What Website Reliability Means for University Programs
Are you part of a university lab that provides resources and data to other universities and academic partners? Or, perhaps you’re faculty, an administrator, or a program director for a graduate program. If you’re looking for ways to make your lab or program’s website more reliable, it could come down to a few key areas. Most universities have strict controls on websites that are tied to the university, especially those on second-level domains.
Issues that we typically see for university websites are often related to how they were designed and the university’s cache setup. Because of the volume of traffic to the university’s server, webpages are heavily cached. However, when the page is incorrectly cached, it can appear broken.
Layout, front-end interaction, back-end code, and hosting are all areas of the website that need to be monitored for breaking changes. Websites should receive regular updates to make sure they are secure. Depending on your university, parts of this process may be automated. This can lead to pages breaking without notice.
Website reliability shouldn’t be something your team has to worry about. When the website is built right and supported by a team of website professionals, things run smoothly. However, if you’re experiencing website reliability problems for your university program or lab, it might be time to start thinking about making a change.
The Role of Hosting Uptime and Monitoring
Most of our university partners require hosting be provided by the university. If this is a requirement, then your options for hosting are simplified. We generally recommend hosting with your university, as they will enforce that other websites that share the same server are updated to prevent attackers from exploiting unpatched software. If your university offers a third-party hosting provider, we will look at the available options to determine what will be the most secure choice. If third-party hosting is an option, choose a provider that offers built‑in protections like firewalls, DDoS mitigation, intrusion detection, encrypted backups, and documented compliance with U.S. regulations relevant to higher education. Our agency offers secure hosting services with these protections. However, as mentioned, for most universities, hosting is restricted to the university’s own hosting service or a specific partner. Our team easily works within these types of requirements. Let us know if you need website support for your program; we can help guide you through the university requirements.
Why Dedicated Support Teams Matter
Even with hosting and other elements of the technology stack being managed by the university, the right support team is critical for your lab or program. Whether you need to update admission stats, course information, alumni, current students, or application deadlines, the right team is standing by ready to help. If you’re a lab, this may mean that you need professional support for your annual conference or monthly forums. Having a responsive website partner means your website is being reviewed for breaking changes and has a team ready to make any fixes necessary so that your users always have access to a stable website. This is important for labs working with other national and international universities and graduate programs trying to attract high-quality candidates to matriculate into the program.
Planned Updates vs Emergency Fixes
Our team understands the requirements of large universities and how to support websites that meet or exceed a university’s standards. Are you facing breaking layouts to lab or course pages? Are you finding that some pages load correctly, while others look skewed and unstyled? These could be cache issues or breaking changes as a result of automatic university website updates.
One of the reasons our team doesn’t encounter as many performance issues as our competitors is that we plan website updates. In a university system, you might not have this luxury. Instead, for university partners, we perform routine monitoring of the website, including layout fixes and updates. We provide a series of compatibility checks to ensure that performance and layout remain unaffected. Emergency fixes are when an unexpected error appears on the website and needs to be resolved quickly. Emergency fixes are where the cause of the error may not be immediately apparent. Because of our systematic approach to website design and development for university sites, emergency fixes are rare. Our team resolves most emergency fixes within a matter of minutes. Our team is highly responsive and always available to provide support.
University programs and labs need a reliable website support team and often don’t have the resources to pay for expert website staff to manage the website edits and layout changes. Our agency can provide the responsiveness and level of support that comes with an in-house team at a significantly lower cost.
Building Trust Through Website Reliability for Universities
University websites already have a lot of initial trust established by the domain they are on. An EDU domain establishes instant credibility. However, in order to attract top talent as a graduate program, trust in the program and the faculty may be hindered by broken layouts and reliability issues with your program’s website. This could result in missing out on attracting highly qualified undergraduate students. More qualified applications and better matriculation statistics can lead to improved placement stats and overall growth for your program. Website reliability is critical to building this trust. For university labs, improved website reliability will lead to improved trust in your research and data by your partners.
You can trust that CH Web Agency will be the qualified website design and development team you need. For websites that we build and support, the types of errors we discussed in this article, while not impossible, are rare. We also provide support for websites that were built by different developers. In these cases, reliability depends on how the website was built; however, during our initial audit and takeover, we will make recommendations to enhance the long-term reliability of your website. Our goal is that worrying about website reliability is a thing of the past once you partner with our team.
