When Your Website Has Reached End of Life

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A modernization guide for government and higher ed

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I’ve spent the last decade watching public sector websites age out of their platforms. The pattern is consistent: the site doesn’t fail all at once. It gets harder to update, harder to staff against, harder to defend in an accessibility review, and eventually someone in leadership asks why it’s taking three days to post an emergency notice that should have gone out in an hour.

If that question is starting to come up in your organization, the platform has likely reached the end of its useful life. The good news is that modernizing it doesn’t have to be a multi-year ordeal. With a clear plan, the new system can be more secure, more accessible, easier to manage, and more responsive to the people you serve.

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Government and higher ed websites are uniquely complex. They serve large, diverse audiences, meet strict accessibility and security standards, and often manage thousands of pages built up over years or decades. When an older platform stops meeting those needs, the symptoms are hard to ignore.

Five of the most common signs:

Even basic updates slow your team down: If editors can’t publish urgent public updates without calling IT, the platform is working against you. Many legacy systems were never built for modern communications workflows — they lack flexible content types, drag-and-drop tools, reusable components, and intuitive page editing. Those limitations cost time and inflate budgets that should be going somewhere more useful.
Non-technical staff struggle to manage content: Comms teams shouldn’t need developer-level skills to perform routine updates. If your team can’t reliably manage landing page layouts, insert media, or reuse components across the site, the platform is preventing you from keeping the site current, accessible, and user-friendly.
PDFs are replacing proper web pages: I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating in this context: when a platform makes structured publishing too hard, staff turn to PDFs as a workaround. The result is a site full of documents that aren’t accessible, aren’t mobile-friendly, and aren’t searchable. PDF sprawl is rarely a content strategy problem on its own — it’s usually a platform problem as well.
Developer reliance is inflating costs: When every layout tweak or content adjustment requires development hours, budgets take a hit. Comms slows down. Constituents and students wait longer for the information they came looking for.
Your platform is no longer supported: Running unsupported software is more than a risk — it’s a compliance issue. Without security patches, the site becomes a potential entry point for attackers. This applies to proprietary and open-source platforms equally. Drupal 7, for example, reached end of life in January 2025, and organizations still running it are now exposed in ways that won’t get better on their own. If you’re at this stage, upgrading isn’t optional.

If any of the above sounds familiar, the next decision is what to migrate to. This isn't a software purchase — it's a digital infrastructure decision that will shape how your team publishes, how accessibly your site serves the public, and how much it costs to maintain for the next five to ten years.

Five things I'd weigh most heavily:

Stability and longevity: Choose a platform with a proven track record, a large user base, and long-term community or vendor investment. Public sector sites have multi-year lifecycles. The platform underneath them needs to still be supported in year seven.
Strong development and support community: For open-source platforms like Drupal, the strength of the community directly shapes security, feature evolution, and longevity. A large, active community also makes it easier to find development partners with the specific expertise government and higher ed projects require. (For more on this, see How to Migrate Your Site to Drupal.)
First-Class accessibility support: State agencies and higher ed institutions have to meet WCAG standards, and not every platform makes that easy. Look for accessibility-ready components, structured content tools, templates built for compliance, and guardrails that help non-technical editors publish accessibly by default. That last piece matters most — accessibility doesn’t hold up over time unless the editing experience supports it.
Security you can trust: The platform should offer regular security updates, a transparent patching process, and documented response protocols. This is especially important for sites managing sensitive or high-traffic content.
Support for large, complex migrations: Public sector websites are big. Migrating from an outdated system means automated scripts for bulk content, manual handling for complex content types, structured cleanup for accessibility and SEO, redesign of dated information architecture, and remediation of potentially thousands of PDFs. A platform alone won't solve any of that. You need an implementation partner with industry-specific experience.

A platform upgrade goes better when it's approached as a phased modernization project. Four steps we use with our clients:

1. Audit and restructure existing content

Most government and higher ed sites carry years of content sprawl. The migration is the right moment to realign around user needs. A content audit should surface outdated or redundant pages, accessibility issues, low-performing content, PDF and media use, overlap across divisions, and navigation problems.

2. Define clear requirements

Both IT and Comms have to be at the table. The platform has to satisfy both groups. Requirements typically include accessibility by default, secure infrastructure, compliance with applicable federal, state, and local standards, scalable architecture, editor-friendly tools, and integration with internal systems like CRMs, data feeds, and scheduling tools.

3. Evaluate platforms through a public sector lens

This is where most selections go wrong. Consumer-grade tools often look good in a demo but fall short on the things public sector sites actually need: WCAG conformance, strong role-based permissions, audit logs and versioning, retention policies, built-in content workflows, multilingual support, and reliable uptime at scale. Evaluate against the constraints you actually operate under, not the features that look best in a pitch.

4. Choose an implementation partner with industry expertise

The partner matters as much as the platform. Look for experience with government and higher ed migrations, a track record on accessibility and security, familiarity with public sector procurement, strong case studies in relevant sectors, and experience replacing PDF-heavy content with structured pages.

A platform at end of life isn’t just slowing down your website — it’s slowing down communication with the public you serve. Modernization is about removing the friction so your team can publish faster, maintain accessibility, and keep information accurate.

If your current platform is creating more friction than flexibility, it's probably time to plan the next version of your site, not patch the current one.

Electric Citizen builds secure, accessible sites for state agencies, city governments, and universities. If you're seeing the warning signs in your own platform, I’d love to talk about what a next version could look like.

About the Author

About the author