The University of Edinburgh

Founded in 1583, the University of Edinburgh is one of the oldest universities in the world. A public research school, it has long been at the forefront of major discoveries in chemistry, biology, physics and geology. From Charles Darwin and Alexander Bell to Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson, the university counts some of the world's greatest minds among its alumni. But even the most storied institutions face thoroughly modern problems.

This is the story of how a centuries-old institution modernized hundreds of websites, united dozens of independent teams, and built a web presence on Drupal, powered by Pantheon, that serves everyone. 

While we offer a central information service within the organization, we have a very decentralized web estate, so we knew we'd have to work on bringing all our stakeholders with us. Working with Pantheon made it possible to put that process in place so that we could reduce our number of sites over time and enable a consistent web experience for our customers and introduce proven processes for the university development community." 

— Billy Wardrop, Head of Website and Communications, University of Edinburgh

Challenge: A Decentralized Web Estate

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The University of Edinburgh has 25 schools, hundreds of research groups, and numerous departments, each running its own web presence. Some used the original central information service (EdWeb) to build websites. Others built their own web presence from scratch. Many started centrally and quietly drifted into something unrecognizable.

When the web team first audited EdWeb, they uncovered a sobering picture: roughly 600 sites running on a central Drupal 7 CMS, plus up to 1,200 additional school- and faculty-built websites with wildly inconsistent design, domains, and content—some more than 20 years old—created by staff who had long since left the university.

It was easy for developers and teams to spin up their own sites in the past. We carried out an audit and, as well as discovering a vast and large web estate, we also found many old websites, including some that were 20 years old, created by staff who were no longer at the university. This was not sustainable." 

— Billy Wardrop, Head of Website and Communications, University of Edinburgh

The result was a sprawling, inconsistent web estate that was expensive to maintain, difficult to secure, and nearly impossible to update all at once. Every few years, the university declared a fresh start. Every few years, the cycle repeated.

The underlying tension is one Pantheon sees across higher education: central IT needs security, consistency, and control; schools and departments need flexibility, speed, and the freedom to innovate. 

Approach: A Multi-Year Journey to a Better Way

The University of Edinburgh's partnership with Pantheon began with a clear strategy: move away from the on-premise monolith, embrace a cloud-hosted multiple-site model, and introduce modern agile workflows the team could actually maintain. Rather than forcing everyone into one giant shared site, each school would get its own independent website with its own domain name. But underneath, they would all run on the same foundation—the same software, the same security standards, the same update process.

The new web platform, EdWeb2, launched on Pantheon, designed for exactly this kind of multiple-site, multi-team scenario. Pantheon handled the infrastructure—servers, security, performance, updates—freeing the university's web team to focus on building a great platform rather than managing hardware. Using Pantheon Upstreams, the team built base containers that could be automatically deployed across the estate, then layered automated pipelines on top to streamline security updates over time.

The migration itself was done in careful waves. The team started with the simplest sites and worked methodically toward the most complex, refining the process as they went. A careful redirect system ensured that all 70,000 pages moved to the new platform without a single broken link.

"Migrating gradually let us lock down the system and protect the core through continuous deployments. We built it in layers: Drupal at the foundation, our governance layer on top, and a flexible outer layer where developers can do their work," said Wardrop. 

Schools weren't required to join. The web team had to earn adoption by building something genuinely better than what departments could do on their own. One of the earliest wins was letting schools have their own domain names, something that had never been possible under the old system. That brought skeptics to the table.

"Moving to the multiple site model gave the ability for schools to have their own domain names and got quite a lot of buy-in. It was something that had been a long-standing ask, and we could finally deliver it," said Wardrop. 

The migration also broke down longstanding organizational silos. Integrating the Degree Finder —a critical student recruitment tool that had its own separate team, budget, and codebase— brought two groups who had never collaborated into a single, unified team working toward shared goals.

What we have managed is to show how collaboration can actually work in a huge, devolved organization like our university. We needed a single language, and that is Drupal—it brings everyone together to think together and move forward together. Joining the shared EdWeb2 platform gives schools time to focus on what matters to them, instead of managing their own infrastructure." 

— Stratos Filalithis, Head of Web Strategy, The University of Edinburgh

Results: From Firefighting to Moving Forward

What began as a vision in 2019—to consolidate, govern, and modernize a sprawling estate—has become the university's day-to-day reality. The build-and-decay cycle that once defined the University’s web strategy is gone. Instead of a massive rebuild every five years, the platform evolves continuously. Security patches go out in hours, not months.

The culture is shifting too. Schools that once insisted on doing things their own way are increasingly choosing to join the central platform, not because they have to, but because it's easier, safer, and better. Today, 21 of the university's 25 schools are on EdWeb2 voluntarily, with the remaining four on the way to joining.

With a stable, well-governed platform in place, the University of Edinburgh web team can focus on what's possible rather than what's manageable. Artificial intelligence is the next frontier. A centrally managed, well-structured web estate is exactly the kind of foundation needed to power intelligent search tools and AI assistants—and the University of Edinburgh is now positioned to build them.

We have more control to avoid risks over compliance, security, data privacy, and overall quality of content accessibility, because we can deploy across the board very quickly. Even if we find something that goes wrong, we can react very quickly to it and not spend a month waiting for something to happen." 

— Stratos Filalithis, Head of Web Strategy, University of Edinburgh