How Long Does a Higher Education Website Redesign Really Take? (And What Actually Impacts Your Timeline)

Corporate clients usually have one decision-maker, maybe one or two executives who need final sign-off, and a project team empowered to keep things moving. Universities have project teams, department heads, faculty committees, senior leadership, and often boards of directors. Multiple people have legitimate authority over different parts of the site, and content accuracy requires subject matter experts.

A corporate site might have 10-30 pages. University sites often have 100-250+ pages: dozens of academic program pages, faculty and staff bios, news and events, multiple content types that need to be migrated or created from scratch.

All websites need to meet accessibility standards legally, but many universities have additional requirements. Some need to report to regulatory boards, others have internal accessibility departments that monitor compliance, and some face stricter state-level regulations. This level of scrutiny affects design decisions, development timelines, and QA processes.

Unlike corporate clients who have relatively consistent availability, universities have peak seasons when project teams simply won’t have bandwidth: enrollment periods, semester starts and ends, commencement, etc. Those blackout periods aren’t negotiable and affect when you can schedule presentations, get feedback, and launch.

1. Decision-making structure and approval layers – Multiple stakeholders (departments, faculty, leadership, board) add months if not mapped upfront. The pre-launch surprise: approvals that surface during final testing can add weeks to your timeline.
2. Academic calendar constraints – Peak seasons create unavoidable blackout periods. Launching during a busy season is a recipe for chaos.
3. Content complexity and volume – 100-250+ pages of program descriptions, faculty bios, and institutional content requiring departmental coordination and approval across multiple stakeholders.
4. Technical requirements and IT coordination – CRM integrations, accessibility compliance, security protocols, and IT approval processes must be planned from day one, not discovered at launch.
5. Surprise approval layers – Requirements that surface during Client Acceptance Testing (departments need to review again, faculty sign-off needed, board approval required) are what extend timelines most unexpectedly and add extra burden to the project teams working towards the launch date.

The fastest higher ed project we’ve completed was 20 weeks, and it only worked because the client had exceptional capacity, could turn around feedback in two days, met with us 1-2 times per week, and delivered all content within six weeks. That’s extremely rare.

More commonly, projects extend to 18 months when there are multiple approval layers, under-resourced teams, stakeholders only available quarterly, and content scattered across dozens of departments.

Projects that finish on time have clear decision-making, realistic capacity assessments, and all approval processes identified upfront.

When you’re planning a university website redesign, start with the assumption that it’s a year-long partnership. That’s not pessimism: it’s setting realistic expectations that lead to better outcomes.

When approval needs aren’t clear from the start, they tend to surface when it’s too late in the project to make big changes. The project team is editing content, getting pages finalized, and suddenly realize: “Wait, X department needs to review this again. And faculty need to sign off. And this needs to go to the board.”

Each approval layer adds time, and if everything has to go to a Board of Directors for the final okay, then you might need to factor in a 2–3-month timeline for the sign-off you need to keep the project flowing.

What helps:

The projects that stay on timeline have clarity upfront:

• One person empowered to make day-to-day decisions (usually marketing head)
• Clear process for when leadership needs to be consulted
• RACI or DARCI chart established at kickoff that defines who decides, who approves, who provides input
• All approval layers identified before we start design

A note on leadership involvement:

The sweet spot we’ve found is a leadership sponsor who stays informed through brief updates and weighs in at key milestones, while the project lead handles day-to-day decisions. This keeps momentum without creating bottlenecks.

If you’re planning a website redesign and reporting to senior leadership, it’s worth having an early conversation about:

• How they want to stay informed
• When they need to be in the room vs. when they trust you to decide
• What their feedback turnaround time realistically looks like
• Whether there’s a plan B if they can’t make a scheduled review

This isn’t about managing your boss. It’s about setting the project up so everyone can participate in a way that works with their schedule.

Your project team’s capacity fluctuates dramatically based on the academic calendar. What looks like slow progress might just be that everyone’s in the middle of enrollment season, final exams, or commencement planning.

Unlike corporate clients who have relatively consistent availability throughout the year, university marketing teams have peak seasons where they simply can’t dedicate time to the website project. And those aren’t just busy periods where things slow down a bit—they’re times when your team is working at 150% capacity on time-sensitive priorities.

This affects everything: when you can schedule presentations, how quickly you can turn around feedback, and when stakeholders are available for reviews or initial discovery workshops. We’ve learned to map these constraints during the statement of work planning phase, because what feels like a standard timeline to us can be completely unrealistic when layered over an academic year.

The biggest calendar consideration: How to time project kick-off and website launch

The two areas where we’ve seen the biggest impact from academic calendar realities are project kick-off and the launch of the new website.

Timing your kick-off:

We once kicked off a project in late summer, before the school year started. Sounds efficient, right? Get a head start on discovery?

Except we needed to do focus groups with staff and students for our research. And nobody was on campus yet. So we had to wait until late September to access the people we needed to talk to, which meant our discovery phase stretched almost a full 2 months longer than planned.

Now we think carefully about timing discovery work relative to the academic calendar. If your project requires stakeholder interviews, user research, or departmental input during the discovery phase, kicking off right before summer break or during a major blackout period can add weeks to your timeline while you wait for people to be available.

Timing your launch:

On the flipside, the worst time to launch a university website is right around the start or finish of a school year or semester. Or during a major marketing push. Basically any time where your project team would be completely slammed with their primary job responsibilities.

We had a project originally slated for a September launch. The team was excited about launching at the start of the school year. But as we got closer, we realized they’d be drowning in back-to-school chaos. Then we discovered internal approval layers we hadn’t known about upfront. Then we bumped into another site launch and some statutory holidays.

Together, we made the call to push to October. And it was the right decision: the team could actually focus on the launch instead of trying to juggle it with everything else.

The best time we’ve found? February. You’re past the holiday break, you can tidy up the site after that downtime, and you’re launching ahead of the prime enrollment window.

Balancing these two timing considerations can be tricky—you need to kick off when stakeholders are available, but also plan for a launch window when your team has bandwidth to focus.

The good news? Crafting the ideal timeline for your project is best done in collaboration with your agency as the statement of work is being developed. We can help you map your academic calendar constraints and find the timing that sets you up for success.

This is where higher ed projects really diverge from corporate work—and where timelines extend most consistently.

The scale:

University sites we’ve built range from 50 pages to 250+ pages. It depends on how many programs you offer, whether you have faculty and staff bios, board of directors pages, summer camps, or other specialized content types.

But it’s not just the volume. It’s the complexity of getting that content created, approved, and organized across a complex institution.

When content coordination works well:

We’ve worked with teams who handle this coordination tango beautifully. One university assigned clear content ownership to specific people before kickoff, built realistic timelines with buffer built in, and delivered everything on schedule. Their approach? They treated content creation as a project unto itself with internal milestones, not as something that would happen “whenever we have time.” They designated one person to consolidate all internal feedback before it came to us, which meant we got clear, actionable direction instead of conflicting requests from multiple departments.

The magic touch though? They provided one clear source of truth on their programs, so our team was able to understand the program and organizational structure without needing to dig for it on the existing website (which might be out of date!) and in program brochures. Doing that upfront consolidation saved our team hours of work and helped us mitigate the risks involved with having lack of clarity when reviewing conflicting materials.

The content types that add complexity:

It’s not just pages. It’s the custom functionality that different content requires.

We’ve built tuition calculators that pull from spreadsheets of fees (U.S., Canadian, international students—all with different cost structures). Custom events systems. Microsites for news articles. Academic program pages built on templates, but with different needs per department and program type.

When every department needs different content types and volumes, you end up with custom modules for each. The module library gets huge. And each variation takes longer to design, build, and QA.

The microsite problem:

Many universities have departments that built their own microsites over the years. Now you’re trying to consolidate everything into one cohesive site with easier content management.

That means migrating content, merging structures, and often navigating departmental politics about autonomy and brand identity.

Migration vs. creation:

Most projects involve both. You’re migrating blog posts, news articles, faculty and staff bios. And you’re creating net-new content for program pages, key landing pages, updated messaging.

The creation part is where things slow down, because someone has to actually write that content. And getting it written, reviewed, and approved by all the relevant stakeholders takes time.

What helps:

Projects that handle content well do a few things differently:

• Content audit done before kickoff, or during the Research and Discovery phase, so you know what you’re working with and what needs to change
• Realistic assessment of internal team capacity (if you’re already at 100%, adding website content creation isn’t going to magically work)
• Single point of contact who consolidates feedback and requests internally instead of us trying to coordinate with seven different people
• Clear content deadline commitments, with buffer time built in

Technical complexity doesn’t usually derail timelines the way content does, but it can add significant time if you don’t plan for it.

Common integrations we deal with:

CRM systems like Slate or Salesforce. Student information systems. Authentication and single sign-on. Payment systems for tuition or registration.

The most complex integration we’ve built was a tuition calculator that had to pull from multiple spreadsheets of fees: U.S. students, Canadian students, international students, all with different cost structures and variables. That kind of custom functionality requires significant development time.

The IT coordination factor:

University IT departments have security protocols, approval processes, hosting requirements, and compliance standards. All of which are legitimate and necessary.

The key is surfacing those requirements during discovery so we can build them into the timeline from the start.

IT reviews don’t typically derail our timeline if we know about them upfront. The problem is when we’re ready to launch and suddenly need DNS records changed or server access we didn’t know we’d need. Or when there’s a six-week approval process for getting credentials we thought would take two days.

Accessibility at a high standard:

All websites legally need to meet accessibility standards. For universities, the stakes are often higher because many need to meet WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 Level AA and some have to report compliance to regulatory boards.

We’ve worked with institutions like NYU that have internal accessibility departments reviewing every aspect of the site. Their standards are strict, which is good. But it also means the team understands what’s required and can help us integrate accessibility into the timeline from the start.

The NYU team we worked with was great about this. They understood that sometimes you work toward a “roadmap to accessibility” rather than achieving 100% compliance at launch, especially when there are specific design or creative needs for certain time periods. We’d talk through those trade-offs together.

When our project managers know the accessibility requirements upfront, we build in time for the additional QA, testing, and potential remediation. It’s when those requirements surprise us late in the project that they cause problems.

What helps:

• Identify all technical requirements and approval needs during discovery
• Get IT involved from day one, not when you’re ready to launch
• Document access credentials and processes early
• Build accessibility compliance into the timeline from the start, not as an afterthought