Website Design for Manufacturers: Building a Site That Specifiers and Buyers Use

Most manufacturing websites we look at were built as brochures: a factory photo, a product gallery and a contact form. The data a specifier needs sits in a PDF catalogue, the distributor list is out of date, and trade customers still email orders in because the site cannot take them.

This guide is about the build itself: how to structure a manufacturer's website so engineers, buyers and distributors can use it, what it needs to connect to, and how to brief and rebuild without losing what you already rank for. It is written for UK engineering firms, fabricators, building products makers and component manufacturers. If you want the wider marketing picture first, our guide to marketing for manufacturers covers how specifiers and buyers research suppliers and where SEO, email and paid search fit. Here we stay on the website.

Decide what the website has to do

Before anyone opens a design tool, settle which jobs the site has to do. Manufacturers usually need some mix of four, and each one changes the build.

A building products maker selling only through merchants may need the first two. A components maker with two hundred account customers reordering every month probably needs all four. Which apply decides budget, timescale and how much of the work is software rather than design.

Product catalogue structure and filtering

The catalogue is the core of the site, and it is a data problem before it is a design problem. If the product data lives in a spreadsheet one person maintains, start there.

Family, product, variant

Most manufacturing ranges fit three levels. A family groups products that do the same job (say, channel drainage or pipe brackets). A product is one design within it. A variant is a size, grade, finish or load rating of that product. Give families and products their own pages with written content. Variants usually belong in a table on the product page rather than on separate pages, unless people search for them by name or part number.

Filters that match how engineers specify

Filters should use the attributes your customers choose on, in their units: load class, material, diameter, temperature range, standard met, finish. Your first filters are the three questions your technical sales team asks first on an enquiry call. Show results as a comparable table with the key values visible, not a grid of photos that all look alike.

Filters can create thousands of URL combinations. Decide which combinations deserve an indexable page with its own heading and copy (a family filtered by material, for example) and keep the rest out of search results, so Google spends its time on the pages that matter.

Technical data sheets, CAD and BIM downloads

Engineers want the file. Buyers want the summary. Search engines need text they can read. The answer is to put the key data on the page and the full detail in downloads alongside it.

Google can index the text inside PDFs, Word documents and Excel files,¹ so a well-titled data sheet can be found in search. CAD and BIM formats such as DWG, STEP and IFC are not on Google's list of indexable file types,¹ so the page around a CAD file has to carry the description, dimensions and product name that someone would search for.

• Name files properly: product name, document type and revision date in the file name and the link text, not "DS_0042_final2.pdf".
• Keep one current version: each download should come from the product database, so an update replaces the old file everywhere rather than leaving three versions in circulation.
• Group by type: data sheets, installation guides, certificates and declarations, CAD and BIM, each labelled so an engineer can grab what they need in one visit.
• Think before gating: asking for an email before a data sheet loses specifiers who only wanted to check a dimension. Gate the larger packs, such as a full BIM library, if you gate anything.

Application and sector pages

Engineers often search for the job before the product: drainage for a heavily loaded yard, brackets for a particular cladding system, castings for high-temperature service. Application pages answer that search. Each one describes the use and the conditions, names the products that fit and why, and links to them. Sector pages (water, rail, highways, energy, food processing) do the same for buyers who think in terms of their own industry.

Plan these into the site map from the start. For the build, what matters is that the product database can tag each product with the applications and sectors it serves, so the links between them stay correct as the range changes. Bolted on later, they tend to become thin pages that repeat each other.

Distributors, trade accounts and ordering portals

How you sell decides how much of the site sits behind a login.

Where to buy

If you sell through merchants and distributors, the where-to-buy page is one of the most used pages on the site. A searchable map or postcode finder works well, filtered by product range if not every stockist carries everything. Keep it tied to your distributor records, because a page listing a stockist who stopped carrying you two years ago sends business to a competitor.

Trade accounts and ordering portals

A trade portal lets account customers log in, see their own prices, check stock, reorder from their history and download invoices. Done well, it takes routine orders off your sales office. It only works if the prices, stock and order status come from your ERP or stock system directly. A portal that needs someone to re-key orders, or shows stock that was right last Tuesday, creates more work than it saves.

Be careful with public prices. Many manufacturers sell at different prices to different accounts, and publishing list prices can upset distributors. A common pattern is a public catalogue with no prices, a where-to-buy route for small buyers, and prices and ordering only behind a trade login.

Quote request flows that collect what you need

For made-to-order and engineered products, the quote form is where the website earns its keep. A generic contact form gets you an enquiry you then have to chase for details. A flow built around your estimating process gets most of them first time.

Ask only what your estimator needs to price the job, and make the rest optional. Accept drawings and specifications as uploads (PDF, DWG, STEP) with a sensible size limit. Route it by product line or region, send the buyer a reference number, and record it in your CRM with the page that brought them in, so you can see which parts of the site produce quotes and orders.

Connecting the website to your ERP and stock

Most of the hard problems on a manufacturer's website are data problems: product specs in one place, stock in another, prices in a third, and the website copied by hand from all of them. The more the site does (filters, live stock, trade prices, quote routing), the more it needs one source of truth behind it.

There are two common patterns. Either the ERP or a product information system holds the product data and the website reads from it, so a new variant is entered once, or the website holds the marketing content and pulls only stock, prices and order status from the ERP. Either can work. A website and an ERP that never talk, kept in step by hand, does not.

If your stock and orders still live in spreadsheets, fix that before building a portal on top of them. Our guide to off-the-shelf versus custom ERP for UK manufacturers covers that decision, and our custom software team builds the integrations between ERP, CRM and website when an off-the-shelf connector does not fit.

Export and multiple languages

If you sell abroad, decide whether you need translated pages or only English pages that overseas buyers can use. Many UK component makers export to engineers who read technical English comfortably. Translation is worth it where buyers search in their own language, or where a distributor in that market needs pages to send customers to.

If you do translate, give each language its own URL and tell Google how the versions relate using hreflang annotations, where each language version lists itself and all the others.² Google does not use hreflang or the HTML lang attribute to detect a page's language; it works that out itself,² so a page that is only half translated is still a problem. Translate the technical data and downloads too, or say clearly that they are in English.

Speed and Core Web Vitals

Manufacturing sites tend to be heavy, with large photos, 3D viewers and PDF previews, and engineers often open them on a phone on site. Google measures page experience with three Core Web Vitals, and publishes the thresholds for a good result.³

Those targets should be met at the 75th percentile of page loads, on mobile and desktop separately,³ so a fast result on your office broadband proves little. Google says it highly recommends achieving good Core Web Vitals for success with Search.⁴ In practice that means resized, modern image formats, loading 3D and video viewers only when someone asks for them, and keeping third-party scripts off product pages that do not need them. Put the thresholds in the brief and ask how they will be tested before launch.

Product structured data

Structured data is code that describes the page to search engines in a standard format. Google's product markup can help product information such as price, availability and review ratings appear in search results.⁵ There is a catch for many manufacturers. To be eligible for product snippets, the markup must include at least one of a review, an aggregate rating or an offer with a price.⁶ A price-on-application range with no reviews will not qualify for those rich results.

It is still worth doing properly where it fits. Mark up products you do sell at a published price, use the product variant markup Google describes when one product comes in several sizes or finishes,⁵ and add organisation details so search engines connect the products to your business. Generate the markup from the product database rather than writing it by hand, so it stays accurate when the range changes.

Rebuilding without losing rankings

The risk in any rebuild is the pages you already rank for. Product pages, old PDFs and application pages that have collected links over years can drop out of search if their URLs change and nothing points from the old address to the new one.

Google's guidance on moving a site with URL changes is clear about the essentials. Prepare a mapping from every old URL to its new one, including images and other files, and use server-side permanent redirects from old to new.⁷ Keep redirect chains short, ideally no more than three hops and fewer than five.⁷ Keep the redirects for as long as possible, generally at least a year.⁷ And expect some movement: for medium-sized sites, Google says it can take a few weeks or more before the new URLs replace the old ones in results.⁷ A permanent redirect (301 or 308) is also what tells Google which URL to treat as the main one.⁸

Before launch, crawl the old site and pull the pages that bring traffic and links from Search Console. After launch, test the redirects, submit the new sitemap and watch Search Console for errors.

How to brief an agency

A good brief tells the agency what the site has to do, what data it will draw on and what must not break, and it lets you compare proposals priced on different assumptions. Use the checklist below as a starting point.

When you compare proposals, ask each agency how they would structure your catalogue, where the product data will live, how they will integrate with your ERP, how they will hit the Core Web Vitals thresholds and who builds the redirect map. Vague answers on the data and the migration are a warning sign, because those are the parts that go wrong after launch.

Where to start

If you are planning a rebuild, start with the product data and the jobs the site has to do, then the design.

We build websites for manufacturers around a structured product database, with the integrations to ERP and CRM where they are needed, and our SEO team handles the migration and the search work afterwards. We do search work for manufacturers including Polydrain Civils in West Bromwich and Advanced Infrastructure in Telford, so we see from the inside how engineers and buyers find products. If you are in the West Midlands and would rather talk it through in person, our Birmingham web design team is based at Brindley Place.