Throughout this series, we've explored three fundamental problems with traditional web platforms: version lock-in that traps you in obsolete code, hidden costs that turn "free" into surprisingly expensive, and the IT-Marketing dependency that paralyzes your campaigns.

If you've made it this far, you probably recognize yourself in some of those scenarios. Maybe all of them.

The question that naturally arises is: now what?

This article isn't meant to sell you anything. It's an honest guide to evaluate whether the time has really come to change your web platform, what criteria you should use to make that decision, and how to avoid the mistakes that turn a migration into a disaster.

Because changing platforms is an important decision. But not changing when you should can be even more costly.

The invisible cost of inaction

There's a concept that rarely appears in technology evaluations: the Cost of Inaction (COI).

When we evaluate a new platform, we usually compare the migration cost with the expected benefits. It's a reasonable calculation. But there's a fundamental error in that approach: it assumes that staying where you are is free.

It's not.

Southwest Airlines learned this lesson the hard way in December 2022, when it canceled more than 15,000 flights during the Christmas holidays. The cause: obsolete technology systems, some with code from the 90s, unable to manage the current scale of operations. The direct cost to the airline: $220 million net loss in that quarter alone.

BlackBerry controlled 50% of the mobile market in the United States in 2007. They were slow to adapt to the touchscreen smartphone. Today their global market share is practically zero.

These are extreme examples, but the pattern is universal: the cost of not acting accumulates silently until it becomes visible all at once.

In the university context, COI takes more subtle but equally real forms:

The problem is that these costs don't appear on any invoice. They're invisible until they stop being so.

The seven warning signs

How do you know if your current situation justifies the effort of a platform change? Based on patterns observed in dozens of universities, these are the seven clearest signs:

1. Your marketing team is afraid to touch the website.

If the people responsible for generating results hesitate before requesting changes because the process is painful or they fear "breaking something," you have a structural problem. A website that's scary is a website that doesn't evolve.

Diagnostic question: When was the last time marketing launched a landing page without involving IT?

2. Publishing times are measured in weeks, not hours.

In a market where students expect immediate responses, execution speed is a competitive advantage. If your competitors can launch a new program page in a day and it takes you a month, they're capturing market that should be yours.

Diagnostic question: How many days pass between deciding to launch a campaign and that campaign capturing leads?

3. IT spends more time on maintenance than innovation.

Qualified technical teams are a scarce and valuable resource. If they spend most of their time patching systems, resolving incidents, and managing plugin updates, they're not contributing to the institution's growth.

Diagnostic question: What percentage of your technical team's time goes to maintenance versus strategic projects?

4. You have technical debt that keeps growing.

Every undocumented customization, every plugin of dubious origin, every workaround that "works but nobody knows how," is technical debt. And like all debt, it generates interest. The longer you ignore it, the more it costs to resolve.

Diagnostic question: Is there anyone in your organization who completely understands how your current system works? What happens if that person leaves?

5. Major updates terrify you.

If every new version of your CMS is an event that requires weeks of preparation, exhaustive testing, and crossed fingers, your platform has become a burden. Especially concerning if you're more than one version behind because "it's not a good time" to update.

Diagnostic question: Are you on the current version of your platform? If not, why not?

6. Your maintenance costs increase every year.

Hosting, premium plugins, development hours, specialized agencies. If the total bill grows year after year while functionality remains essentially the same, you're paying more and more to maintain the status quo.

Diagnostic question: How much did you spend in total last year to keep your web ecosystem running? And three years ago?

7. You can't answer basic questions about performance.

If you don't know with certainty which pages convert best, which content generates more leads, or what the real ROI of your website is, it's probably because your platform doesn't allow you to test, iterate, and measure easily.

Diagnostic question: Can you tell me right now which of your recruitment landing pages has the best conversion? Why?

Timing matters

Not all universities that recognize these symptoms should change platforms immediately. Timing is crucial.

Good times for a change:

Times that require more caution:

The key is to plan the transition, not improvise it. The best-executed platform migrations start months before it's urgent.

Evaluation criteria that matter (and those that don't)

When it's time to evaluate alternatives, it's easy to get lost in feature comparisons. Hundreds of functionalities, integrations, technical capabilities. Most CMS RFPs include more than a thousand criteria.

The problem is that many of those criteria are irrelevant to your specific context.

These are the ones that really matter for a university:

1. Real autonomy for non-technical teams

Not "they can edit content if someone configures their permissions." Real autonomy means marketing can create, modify, and publish complete pages without technical intervention and without risk of breaking anything.

How to evaluate: Ask for a demo where someone without technical training creates a recruitment landing page from scratch. Time how long it takes.

2. Publishing time

From when you decide to make a change until it's visible in production. Not in staging. Not in preview. On the real website.

How to evaluate: Ask for real cases from similar clients. How long do they take to launch a new landing? How long to update a price or a date?

3. Guaranteed brand consistency

The system should make it difficult (or impossible) to create content outside brand guidelines. Components available to editors should be pre-designed to maintain visual coherence.

How to evaluate: Ask to see the catalog of available components. Are they flexible but within brand limits? Or are they blank canvases where each editor can do whatever they want?

4. Predictable cost model

The price you pay today should be very similar to what you'll pay in three years, without surprises for traffic, users, or features you thought were included.

How to evaluate: Ask for a 5-year TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) that includes absolutely everything: licenses, hosting, maintenance, updates, support, training.

5. Experience in your sector

A platform that's excellent for e-commerce can be terrible for higher education. The workflows, necessary integrations (SIS, CRM, academic portals), content structures, are completely different.

How to evaluate: Ask for references from universities similar to yours in size and complexity. Talk to them directly.

6. Support and evolution model

Who solves problems when they arise? What's the product roadmap? How long do they take to incorporate new technologies (AI, new channels)?

How to evaluate: Ask about the support SLA. Review the product's update history over the last two years. Ask specifically about their AI strategy.

What you shouldn't prioritize

It's equally important to know which criteria can distract you:

Number of features on a list

More functionalities doesn't mean better product. It often means more complexity, more things to maintain, more surface area for problems.

Generic analyst rankings

Gartner or Forrester reports are useful as a starting point, but they evaluate generic criteria that may not apply to your context. A "leading" platform for retail may be mediocre for education.

License price in isolation

License cost is usually a fraction of total TCO. A platform with an expensive license but that reduces development hours can be much more economical overall.

Familiarity with the technology

"We know WordPress" isn't an argument to stay with WordPress if WordPress doesn't solve your problems. The learning curve for a well-designed new platform is usually weeks, not months.

The process that works

After observing dozens of migrations, both successful and failed, this is the process that produces the best results:

Phase 1: Internal alignment (4-6 weeks)

Before talking to any provider, make sure all internal stakeholders understand the problem and share the vision for the solution. This includes:

Without this alignment, any project will fail due to internal resistance, not technical problems.

Phase 2: Requirements definition (2-4 weeks)

Not a list of a thousand features. A clear document that answers:

Phase 3: Focused evaluation (4-8 weeks)

Don't evaluate 20 platforms. Do a pre-selection of 3-4 based on specialization in your sector and verifiable references. Then:

Phase 4: Decision and negotiation (2-4 weeks)

With all information on the table, make the decision. Negotiate not just price, but also:

Phase 5: Phased implementation

Never migrate everything at once. Start with a contained area (one school, one type of content), learn from the process, and expand gradually. "Big bang" migrations are the main cause of failures.

The most expensive mistake

There's a mistake we see repeat over and over: choosing the platform that presents best in demos but fits worst with your reality.

Demos are designed to impress. They show the ideal scenario, with perfectly prepared content, executed by experts who know every shortcut in the system.

Your university's reality will be different. You'll have editors with different levels of technical skill. You'll have legacy content that needs to be migrated. You'll have integrations with systems the provider has never seen. You'll have internal policies that limit what you can do.

That's why proof of concept is critical. Don't accept a generic demo. Insist on seeing the system working with your content, your brand, your real use cases. Put someone from your marketing team (not IT) to use it for one or two weeks.

If you can't imagine Clara, your Digital Marketing Specialist, using that platform day to day without getting frustrated, it's not the right platform.

The decision is yours

There's no universal answer to "should I change platforms?" It depends on your context, your resources, your priorities, your risk tolerance.

What I can tell you is that the symptoms we've described in this series—version lock-in, hidden costs, operational paralysis—don't improve on their own. They get worse.

The cost of inaction accumulates silently. Every day that passes is another day of inefficiency, of lost opportunities, of competitive advantage ceded.

You don't have to decide today. But if you've spent months or years knowing that your current situation isn't sustainable, maybe the time has come to act.

Self-diagnosis checklist

To close, a practical tool. Score each statement from 0 (totally disagree) to 5 (totally agree):

Interpretation:

In the next and final edition: We close the series looking ahead. How AI, new search channels, and student expectations are redefining what it means to have a university website "ready for the future." And what leading institutions are doing to not fall behind.