47 Microsites, One Design System
Large organisations accumulate microsites like barnacles on a hull. Each one made sense at the time. Together they create an ungovernable, inconsistent, expensive mess. There is a better way.
How We Got Here
It usually starts innocently. A campaign needs a landing page. A product launch needs its own site. A regional team builds something locally because the central platform cannot move fast enough. Five years later you have 47 microsites on six different platforms, three of which are no longer supported. Each has its own design, its own hosting, its own security posture. Nobody has a complete inventory. Updating the brand across all of them would take months of agency time. So it does not happen.
The Consolidation Mistake
The instinct is to consolidate everything onto one platform. This is usually the right destination but the wrong approach. Traditional consolidation means a massive migration programme: audit everything, prioritise, migrate content, decommission old sites. It takes a year or more. Teams resist because they lose autonomy. By the time you finish, three new microsites have appeared. The pattern repeats.
Design System as Governance Layer
The alternative is to govern at the design system level, not the platform level. Extract your brand into a portable, headless design system. Deploy that system as the front end for every site, regardless of what CMS sits behind it. The content stays where it is. The editors keep their tools. But every user-facing page now renders through a single, governed component library. Brand consistency, accessibility compliance and performance standards are enforced by the system, not by process documents that nobody reads.
What Changes
The brand team gets a single source of truth for digital brand expression. The security team gets a unified front end to audit instead of 47 separate attack surfaces. The content teams keep their preferred CMS. The finance team stops paying for 47 sets of hosting, monitoring and maintenance. And when the brand evolves, you update the design system once and every site reflects the change. Not in six months. That afternoon.