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Higher education websites have a tough job.
They're part marketing engine, part administrative tool, part digital campus tour—and they’re often managed by small, overstretched teams.
With thousands of pages, dozens of departments, and sometimes competing stakeholder opinions, it's no wonder user experience (UX) often falls by the wayside.
For prospective students and their parents, your university site often the first interaction they have with your institution.
But with sprawling sites, limited resources, and increased competition, it’s easy for even the best institutions to lose ground on what really matters: creating an experience that converts.
Here’s a breakdown of some actionable tips to boost your site’s performance, improve UX, and increase engagement—all without needing a complete redesign.
Here are five of the most common barriers to conversion greatness on higher ed websites—and how to break through them.
1. Heavy pages = light engagement
In 2025, performance is about speed and sustainability.
University web sites are enormous, and big images, clunky code, and bloated pages slow things down—but they also drive student visitors away from your site.Students have low tolerance for sites that don’t match their high expectations.
Poor page speed impacts not just their user experience and your SEO—it contributes to your digital carbon footprint.
If your site takes more than a couple of seconds to load, especially on mobile, you're losing prospective students before they even read your value proposition.
The fix is to design for performance.
Optimizing for lightweight design means your site is faster, more environmentally responsible, and more inclusive for users with limited bandwidth.
Modern image techniques make the most of srcset to serve the right images to the right devices, and you can hold assets on a content delivery network (CDN) with additional functionality for image compression and transformation in real time.
Other quick wins would be to use modern image formats like WebP and AVIF, minimize JavaScript and defer non-critical scripts.
And there are plenty of online tools that can track carbon emissions of your site.
2. Authenticity as a new aesthetic
Stock photos are officially over. They have been for some time.
We know Gen Z and Gen Alpha crave realness and authenticity: real students, real campuses, real experiences.
This is a unique chance to show them what it’s actually like to be part of your university community.
Invest in custom photography that reflects your actual student experience, make it less polished, show diversity, and capture candid interactions.
You can also feature student-generated content for even better engagement.
These all increase emotional impact and bring your campus to life.
Our AI tips:
- AI tools can automatically tag your photos or videos with contextual information like location, activity type, etc., making it easier to curate your image libraries.
- AI can create accurate alt text descriptions for images and videos, which helps make your site more accessible without compromising speed or scale.
You can also AI transcription tools to turn short video testimonials or voice clips into searchable, accessible text content.
3. Design for people, not for pages
Empathy is your most powerful design tool.
Too many websites mirror the org chart instead of the student journey.
We’ve seen it countless times—still!—where higher education sites are designed to please internal stakeholders. But these often frustrate users.
There’s always a struggle for visibility between departments, leadership that wants splash, and everyone else to have links to their page be on the homepage.
But meanwhile, prospective students just want to know if your program is right for them.
You can fix this by doing your research, talking to students, doing user testing (often!).
Create personas and context scenarios that reflect real user needs and journeys, and then use those insights to drive your design decisions—not internal politics.
Our AI tips: Some new AI tools can now help map out user journeys, identify friction points, and even segment users dynamically. But it only works when paired with real conversations—interviews, feedback, and testing.
- AI-driven analytics can uncover drop-offs and dead ends on your site
- You can also use heatmaps and session replays to visualize real student user behavior
- Chatbots can answer specific student questions 24/7 and help with conversions
4. Consistency at scale starts with a system
When you have multiple teams, inconsistent design items, and legacy content, this can create a patchwork user experience and undermine the user experience.
What you need is a shared design language, with consistent buttons, accessible templates, and reduced effort for your content contributors.
The way to do it is to build a living style guide and stick to it.
Design systems ensure consistency and let your teams work faster (without breaking things!).
Atomic design uses modular, reusable components that scale with your team and your site, with small elements that come together to create a consistent, coherent system.
This design creates trust for your users, whether they’re on your site, opening your emails, or checking out your student portal.
Tools like Figma or Sketch help you create component libraries with usage guidelines, and you can use automated accessibility and performance checks, and version-controlled CMS or digital engagement system components that lock in best practices.
Our AI tip: Use AI to help generate accessible alt text, flag redundant content, and recommend UI improvements on your site.
5. Design with intent (and smarts!)
Lack of intent means missed opportunities.
Every page needs a purpose, and every element on your landing page should support the same conversion goal.
But far too often, we see content bloat, aimless pages, and forms that ask too much too soon.
The key is to be clear about what you want visitors to do—and make it easy for them to do it.
Use design to show them where to look first, and reveal information step by step so they don’t get overwhelmed.
Test relentlessly—A/B testing isn’t just for e-commerce, it works for higher education, too.
Try different layouts, form designs, headlines, and calls to action. Learn what works. Then do more of it.
Intentional design is data-informed design.
Our AI tip: Use AI as A/B and multivariate testing tools, use it to analyze behavioral analytics (which headline performs better? Which CTA gets more clicks? What’s causing drop-offs on your application form?)
So the question is—what’s the one thing you can do today to make your site more human, more helpful, and more likely to convert? Share it with us on social media.