A manufacturer does not lose on design, but on missing data
The buyer who found you is not looking for your company story since 1992. They are looking for whether you can make their part, in what batch, from what material and by when. If that is not on the site, they write to the supplier where they found it.
The buyer decides, not the end customer
Two people read a manufacturing website and neither buys anything for themselves. The buyer compares three suppliers at once and needs to pull together an enquiry. The engineer checks whether you handle the tolerances, materials and finishes their drawing calls for.
Both are doing the same thing: looking for a reason to rule you out. It happens fast and without ill will, because there are more enquiries than hours. A site where those facts are harder to find than at a competitor loses before anyone gets in touch.
What we measured in this industry
The sample holds 97 sites from this industry and 95 of them were measured. The median mobile performance is 60 against 61 for the whole sample. 83 of the 88 measured sites fall short of ninety points, the line Google calls a good result.
Zoom on a phone does not work on 32 of the 95 sites whose pages could be fetched. On 18 of those the setting is not missing, zooming is disabled on purpose.
35 sites in the industry run on WordPress and 19 of them carry at least one outdated plugin. An outdated plugin is the most common way a company website gets compromised.
A typical site from the industry
One real measured site from this industry, without a name, address or town. Not a cherry picked extreme: it is the one sitting exactly in the middle of the industry results.
- Mobile performance
- 60
- Time to main content
- 3.6 s
- Home page weight
- 1.1 MB
- Findings in the scan
- 1
The three faults we saw most often
Not true of every manufacturing site. True of most of the ones we measured.
The site speaks production, not enquiry
Company history, photos of the hall and a list of machines. Nowhere does it say what the customer gets out of it: which parts, which batch sizes, which materials, how long a sample takes. A machine list answers a question the buyer never asked.
Technical documents are not downloadable
Catalogues, data sheets, certificates and declarations of conformity tend to be available on request. On request means an email, a wait and another person. The buyer downloads from the supplier who published theirs, and your enquiry never opens.
A drawing cannot be zoomed on a phone
Blocked zoom is the most common accessibility fault we measured in this industry. Yet the engineer is looking at a phone on the shop floor, not a monitor in an office, and the first thing they do with a table of dimensions is pinch it open.
We get our enquiries at trade fairs and through sales reps
You do, and the site does not change that. It changes what happens after the fair. The buyer drives home with a stack of cards and opens three websites side by side. At that moment you are not selling, the page you have not opened in years is.
Enquiries from a manufacturing site rarely arrive. They are lost there. That difference never shows up in your traffic, because a loss sends no signal.
What pays off on a manufacturing site
Features from our catalogue that answer exactly the three faults above. The ones with a live demo can be tried out.
Want to know how your site stands against the industry?
Measure your own siteFrequently asked questions
What does a website for a manufacturer cost?
It depends on how much of the production the site has to carry. A presentation with downloadable documents and a guided enquiry starts at the same figure as an ordinary company site, see the pricing page. A product catalogue with parameters and multiple languages raises it, page count does not.
Does a manufacturer need an e-shop?
Usually not. Customers buy on an enquiry and a quote, not from a basket. It makes sense where you sell stock items, spare parts or consumables alongside custom work.
Is an English or German version worth it?
If you export or supply a foreign customer, yes. It is not about translating text but about a foreign buyer finding the same technical documents a Czech one does. Half a translation is worse than none.