

    Higher ed is evolving — don’t get left behind. Explore how Collegis can help your institution thrive.

    Jessica Summers is Director of Website Strategy at Collegis Education, where she leads initiatives to elevate digital experience, search visibility, and website performance for higher education institutions. She combines strategic and creative insight with emerging AI-driven approaches to build and optimize websites that perform as true marketing and user experience engines. Her work helps prospective students find what they need and take action. With extensive experience guiding web strategy for universities and agencies, Jessica aligns content, design, and technology while strengthening the structured content, technical optimization, and data governance behind the scenes that make websites effective and sustainable.

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  • How Do We Rebuild Public Trust in Higher Education? Together

    How Do We Rebuild Public Trust in Higher Education? Together

    A recent Lumina–Gallup poll offers a rare piece of good news: public confidence in higher education has ticked up from a recent low of 36% to 43%. While the rebound is modest, it breaks a years-long narrative of decline, and it’s worth asking: What is driving renewed trust?

    Drs. Julie Posselt and Adrianna Kezar Respondents pointed to three factors: quality of education, opportunities for graduates, and innovation. In other words, the public is telling us that when we deliver tangible value—educational excellence, new opportunities, and forward-looking ideas—trust grows.

    At the USC Rossier School of Education, this belief is guiding our next chapter. This month, we are merging the Pullias Center for Higher Education and the Center for Enrollment Research, Policy and Practice. Working collectively under the Pullias banner thanks to the generous bequest of the Earl and Pauline Pullias family, we are coming together to propel learning across decades of experience in research-practice partnerships. 

    The teams in our centers work with community colleges, school districts, nonprofits, businesses, government agencies, state higher education systems, and national associations. Though we love theory work as much as the next professors, we know theory’s greatest power is realized when tested and applied in the real world, in partnership with the communities we serve.

    Take the USC College Advising Corps. Through partnerships with public high schools across Los Angeles County, we place nearly 40 trained college advisers per year, most of them recent college graduates from across Southern California, into underresourced high schools. The result has been to support 10,000 high school seniors annually, with more than 88,000 first-generation, low-income, and underrepresented students helped since the program began more than a decade ago. This is the kind of scale, innovation, and equity-driven practice that the public recognizes and values.

    Our work to date and going forward will be defined as much by our approach. We partner with communities, connecting research directly to policy and practice to innovate on the systems that shape student access and success, from high school through graduate education and into the workforce. This work often means capacity building, institutional improvement, and student-centered design—not in theory alone, but in practice, in partnership, and at scale.

    Look around and you’ll find many more examples of people and organizations who inspire not just through individual excellence but also by deepening wells of mutual support and mutual investment. There are longstanding national examples such as Campus Compact, which brought together college presidents across the country to sign a declaration and create an organization focused on civic engagement; they have sponsored collaborative responses to crises and offer faculty development. That kind of solidarity is not typical, but to our minds it is increasingly valuable.

    Benjamin Franklin warned at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” His words are as relevant to higher education today as it was to the Continental Congress. Our sector’s future depends on resisting the pull toward isolation and polarization, and instead modeling connection, mutual support, and shared purpose. 

    In a year certain to bring challenges, higher education must lead not from the top of the ivory tower, but from within networks of trust we build with the communities around us—of professionals and publics. For us, merging our centers is just one example of the belief that we are stronger together—intellectually, financially, and in service of the public good. We welcome connecting with you through your stories and examples of the same. 

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    Drs. Julie Posselt and Adrianna Kezar are Co-Directors of the Pullias Center for Higher Education at University of Southern California.

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