An industrial website takes roughly three to five months for a focused corporate site, and six to twelve months or more where a multilingual catalogue, integrations or a distributor portal are in scope. The variable that moves the date most is rarely design or development.
It is content, product data and decision-making. A manufacturer with clean product information, an available technical reviewer and one accountable sponsor will launch faster than a larger business with a bigger budget and no one able to approve a specification. Scope, language count, catalogue size and ERP or PIM maturity set the outer bounds; internal capacity decides where inside them you land.
A single-language corporate site with a modest product section commonly runs three to five months from kick-off. Add a structured catalogue of several hundred items, two or three languages and a CRM connection and six to nine months is more realistic. A distributor portal with authentication, pricing and ERP data usually needs a phased plan across a year or more.
These are planning ranges rather than quotations. The credible number comes after discovery has established the real content volume and integration scope.
Fifty products with consistent attributes is a different project from four thousand with inconsistent naming across three legacy systems. The question is not the count but whether the data is structured, deduplicated and owned by someone who can arbitrate conflicts.
Where a PIM already governs product information, migration is largely a mapping exercise. Where product data lives in spreadsheets and PDFs maintained by different departments, expect data preparation to become a workstream in its own right, and plan for it explicitly rather than discovering it in month four.
Each additional language adds translation, review by someone who knows the local terminology, and a further pass of quality assurance across every template. Four languages does not mean four times the build, but it does mean four times the content review, and review capacity is usually the scarcer resource.
Sequencing helps. Launching the primary language and adding markets in defined waves keeps the critical path shorter and gives local teams a working reference to review against.
A contact form posting to a CRM is a week. A live stock or pricing feed from an ERP, a customer authentication layer or a two-way PIM sync is a different order of work, and its timeline depends as much on the availability of the systems team as on the web build.
Where an integration depends on a third party, secure the technical contact and the test environment before the schedule is agreed. That single dependency causes more slippage than any other on industrial projects.
A complex platform does not need every future capability on day one. Identify the content, journeys and technical foundations required for a credible launch, then roadmap the higher-complexity work such as product selectors, configurators or account features.
The condition is that phase one is complete enough to serve a defined audience properly, so that it is a foundation rather than a temporary structure to be discarded. Setting that boundary is part of project scoping.
Name one accountable sponsor with authority to resolve trade-offs. Nominate the technical reviewer who will sign off specifications and protect their time. Export the current site inventory and analytics before kick-off. Decide the priority markets. Identify where product data lives and who owns each field.
Projects slow when ownership is unclear and approval routes are informal, and those are the two constraints a client controls entirely. Resolving them before kick-off routinely saves more time than any decision made afterwards.
A clearly scoped single-language corporate site commonly takes three to five months. A multilingual site with a structured catalogue and CRM integration is more often six to nine. Portals, ERP connections and configurators extend that further and are usually phased. We give a firm timeline after discovery has established content volume, data condition and integration scope rather than before.
Content and decisions, in that order. Product data that needs cleaning, technical copy waiting on an engineer who is travelling, and approval routes where no one holds final authority account for most slippage. Third-party integration dependencies are the next most common cause, particularly where the systems team was not involved when the schedule was set.
Yes, and it is often the lower-risk route where products, markets or systems are complex. The condition is that the first phase serves a defined audience completely, so it becomes a foundation rather than a placeholder. Agree at scoping which journeys must be whole at launch and which capabilities can follow in a defined second phase.
It affects the timeline mainly through setup, content migration and integration work rather than through the platform name. A well-supported CMS with mature integrations and available specialists tends to move faster than one requiring bespoke development for standard content, workflow or translation needs. The larger timeline variable remains the content and data you are migrating into it.
Prepare the commercial objective, current analytics and search data, a URL inventory of the existing site, a view of your product data sources and their owners, priority markets and languages, the stakeholder list with one named sponsor, and concrete examples of where the current site fails buyers or internal teams. That package alone shortens discovery noticeably.
Additional resource compresses design and development, which are rarely the constraint. Where the critical path runs through content approval, product data cleaning or an ERP dependency, extra budget does not move it. The effective lever is usually reducing launch scope and phasing the remainder, or freeing internal reviewer time, rather than adding people to the build.
Tell us your content volume and review process and we will give you a realistic timeline.