Higher Ed Web Strategy Under Budget Pressure
Higher education continues to face financial pressure. Federal funding uncertainty and rising operating costs are forcing colleges and universities to make difficult decisions about how they allocate resources.
The enrollment cliff is adding further strain. As the number of traditional college-age students continues to decline, many institutions are competing for a smaller pool of prospective students. Reuters reports that over 700 degree-granting colleges and universities closed between 2013 and 2023.
At Square360, we regularly work with higher education institutions and understand how budget constraints shape the way they prioritize web and digital projects.
One example of this is our work with Carnegie Mellon University School of Art, which we explore as a case study.
Resuscitating a Legacy WordPress Site on a Shoestring Budget
Faced with an aging, plugin-heavy WordPress site and a limited budget, the School of Art needed a way to modernize its digital experience without funding a complete rebuild. Our goal was to extend the life of the existing platform while delivering a more modern and engaging website.
Challenge
The site had aged on every front: a dated visual design, a heavy load of legacy plugins that slowed performance and inflated maintenance, and a publishing experience the school's editors knew well and could not afford to lose. The budget ruled out a backend migration or custom development effort.
Strategy
Rather than recommending a full rebuild, we shifted our strategy toward what we called a "resuscitation" of the existing WordPress platform. The objective: extend the site's lifespan by another three to five years at a fraction of a rebuild's cost.
We focused on the front end, creating a new visual layer that brought fresh life to existing content. Dated gradients, heavy borders, and inconsistent layouts were replaced with a cleaner, gallery-inspired design that puts student work at the center of the experience.
To support those design improvements, we completed a full plugin audit, removing legacy plugins that slowed performance and increased maintenance. The streamlined site loads faster, performs better on mobile devices, and gives content editors a familiar publishing experience without requiring them to learn a new platform.
Outcome
By improving the front-end experience and reducing technical overhead, we delivered a contemporary website while saving the client tens of thousands of dollars compared to a full rebuild. The School of Art gained several more years from its existing investment, allowing future funding to be directed where it would have the greatest impact.
Projects like this are a reminder that modernization does not always require starting over. Every institution has different constraints, goals, and timelines. Sometimes the right decision is a new platform. Other times, extending the life of an existing system can provide the greatest return on investment.
One caution belongs in every budget conversation like this one. Whether you extend or replace, the platform decision is a five-year risk bet: it carries your security posture, your maintenance costs, and your legal exposure for the life of the investment, long after the feature comparisons are forgotten. Accessibility is the clearest example. Deferring a redesign does not defer your obligations. WCAG conformance is now written into procurement requirements and, for public institutions, into federal regulatory deadlines, and defending a single accessibility complaint routinely costs more than the remediation that was postponed with the redesign. That is why, when we scope extend-or-replace decisions, accessibility work sits in the base scope rather than on the cut list.
Square360 has spent 23 years helping organizations solve complex digital challenges, colleges and universities among them from the start. If you're evaluating your next web project, let's talk about which path forward fits your institution.