A Little Forest guide to turning digital chaos into a thriving ecosystem 🌿
Every organisation has one: an overgrown, unruly web estate.
Dozens (sometimes hundreds) of websites, subdomains, campaign microsites, dev environments, and long-forgotten pages tangled together like ivy.
Left unchecked, your digital landscape starts to resemble an abandoned garden; wild, sprawling, and full of surprises. Somewhere among the weeds, you’ll find hidden gems, long-lost projects, and a few digital fossils that no one has dared to touch.
But here’s the good news: this wild ecosystem can be tamed.
At Little Forest, we help organisations discover, catalogue, and cultivate their digital estates – transforming them from chaotic jungles into well-curated gardens.
As this article is an in-depth description of our learnings in this area, we’ve created a contents list of the steps below for you:
How to Tame the Jungle That Is Your Web Estate
- Step 1: Discover All the Websites You Own 🌍
- Step 2: Gather Internal Lists 📋
- Step 3: Get Automated Data for Every Site ⚙️
- Step 4: Exclude Dev, Test, and Staging Sites 🛠️
- Step 5: Close, Archive, or Redesign – Pruning the Weeds ✂️
- Step 6: Categorise and Prioritise 🥇🥈🥉
- Step 7: Let AI Do the Heavy Lifting 🤖
- Step 8: Focus on People, Not Just Platforms 👥
- Step 9: Keep It Alive and Thriving with Surveys 📝
- Step 10: Enjoy the Benefits of a Well-Curated Estate 🪴
- Your Overgrown Garden…. Tamed! 💐
Step 1: Discover All the Websites You Own 🌍
You can’t manage what you can’t see.
Start with domain discovery: identifying every top-level domain (TLD) your organisation owns and all their subdomains.
For example, google.com and youtube.com are both owned by Google – that’s horizontal discovery. Once you’ve identified those, you dig deeper: mail.google.com, maps.google.com, research.youtube.com – those are your vertical layers.This step alone often reveals just how big your jungle has grown!
Our Web Registry automates this process, crawling your DNS records and surfacing everything connected to your organisation, even the forgotten corners no one remembers registering!
Step 2: Gather Internal Lists 📋
Next, reach out to your IT departments, marketing teams, and CMS administrators.
Export every list you can find, even the half-finished spreadsheets and handover documents. Somewhere in there lies the map to your web kingdom.
Combine these with your automated discovery to get a comprehensive master list: a single view of what you know and what you’ve just unearthed.
Step 3: Get Automated Data for Every Site ⚙️
Now that you know what exists, it’s time to understand it.
For each site, gather data such as:
- Status code – Is it live, broken, or redirecting?
- Brand and experience metrics – How consistent is it with your main identity?
- Accessibility score – Measured against WCAG standards.
- Security score – HTTPS compliance, certificates, and vulnerabilities.
- Privacy score – how respectful of people’s data are the sites?
- Sustainability score – Page weight, emissions, and green hosting.
- Quality indicators – Metadata, broken links, and SEO hygiene.
The Web Registry pulls this data automatically thus giving you a living dashboard that updates itself rather than relying on manual reports.
Step 4: Exclude Dev, Test, and Staging Sites 🛠️
Every gardener knows not every patch of soil belongs in the final design.
Your dev, test, and staging sites are important, but they shouldn’t clutter your public-facing reports or analytics.
By automatically excluding these environments (e.g. dev.littleforest.co.uk), you can focus on the live, customer-facing estate aka the part of the garden that visitors actually see.
Step 5: Close, Archive, or Redesign – Pruning the Weeds ✂️
Once you’ve mapped the estate, you’ll see which sites are thriving and which are past their prime.
Now’s the time for tough love:
- Close down obsolete sites
- Archive valuable historical ones
- Upgrade outdated CMS platforms
- Redesign or protect internal sites behind login
This pruning process takes time – it often involves discussions and departmental sign-offs – but it’s worth it!
Every site you close or update reduces risk, improves brand consistency, and helps you see measurable progress.
Step 6: Categorise and Prioritise 🥇🥈🥉
When your list still feels endless, categorisation is your best friend.
Start by grouping sites into priority tiers:
- Critical – Business essential
- Important – Actively used but lower risk
- Unknown – Need investigation
- Low Priority – Old campaign or microsites
Then go further. Little Forest helps you sort everything into what we call the Top 10 Big Buckets e.g. marketing, research, teaching, alumni, student life, etc.
This makes your sprawling estate feel like an achievable program of work, not an impossible mountain. Over time, you’ll shrink your “active list” down to what we call your Evergreen Sites (your healthiest, most valuable, and best-maintained pages).
Step 7: Let AI Do the Heavy Lifting 🤖
Our AI tools can analyse site content and metadata to categorise topics and even predict ownership.
That means we can often tell (with surprising accuracy) which department a site belongs to, or even which individual is responsible for it.
Because ownership isn’t always simple.
Most sites have multiple owners:
- Business Owner (Overall accountability)
- Technical Owner (Platform and hosting)
- Content Owner (Updates and quality)
- Analytics Owner (Measurement and reporting)
- Data Owner (Governance and privacy compliance)
By surfacing this information automatically, you save hours of detective work to quickly start building a transparent ownership network.
Step 8: Focus on People, Not Just Platforms 👥
Even the best registry is only as strong as the people maintaining it.
The heart of web estate management is community.
Kick off your program with energy and collaboration. Host regular sessions that explain:
- Why governance matters
- How accessibility and privacy protect your organisation
- What each owner’s role is
- How to use the Web Registry effectively
Offer monthly meetings, quick training workshops, and peer discussions. Encourage a community of site owners who take pride in maintaining their patch of the digital forest.
Step 9: Keep It Alive and Thriving with Surveys 📝
Governance isn’t a one-time audit; it’s an ongoing conversation.
Send annual surveys to all site owners asking questions like:
- When was your site last reviewed for accuracy and relevance?
- Has it been checked for accessibility and security?
- Is personal or sensitive data collected?
- Who manages hosting or maintenance?
Surveys make sure your registry reflects reality, not just good intentions.
And because they’re built into the Little Forest platform, they’re easy to send, track, and repeat year after year.
Step 10: Enjoy the Benefits of a Well-Curated Estate 🪴
Once the weeds are trimmed, the difference is transformative.
A well-manicured web estate means:
- Improved customer experience – Users find what they need faster.
- Reduced risk – Better compliance with laws like the ADA and EAA, and improved information security.
- Clarity and control – You know what you own, who owns it, and how it’s performing.
- Efficiency – Fewer redundant sites, less wasted spend, more focused resources.
Your digital estate becomes a living, breathing environment rather than a neglected wilderness.
Your Overgrown Garden…. Tamed! 💐
At first, the challenge of managing a massive web estate can feel impossible, almost like hacking through vines with a butter knife. But with the right approach, the seemingly unmanageable becomes simple.
Discover, categorise, prune, and nurture.
Build a registry that grows with you, not against you.
And most importantly, cultivate a community of caretakers who keep your web presence alive, accessible, and sustainable.
At Little Forest, we’ve helped organisations around the world transform chaos into clarity. If your web estate is looking more like a jungle than a garden, we’d love to help you landscape and get control of your overgrown web estate.
📩 Get in touch to start building your Web Registry today. Feel free to get in touch via emailing [email protected]
