Manufacturing & engineering
Your buyer is technical, sceptical, and already halfway through the decision.
By the time a procurement engineer contacts a supplier, most of the evaluation has happened without them. The website is either part of that evaluation or absent from it.
Werehouse Media builds websites, search visibility and quoting systems for UK manufacturers, engineering firms, fabricators and industrial suppliers. Manufacturing website design carries meaningful UK search volume at low difficulty and, unusually, an advertiser competition figure close to zero, which makes it one of the least contested commercial terms measured in this research. The buyer in this sector is technical and self-directed: specifications, tolerances, materials, capacity, lead times, certifications and evidence of comparable work decide the shortlist, usually before any human contact. A manufacturing website therefore succeeds or fails on whether that information is present, findable and precise, not on whether it looks modern. Behind the site, the highest-value systems work is quoting and estimating, request-for-quotation handling, production and stock visibility, and integration between an existing ERP or MRP system and everything that has to talk to it. Websites from £995 and £1,495 upwards, redesigns from £1,495, search from £695 a month, process audit £495, bespoke builds from £4,500.
The search problem
A commercial term with almost nobody bidding on it.
Manufacturing website design shows solid UK volume, low difficulty, and an advertiser competition figure of roughly 0.04, effectively nobody paying for it. That combination usually means one of two things: the term has no commercial value, or the sector has not noticed it. Here it is the second, and it is consistent with everything else about how this industry markets itself.
The deeper opportunity is not the head term anyway. It is that technical buyers search in extremely specific language (a process, a material, a tolerance, a standard, a capacity) and almost no UK manufacturer has a page for any of it.
What technical search actually looks like
- Process pages. CNC machining, laser cutting, press braking, injection moulding, powder coating, TIG welding, anodising. Each one a real search, each one made by somebody with a job to place.
- Material and capability pages. What you work with, to what tolerance, at what size, in what volume. "Stainless steel fabrication up to 6mm" is a search. "Quality engineering solutions" is not.
- Sector pages. The industries you supply, named. Aerospace, rail, medical, food processing, defence, each with its own compliance vocabulary and its own buyer.
- Certification and standard terms. ISO 9001, AS9100, ISO 13485, CE and UKCA marking. Buyers filter on these before anything else, and a supplier who does not name them is filtered out silently.
- Low-volume and prototype terms, which are frequently the softest of the lot and the ones that bring in the customer who scales up later.
None of this is difficult content to produce. It is difficult content to get produced, because the person who knows it is on the shop floor and the person writing the website is not. The practical fix is an hour with the works manager and a recorder.
The website
Built for procurement, not for a brochure.
A manufacturing website has an unusual job: it has to survive a technical evaluation by somebody who is actively looking for reasons to remove you from a list.
Specification over adjectives
"Precision engineering excellence" tells a buyer nothing. Machine list with envelopes and tolerances, materials handled, maximum part size, batch sizes served, typical lead times, and what you genuinely do not do. Every one of those is a filter the buyer is applying anyway; providing them means being filtered in rather than skipped.
Evidence, in a form an engineer trusts
Photographs of actual parts and actual plant, not stock imagery of sparks. Case studies with a problem, a constraint and a measurable outcome. Downloadable technical data where it exists. Certification numbers and expiry dates rather than logos.
A request-for-quotation route that respects the buyer's time
Drawing upload with sensible file type and size limits. Fields for quantity, material, tolerance and required date. An immediate acknowledgement that says who is looking at it and by when. Most manufacturers offer a generic contact form, which converts a technical enquiry into a phone call somebody has to make, and a proportion of buyers simply will not make it.
And the unglamorous half
- Fast on an industrial network, which is frequently worse than domestic broadband.
- Accessible, because larger customers write WCAG requirements into supply agreements and a supplier who cannot answer that gets scored down. See the capabilities page.
- Findable in AI search, which technical buyers are now using for supplier discovery in the same way they used to use directories. Specific, factual, well-structured content is exactly what gets retrieved and cited.
- A credentials answer ready for a procurement questionnaire, because it will arrive.
The systems behind it
Quoting is where the money leaks.
Ask a manufacturer where the operational pain is and quoting comes up before anything else. Estimating is skilled, slow, done by people whose time is expensive, and a large proportion of it is spent on work that never lands.
Quoting and estimating
A structured request in, a costing model that already knows material rates, machine time and setup, a quote out the same day, and automatic follow-up that stops the moment it is won or lost. The measurable outcome is not just speed. It is that the estimator stops re-deriving the same numbers, and that the win rate on quotes chased beats the win rate on quotes sent and forgotten. Quoting software is a well-populated market and the £495 process audit will often say buy one; where it does not fit, this is a strong candidate for a bespoke build.
Making the ERP talk to everything else
Most established manufacturers have an ERP or MRP system, and most of them have a ring of spreadsheets around it doing the jobs it does not do. That is normal and it is also where the retyping lives. Integration work here is unglamorous and returns quickly: the shop floor sees the same data as the office, the stock figure means something, and nobody keys the same order twice.
The rest of it
- Customer portals for order status, drawings, certificates of conformity and delivery notes, removing a large share of "where is my order" calls.
- Certificate and traceability handling, generated and filed rather than assembled by hand at dispatch.
- Production visibility. A screen the works manager actually looks at, built around this factory rather than a generic dashboard.
- Supplier and purchasing chasing, which quietly occupies a large part of somebody's week.
Process audit £495, connected systems from £1,950, bespoke builds from £4,500. See bespoke software and CRM.
Pricing
Published, like everything else.
The same published prices as everywhere else on this site. Quoted in writing before anything starts, fixed, and never adjusted because of the sector on the invoice.
| What | Price | Usually right when |
|---|---|---|
| SEO audit and fix list | £495 | You already have a site and nobody finds it. Credited against a build if a rebuild turns out to be the answer. |
| Local SEO | From £695/month | You need to be found in your own town and the map pack matters. |
| Full search programme | From £995/month | Content, technical work, earned links and AI search visibility together. |
| Website build | From £995, multi-page £1,495 upwards | No site, or one that cannot be extended. |
| Website redesign | From £1,495 | A site with rankings worth protecting that has run out of road. |
| Process audit | £495 | Before any system is quoted. Credited in full against builds over £2,000. |
| Bespoke build | From £4,500 | A system with its own data model: CRM, portal, internal tool. |
| Care | From £49/month | Anything live that needs watching. Never a condition of the build. |
The incumbent specialists in most sectors publish no prices at all and put a book-a-call form where the number should be. That is the gap this practice works in, and it is the same gap on every one of these pages.
Straight answers
Common questions.
Partly, and it is worth being precise about which part. Search will not replace a relationship-led pipeline in this sector and anyone claiming otherwise is selling. What it does is capture the buyer who has been given a specification and told to find three suppliers, and the buyer whose existing supplier has just let them down. Both are high-intent, both are searching in very specific technical language, and both are currently finding whoever happens to have a page about that process. That is usually not the best manufacturer, just the one who wrote it down.
Machine list with envelopes and tolerances, materials handled, maximum part sizes, batch sizes served, typical lead times, certifications with numbers, sectors supplied, photographs of real parts and real plant, case studies with measurable outcomes, and a request-for-quotation route that accepts a drawing. Then, and only then, the design. Almost every underperforming manufacturing site in Britain has that list inverted.
Generally not, and this is the one sector on this site where that is the right answer. Bespoke fabrication and machining genuinely cannot be priced without a drawing, and a published rate would be misleading. What you can and should publish is the shape of the commercial relationship: minimum order values, whether you take prototype and low-volume work, typical lead times, and how quickly a quotation comes back. Those are the questions that actually filter enquiries.
Almost certainly not, and I would be sceptical of anyone who suggested it. Replacing a working ERP is a large, risky, expensive project that rarely returns what it costs. The valuable work is nearly always the ring of spreadsheets and manual steps around it (the quoting model, the stock reconciliation, the certificate assembly, the order status enquiries) which can be automated or connected without touching the core system. That is what the process audit maps.
Increasingly, yes, and it catches manufacturers out because it arrives from procurement rather than from marketing. Larger buyers and public-sector contracts write WCAG conformance into supply agreements and score suppliers on security posture. The capabilities page publishes the full position, including which certifications are and are not currently held, so a procurement team can check without a meeting.
For a website, search programme, quoting system or integration piece, comfortably. For a full ERP implementation or a multi-site systems programme, no, and that is worth saying at the first conversation rather than the fifth. The capacity position is published on the capabilities page: a small number of concurrent projects, start dates typically two to three weeks out, and no cover if I am ill.
Worth reading next
Written for owners, not for marketers.
Next step
How long does a quotation take to go out?
If the answer is measured in days and the estimator is your most expensive person, that is the project. Tell me how a request for quotation arrives and what happens to it.