Reimagining a Digital Campus for Speed, Scalability, & Strategic Growth
Shenandoah University
From Overloaded to Future Ready
Services
- Content & Editorial Overhaul
- Multi-Site Design System
- Platform Modernization
- Editorial Enablement
Market
- Higher Education
Shenandoah University came to WDG to transform its sprawling digital landscape into a streamlined, scalable ecosystem. By modernizing the WordPress platform, overhauling content and editorial workflows, and establishing a robust multi-site design system, SU gained the ability to publish faster, maintain a consistent brand, and deliver measurable results across 50+ subsites.
Results That Matter
subsites migrated with zero downtime
hours to publish content by SU’s non-technical staff
less plugin dependency, streamlining future maintenance
of legacy content successfully migrated into the new content blocks via WDG Migrate
The Challenge
When “Good Enough” isn’t Enough Anymore
Shenandoah University’s website was sprawling and fragile. After more than a decade of incremental fixes, it relied on outdated themes, rigid ACF layouts, and over 100 plugins, making the platform slow, complex, and vulnerable.
For the marketing and comms team, the limitations were even clearer: They needed a revamped scalable digital system that would:
- Keep pace with the growth of the University,
- Empower the content teams to publish efficiently, and
- Deliver measurable improvements in accessibility, performance and impact.
WDG’s Approach
From Technical Triage to a Bold Vision
We treated our collaboration with SU not as a redesign effort, but as a full digital transformation initiative.
We kickstarted the project with a full audit of Shenandoah’s multisite environment, from code and plugins to content and editorial workflows. We weren’t just looking to identify what was broken, but also to learn what was slowing the teams down.
Working alongside SU’s marketing, communications, and IT teams, we developed a cohesive roadmap balancing technical modernization with editorial empowerment.
Design System
- Developed a component-based design system ensuring brand consistency and baked-in accessibility.
- Delivered reusable content blocks and patterns, making it easy for SU to launch new pages, campaigns without relying on custom development.
Platform Modernization & Migration
- A parent/child multi-site architecture was built, reducing complexity in supporting 50+ subsites.
- Consolidated the plugin overhead, cutting reliance nearly in half.
Alongside modernizing SU’s WordPress platform, we utilized our migration framework, WDG Migrate, to move decades of legacy content over to the new system.
- Automated large-scale migration across over 50 subsites.
- Converted ~80% of legacy content into block-based layouts.
- Successfully preserved SEO integrity with redirects and metadata mapping.
- Reduced manual data entry, significantly cutting down the migration timeline.
Editorial Empowerment
- The University teams were trained to own their respective publishing workflows.
- With workshops and structured documentation, non-technical staff were then equipped to quickly launch pages — within minutes instead of days.
Performance & Accessibility
- Optimized for Core Web Vitals, delivering faster load times, smoother experience for site users.
- Achieved WCAG 2.1 compliance, improving inclusivity and reducing risk.
Technical Spotlight
WDG Migrate
Traditional higher-ed site migrations can easily encompass months of manual clean up. With our toolset, SU’s content was efficiently mapped, cleaned up, and restructured into the newly implemented reusable blocks, effectively saving time, preserving search rankings, and giving the content teams a solid foundation for growth.
Beyond Launch
This transformation doesn’t end at the relaunch of Shenandoah’s website. The new WordPress ecosystem has created a strong foundation for their continuous digital growth, one that empowers them to evolve alongside its students and community.
With Admissions as a top priority, SU.edu is now primed for conversion optimization, ensuring that prospective students find a clear path to engage and apply. SU’s comms teams can move faster than ever before, using ready-to-launch campaign templates to promote events, school programs and enrollment initiatives without obstacles from their developers.
As the University looks to the future, the new SU.edu is built to successfully support personalized user journeys, offering tailored experiences for students, alumni and faculty alike.
This wasn’t just a migration—it was an overhaul of how content is created, structured, and managed. We built something future-proof.
Amanda Blake, Senior Developer & Accessibility Lead
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