It depends on portfolio and audience complexity, but the honest default is fewer than most companies end up with — the common failure is accumulating a website per product, market or campaign without ever consolidating, not having too few.
Most pharma companies we audit have more properties than they can account for: a corporate site, several product sites, an old campaign microsite still live, and an affiliate site nobody remembers launching. The default outcome, left unmanaged, is too many, not too few.
A distinct regulatory pathway per product, a genuinely different audience needing its own architecture, or an unbranded content requirement — see product website and disease awareness website for the two most common legitimate reasons.
A structured inventory and consolidation decision, not an assumption that everything currently live still needs to exist — see multi-brand consolidation for how that decision gets made deliberately.
Only where the regulatory pathway or a distinct audience requires separation should a product get its own site. See product website for when that separation is the right call, since defaulting to a dedicated site for every product creates an estate that becomes difficult to govern and maintain over time.
Old campaign microsites should be audited and retired once they no longer serve a purpose. An orphaned property left online is a compliance and maintenance risk rather than a neutral leftover, since outdated claims or unpatched software can sit unnoticed for years on a site that no one is actively managing.
Start with a full inventory of every domain, subdomain and microsite associated with the organisation, including ones marketing teams may have forgotten about. See how to audit a pharma website for the process that surfaces what exists before any decision about consolidation or retirement is made.
Consolidating sites can affect rankings temporarily if redirects and content migration are not handled carefully, but done properly it often improves visibility by concentrating authority onto fewer, stronger pages. The risk comes from skipping proper URL mapping, not from consolidation itself, so treat it as a migration project with its own checklist.
Tell us what you think you have and we will help you find out what actually exists.