A technical buyer looking for a supplier gives your website about ten seconds to answer one question: can these people make my part. Not are they nice, not have they been established since 1987. Can they make this, to this tolerance, in this material, in this quantity, by this date.
Most manufacturing websites spend those ten seconds on a photograph of a factory and a paragraph about commitment to excellence. This is what to put there instead, and why a manufacturing site is judged by completely different rules from a shop or a trade website.
Who is actually on the site?
Four sorts of visitor, and none of them is the general public.
- A buyer with a drawing and a deadline, shortlisting three suppliers. Wants capability, capacity and a fast response.
- A design engineer checking whether what they have drawn can actually be made, and by whom. Wants tolerances, materials and processes.
- Procurement doing due diligence on a supplier somebody else picked. Wants certifications, company details, financial credibility and quality process.
- A distributor or agent looking for a UK manufacturer to represent. Wants capacity, lead times and whether you export.
All four are looking for reasons to eliminate you. That sounds harsh, but it is how a shortlist works, and it means the job of the site is to remove doubt rather than to create desire.
Capability pages beat a services list
"Precision engineering" is not information. What a technical visitor needs is the specifics, and the more specific you are the better you do, because specificity is also what people search.
For each process you offer, publish the envelope you work within:
- The machines, by make, model and number of axes. A machine list is the single most useful page on a subcontract manufacturing website and almost nobody publishes a good one.
- Capacities. Maximum part size, bar capacity, table size, press tonnage, weld thickness, whatever the limit is for your process.
- Tolerances you hold routinely, as opposed to the best you have ever achieved.
- Materials you work with regularly, and the ones you will not touch.
- Batch sizes. One off and prototype, small batch, high volume. Say which you actually want, because a buyer with a run of five will not ring a site that only talks about volume production.
- Typical lead times, honestly, with a note that they move.
- Finishing and secondary operations, in house or subcontracted, and say which.
This is also the content that gets you found. Nobody searches "quality engineering partner". They search the process, the material and the town.
Write it yourself, or get an engineer to. A copywriter cannot invent your tolerances, and a page written by somebody who has not been on the shop floor reads exactly like one. If the writing is the part you are dreading, there is a method for getting it out of your head and onto the page in writing the words for your own website.
Certifications and approvals go near the top
For procurement, these are a filter before anything else is considered. If you hold a quality management certification such as ISO 9001, or sector approvals for aerospace, automotive, rail, defence or medical work, they belong on the homepage and on a page of their own with the certificate numbers and expiry dates.
Two practical points. Keep them current, because an expired certificate on a website is worse than none. And if you are working towards an approval rather than holding it, say exactly that, because a buyer will find out and the honesty is worth more than the badge.
It is also worth saying plainly what your inspection and quality process looks like, in a paragraph a buyer can read: what gets measured, on what equipment, and what documentation comes with a delivery. Certificates of conformity, material certificates and first article inspection reports are the sort of thing a procurement department wants to know it can have before it places an order, not after.
The same page should carry your company registration number, your registered address, and whether you carry the insurances a customer will ask about. Procurement will look for these, and a site that does not have them creates work for the buyer, which is a reason to move on.
Downloads, drawings and whether to gate them
Data sheets, specification sheets, material certificates, a capability brochure, sometimes CAD models of standard products. Technical buyers expect to download these.
The temptation is to put them behind a form to capture the lead. Resist it for anything a buyer needs to do their job. An engineer comparing three suppliers at half past four will simply use one of the other two rather than fill in a form for a datasheet, and you will never know you were eliminated.
Gate the things that are genuinely marketing, like a capability overview or a case study pack, if you must. Leave the technical documents open, name the files sensibly so they can be found, and put the revision date on each one.
The enquiry form a manufacturer needs
A generic "your message" box is the wrong tool here, because the reply is always going to be a list of questions, and that round trip costs you two days on a quote somebody else answered the same afternoon.
Ask for what you need to quote:
- A drawing or file upload, accepting the formats you actually work with, with a note about what you accept.
- Quantity, and whether it is a one off, a batch or a schedule.
- Material, or a note that you are open to suggestions.
- Required date, and whether there is flexibility.
- Whether this is for a quote, a prototype or a production enquiry.
- Company name and a direct number, because business enquiries expect to be rung back.
Add a line about confidentiality and whether you will sign a non disclosure agreement, because a lot of engineering enquiries stall on that question.
Do you need your whole catalogue online?
If you make standard products, some of it, yes. If you are a subcontract manufacturer, almost certainly not, and trying to reproduce a catalogue that lives in your quoting system is how manufacturing website projects become expensive.
The middle path most manufacturers end up happy with is a set of capability pages, a handful of representative products or projects in detail, and a downloadable catalogue in PDF that you already maintain. If you genuinely need a live product catalogue with stock and pricing, that is a shop, it is priced by product count, and it is a different project.
The ten second test on your own homepage
Try this before you change anything. Find somebody who does not work for you, show them your homepage for ten seconds, take it away, and ask them three questions: what do we make, what processes do we have, and who do we make it for. If they cannot answer, neither can a buyer, and no amount of design will fix a homepage that does not say what it is.
The fix is usually one line of text at the top. "Subcontract CNC machining and fabrication in the East Midlands. One offs to batches of five thousand, aluminium, stainless and mild steel, ISO 9001." That sentence is not beautiful and it will do more for your enquiry rate than a new photograph of the front of the building.
What to photograph, and what not to
Manufacturing sites are full of the wrong pictures. The building from the car park, a generic stock image of a robot arm, three men in hi vis pointing at a clipboard. None of it tells a buyer anything.
Photograph the work instead. Finished parts on a clean surface, close enough to see the finish. Work in progress on the machine. Something being measured, because inspection is what a buyer is quietly worried about. The machine list as actual machines with their control panels visible. A part next to a ruler or a coin so the scale is obvious. These are easy to take on a phone, they cost nothing, and they are evidence rather than decoration.
Get them off the camera and compressed before they go on the site, though. Full size photographs straight out of a phone are the most common reason a manufacturing website crawls on a mobile connection, which matters when a buyer is looking you up between meetings. The fix is covered in why a slow website costs you work.
Selling overseas, and to buyers who are not in your town
Most subcontract manufacturers get enquiries from well beyond their county, which changes a few small things on the site.
- Say where you are properly, including the country. It sounds obvious. A surprising number of UK manufacturing sites never say England on any page.
- Give dimensions in the units your customers use, and give both where the sector is mixed.
- Say whether you export, and if so whether you handle shipping or work to the customer's forwarder.
- Put a direct number on the site, with the international dialling code, and say what hours you are on it.
- Make the email address a person, not a general enquiries box, if you want serious buyers to use it.
Case studies do more work here than anywhere else
In manufacturing, a case study is evidence of capability rather than a marketing story, so write it as an engineer would. What the part was, what was difficult about it, the process route you used, the tolerance held, the volume, the lead time, and what the customer needed that others could not do.
Get into the habit of taking two photographs and three notes at the end of any job that was technically interesting. That is the whole cost of a case study, and it is far easier than trying to reconstruct one eighteen months later when the marketing budget finally arrives.
You do not need a customer's name for this to work, and often you will not be able to use it. "A tier one automotive supplier" plus real technical detail is more persuasive than a named logo with no substance. Six of these, written properly, will outperform any amount of design.
What should a manufacturing website cost?
Structurally it is a brochure site with a lot of technical content and some downloads, so the build is not the expensive part. A UK freelancer or small studio will typically quote £1,500 to £5,000, more if product data or an integration with a quoting or stock system is involved, which is where manufacturing projects genuinely do get costly.
The real cost is nearly always internal: getting an engineer to write or check the capability pages. Budget that time properly, because it is the thing that makes the site work and it is the thing that slips.
On a rental, most small manufacturers land in the ten page bracket at £149 a month excluding VAT, with the first three months paid up front and no setup fee. Hosting, SSL, business email and a yearly redesign are included, one design revision comes with the build, and content changes are unlimited and free, which is genuinely useful here because machine lists and lead times change.
To sanity check a quote before it lands, the four UK bands are in why UK website quotes vary so much, or you can price up your website directly.
The short version
Publish your machines, your capacities, your tolerances, your materials and your approvals, in that order, and make the technical documents easy to download. Ask for a drawing rather than a message. Then answer quickly, because in subcontract manufacturing the supplier who quotes first is very often the supplier who gets the work.
