Tiering the Web: A Practical Framework for Governing Web Sprawl
Abstract:
When we inventoried our web ecosystem at Penn State, we discovered over 2,000 distinct public subdomains and over 100,000 active WP sites across multiple environments.
Over time, institutions accumulate hundreds, sometimes thousands, of sites across multiple CMS platforms, themes, and hosting environments. The result isn’t just brand inconsistency. It’s governance gaps, accessibility risk, analytics fragmentation, duplicated spend, and organizational fatigue.