Seamless integration of multilingual websites for a global pharmaceutical company
Our client is a reputed research-driven and specialty biopharmaceutical group committed to helping people around the world build families and live better lives. For more than five decades, as a leader in reproductive medicine and women’s health, and in gastroenterology and urology, they have been developing treatments for mothers and babies across the globe.
Our client’s website, developed on the Drupal platform, had one Global site and 14 language variations, with some variations from country to country. They were looking to develop all their websites (one global site plus 14 individual language sites) under one dashboard. This would make it quicker to effect changes and easier to manage in a cost-effective manner.
Even though Drupal has a multisite dashboard, WordPress is a widely used CMS with a larger community. It is easy to manage and Includes a large number of plugins and themes to extend WordPress without need for custom development each time. This makes WordPress a cost-effective solution in a long run, which makes it most popular CMS across the globe.
We therefore discussed with the client and decided to migrate to the WordPress Multisite instance, which is based on their Web Factory (Amazon web Services), so that all sites could be developed under one dashboard and would be easy to manage.
We centralized the theme for all the websites. This was a cost effective and easy-to-manage option to enable future theme changes to appear simultaneously in all the websites. All that is needed is to change the text in the local language of the specific country – and the functions would remain the same
Deploying some plug-ins at our end (in addition to the limited use of plug-ins in the client’s AWS Web factory as per their guidelines), we exported the data from Drupal and imported it to our local WordPress instance. We also integrated the features of the dynamic questionnaires in the theme itself to comply with the client’s guidelines on exposure to external plug-ins.
We created more than 1000+ pages and 300+ posts for the migration. Once the pages were created we exported the local WordPress data through XML format and imported them to AWS Web factory instance. By doing so, we saved significant time – from 25 days to just 2 days. Our thorough quality check ensured that no content was missing after the migration and that the design was as per the original websites.
