Lessons from London South Bank University’s strategic content overhaul

Among the challenges universities are currently facing is the changing patterns of engagement among young students. A session, held in partnership with Squiz, at the 2026 THE HashtagHigherEd UK event, showcased how London South Bank University’s (LSBU) website redesign drove a notable increase in page views and engagement, at a time when AI is reducing website traffic across the sector.

“There is a certain degree of headwind at the moment in terms of recruitment for universities,” said Robert Perry, digital strategy consultant at Squiz. “Students are finding new ways to get the information they need. This makes it more difficult to get them to the information on our websites,” Perry said. 

LSBU’s website restructure saw over 70 per cent increase in engagement time per user and page views went up by more than 30 per cent for certain undergraduate courses. “The main thing is to put the audience first,” said Nicola Crean, head of marketing and digital at LSBU. “Your website is the most powerful tool you have for the outside world. It’s your shop window into the university.”

Flexible website design enabled the university to manage the improvement efforts in-house. The team focused on two separate projects, which included updating hundreds of course pages and redesigning the university’s Clearing site to encourage recruitment. In the UK, Clearing is a process where aspiring students can apply to programmes after they receive their school-leaving results.

“For our Clearing hub, the priority is that students need the information quickly. They don’t want to have to search pages and pages of information to find useful content on how and when to apply,” Crean said. “We wanted to write content that answered the questions students want to know, not what the university wants to tell them.” Audience-first content – answering real questions directly, in plain language and with clear structure – is also what AI systems surface when students search.

The results clearly demonstrate the impact. “We were able to evidence real business impact,” Crean said. “On results day, by 10 o’clock in the morning, we had already well exceeded the full number of phone calls that we had received the year before.”

For their work on course pages, Crean and her team ran “friendly interrogation sessions” with academics. “We talked to them as if we were students and then took that information and translated it into the student-first language that works with our in-house style,” she said. One key design decision was making students’ primary question – “What’s in it for me?” – a section header on every course page, putting the answer where both students and AI systems look for it.

At the beginning of the process, a major struggle was getting changes made to the website. “Every change was a [service] ticket and every ticket was a wait,” Crean noted. To address such bottlenecks, the team adopted Squiz’s component-based design. “It allowed us to have reusable, flexible building blocks that we could use across pages and manage completely in-house.”

LSBU’s foundation of clear, structured, audience-first content has also laid the groundwork for what comes next, from AI-powered search visibility to on-site personalisation. Crean’s advice to those looking to replicate London South Bank University’s success is to put the audience first and be “brave enough to do it across your website”.

The speakers:

• Nicola Crean, head of marketing and digital, London South Bank University
• Robert Perry, digital strategy consultant, Squiz

Find out more about Squiz.