Over the past 15 years, Carleton University has undergone a remarkable digital transformation through WordPress. What began as a small project to replace 36 sites in a legacy CMS quickly grew—by the end of that first year, we were managing over 120 live sites. We had no idea at the time that this would become some of the most challenging, creative, and rewarding work we’d do at the university.
Today, Carleton’s custom-built, enterprise-level WordPress platform powers more than 700 sites. Built on a robust Multisite foundation and enhanced with Gutenberg, a custom React component library, and Timber with Twig templating, our platform continues to evolve to meet institutional needs while embracing modern WordPress capabilities. This session will share key milestones, lessons learned, and the strategy behind scaling and sustaining a high-performance WordPress ecosystem in a large university setting.