It depends far more on your medical, legal and regulatory review capacity than on the build itself — the technical work often takes weeks, while the content review cycle is usually the actual determinant of the overall timeline.
Design and development for a well-scoped pharmaceutical site typically move at a predictable pace once requirements are clear. What varies enormously between projects is how quickly content moves through your internal review, which is usually the larger share of total project time.
We can give a confident estimate for the build itself once scope is defined through discovery — see marketing team autonomy and project scoping for how that discovery phase works. The review timeline depends on your internal process, which we account for in planning but do not control.
The most effective lever is not rushing the build, it is aligning the content plan with your review capacity from the start, so content is not written faster than it can actually be approved.
A rough range is not useful before scoping, since content volume, the number of markets and your organisation’s review speed all vary too widely for a generic number to mean much. What we can commit to is a realistic timeline once those specific variables are known, typically within the first scoping conversation.
A realistic content plan matched to your actual review capacity speeds things up the most, since content approval is usually the longest and least predictable stage. See how to speed up MLR for web content for the specific practices that reduce review cycles without cutting corners on compliance.
A migration often takes longer than a new build, because of the additional work involved in mapping old URLs, preserving search visibility and auditing existing content before anything new is written. See what is a website migration checklist for the full list of migration-specific steps a new build does not require.
Platform choice affects timeline mainly through setup and integration work, such as connecting an existing MLR review tool or translation system, rather than through the platform itself. A familiar, well-supported platform with existing integrations built for pharma tends to move faster than one requiring custom development for standard compliance features.
Tell us your content volume and review process and we will tell you a realistic timeline.