Website Governance at Scale: Lessons From McGill University

Looking after one website is complicated enough. Looking after hundreds, or thousands, across different departments and content owners is a different problem entirely.

Website governance is how organizations solve it. It establishes who owns websites and content, which standards teams follow, how decisions get made, and how quality is maintained over time. Without governance, organizations end up with duplicate content, inconsistent experiences, outdated information, accessibility gaps, and conflicting sources of truth.

McGill University faced this at a huge scale. Joyce Peralta and her team worked with more than 1,500 stakeholders across roughly 1,000 websites. Here's what their experience shows about making website governance work.

How should user needs and analytics shape website governance?

Governance standards should start with the people a website serves, and analytics should then decide where teams focus first. When departments compete for prominence, a site ends up mirroring the org chart instead of the way people actually look for information.

User research, search behavior, and feedback show what visitors are trying to do. Those insights should shape standards for navigation, content, page design, and publishing.

Analytics adds prioritization. Traffic, internal search, navigation paths, accessibility findings, and feedback reveal which content matters most and which pages should be improved, consolidated, or removed. Data doesn't replace user research or good judgment, but it gives teams a shared basis for deciding what comes first.

How do you build accessibility, security, and privacy into website governance?

Write accessibility, security, and privacy requirements into your governance standards from the start, rather than checking for them after content is published.

For accessibility, standards should set clear expectations for headings, alternative text, keyboard navigation, color contrast, captions, and document accessibility. At McGill, accessibility was part of the broader digital standards, which helped create a more consistent experience across the university's websites. Accessibility is also a shared responsibility, so content creators, designers, developers, and site owners each need to know what they're accountable for.

Security and privacy standards should cover user access, permissions, data collection, third-party tools, and sensitive information. Access control matters most in organizations with many contributors. Know who needs publishing or admin rights, and review permissions as responsibilities change.

How do you handle outdated and duplicate content at scale?

Audit content on a regular schedule, assign an owner to every important page, and decide for each problem page whether to update, consolidate, redirect, archive, or remove it.

Large website ecosystems accumulate content naturally. New pages go up, old ones stay live, and different departments publish different answers to the same question. McGill's "Less is More" principle helped teams prioritize clarity over volume.

An ongoing process should flag outdated, duplicate, rarely used, and unowned pages. Reducing duplication also creates clearer sources of truth for users, search engines, and AI systems.

Who should be involved in website governance?

Everyone who creates or supports the digital experience should share responsibility for governance, with clear ownership of each type of decision.

Marketing may own messaging, content teams publishing, and UX the user perspective. IT and developers typically manage platforms, performance, and security, while legal, accessibility, and compliance teams help shape standards.

Rather than leaving governance to one central team, McGill involved stakeholders from across the university in developing its digital standards. The goal isn't for everyone to approve every decision. It's to make clear who owns each kind of decision and when other teams need to be brought in.

What should a website governance framework include?

A website governance framework explains how an organization makes decisions about its websites, content, and technology. It typically covers:

• Ownership: who is responsible for each site, section, or piece of content
• Roles and permissions: who can create, edit, approve, and publish
• Content and technology standards: requirements for writing, branding, accessibility, and quality, plus the platforms, templates, and tools teams should use
• Decision-making: what teams can decide independently and what needs coordination
• Review and maintenance: how often sites and content are reviewed
• Compliance: how accessibility, privacy, security, and legal requirements are handled

Standards only stick when something reinforces them, such as publishing workflows, CMS permissions, reusable templates, automated checks, audits, and training. A framework isn't more bureaucracy. It's giving teams a reliable way to manage websites as they grow.

How do you keep website governance working over time?

Treat governance as an ongoing program with training, documentation, and regular review, not a one-time project. Teams change, new people join, platforms evolve, and standards have to adapt.

At McGill, training and ongoing support helped contributors understand what was expected of them. Organizations can do the same through onboarding, documentation, publishing guidelines, CMS training, accessibility education, office hours, and refresher sessions. The governance model itself should also be reviewed regularly to confirm it still fits the organization's needs.

Building website governance that scales

McGill's experience shows that managing a large digital ecosystem takes more than technology. As organizations grow, informal processes stop working, and governance gives teams a shared framework for making decisions consistently.

That matters even more now that search and AI systems rely on clear, consistent, authoritative information. Well-governed content helps both people and machines find reliable answers.

Need help improving your website governance?

[A] helps organizations make complex digital ecosystems easier to manage. We work with marketing, content, UX, and technology teams to clarify ownership and workflows, improve content structure, establish practical standards, and build digital experiences that are easier to maintain and scale.

If your organization is managing multiple websites, teams, platforms, or content owners, we can help identify where governance is breaking down and map a clearer path forward.

Talk to [A] about your website governance strategy.