Reducing the cost of content management
Our work this year to deliver a new website for prospective students has reduced the number of pages we publish by over 50%. This is better for the student experience, better for the environment and better for our content management overhead.
2025 – a year of change
Back in March 2025, we launched the first phase of the new website with provision for prospective undergraduates applying for entry in 2026. This week, we’ve launched the entry 2026 provision for prospective postgraduates.
When the software development project ended in January, we switched gears and turned our attention much more towards website content. (Not that website content wasn’t a fundamental part of everything we do anyway).
Over the course of 2025 our two content design teams have been working on parallel tracks towards these deliveries:
- The Content Operations Team have been working with schools and colleges to help colleagues use the new degree profile templates, ensuring that the University’s 800+ entries were ready to publish
- The Continuous Improvement Team have been auditing, rationalising and rewriting the supporting content to ensure is complements and supports information in degree profiles
Reducing the page count
Because degree profiles are now so much more comprehensive, we’ve removed the need for much of the generic supporting information and been able to reduce number of the webpages considerably.
Undergraduate reduction: 54%. The number of pages published for prospective undergraduates reduced from 320 to 147 pages.
Postgraduate reduction: 60%. The number of pages published for prospective postgraduates reduced from 325 to 130 pages.
In amongst the work on the postgraduate site in recent months, we also managed to:
- Pull together content for unsuccessful applicants which was spread across three college sites and the Student Recruitment and Admissions departmental site. This is now published centrally by us, and reduced in size by 25%. (The page count didn’t drop quite so much because we eliminated a load of PDF document, turning them into much more accessible web pages).
- Review, deduplicate and retune the Mature Students website, cutting content by over 50%.
- Integrate the postgraduate online courses content into the broader prospective postgraduate provision, reducing by 75%.
So that’s a reduction of 57% of pages overall.
Benefits to reducing the amount of content we publish
This reduction in content is good for a number of reasons:
- Readability: Less content that students need to read to get things done.
- Navigability: Fewer options in website navigation panels makes next-click choice easier.
- Findability: Fewer choices in search engine results pages.
- Environmental impact: Reducing our carbon footprint. Every webpage comes with an environmental impact, however small.
- Cost: It’s cheaper for us to manage fewer web pages.
- I want to look at more closely at this last point, as it’s a hidden cost we bear right across the University. Or at least it would be if web pages were actively managed.
What does website management cost?
Let’s just look at the 375 pages we no longer publish on the Study site.
Every page needs to be reviewed, updated and republished every year. Given we operate on an annual recruitment cycle, a review on a yearly basis is reasonable I think.
To generate a savings calculation I assumed:
- 20% of pages need a quick review and republish taking 12 minutes
- 40% of pages need some editing before republishing taking 42 minutes per page
- 40% of pages need consultation and review by at least one other party as part of the editing process before republishing taking 90 minutes per page
I also used the mid-point of Grade 6 total cost of employment as the basis for the hourly rate. In reality, editors are employed on a range of grades, and some of our subject matter experts responsible for working with us on reviews are significantly more senior.
University pay scales and cost of employment data
So for the reduction by those 375 pages, I estimate we saved 11 weeks’ work which equates to nearly £10,000 every year.
Following a process to rationalise
If only it were as simple as removing pages though.
We need our webpages. They’re the number 1 resource for prospective students in their decision making process. They get visited by about 9 million people each year, and account for over 27% of all traffic to the University web estate.
So which ones do we keep and which ones can we lose?
To answer that question we needed to:
- Understand business and user needs
- Audit the content against needs and other objective criteria
- Analyse content demand through web analytics
- Prototype a revised structure and test it with students
- Co-design new content with subject matter experts, and take them on the decision-making journey with us so they understood why we didn’t need to retain everything.
As a team largely made up of user-centred content designers, this is what we do with every enhancement project we deliver. It’s fundamental to delivering a web presence that’s useful, usable and sustainable.
While it’s easier to say yes to everyone and everything in projects like these, that’s how we end up with bloated, challenging, out-of-date websites.
Looking ahead
The team has a long to-do list, with some big projects in the pipeline for 2026. The central web presence for prospective students is almost under control now though.
Tackling the International Students site and the Qualifications by Country content is high on our agenda. With currently almost 400 pages, this promises to be another opportunity to significantly reduce the size of our web estate and content management overhead.
Meanwhile, colleagues in schools also have the opportunity to rationalise their web estates now that it’s possible to provide much more comprehensive information on degree profile pages.
