Inside an Industrial Website Rebuild, Week by Week
A step by step walkthrough of an industrial supplier website rebuild: discovery, catalog architecture, spec pages, the RFQ path, launch, and the first 60 days after.
This is a walkthrough of how we run an industrial website rebuild, structured as a composite of the supplier and dealer projects we handle. The company described here is a stand-in built from the pattern rather than a single client, and every number below is a scope or timeline figure from our own process. There are no performance claims attached, because results depend on the market you are in.
The stand-in: a Gulf Coast industrial supplier and rigging house. Around 40 employees, two branches, several thousand SKUs, an inspection and repair service arm, and a website last touched six years ago that consisted of eight pages and a downloadable line card PDF.
For the service and pricing view, see our industrial marketing agency page.
Weeks 1 and 2: discovery
Discovery for this kind of build is mostly interviews with people who never get asked.
Inside sales tells you which questions eat the phone day. In this case: stock checks, sling capacity, inspection scheduling, and lead times on hydraulic components. Every one of those is a page.
Outside sales tells you which product lines they want more of and which ones they quote out of obligation. Marketing budget should follow the first list.
The service manager tells you where the recurring revenue actually is. For rigging houses, inspection and recertification is a steadier business than product sales, and it is almost always buried three clicks deep or missing entirely.
Deliverable at the end of week 2: a page map. Product families, service pages, branch pages, and the RFQ path, with a target search query attached to each one.
Weeks 3 and 4: architecture and content model
The catalog is the hard part. Several thousand SKUs cannot each become a page worth publishing, and they should not.
The model we land on most often is three layers. Category pages for the broad line, family pages for the thing buyers actually search, and a specification table inside the family page carrying the individual SKUs with sizes, capacities, and part numbers.
That gives you roughly 60 to 90 substantial pages instead of 3,000 thin ones. Family pages can carry real copy, real photos, real FAQs, and real schema. Thin SKU pages carry none of that and dilute the whole site.
Service pages get built at the same level of care. An inspection page names the standard, the interval, what the report contains, what happens when something fails, and how to schedule.
Branch pages name the parish and county coverage, the counter hours, the delivery radius, and the staff who answer the phone.
Weeks 5 through 8: build and content
Design and content run together, because in this sector the content decides the layout.
Every family page gets the same structure so the build stays maintainable:
- H1 with the searched term
- A definition paragraph of 40 to 80 words
- Specification table
- Photos of real product, with descriptive alt text
- Standards and certifications
- FAQ block from the inside sales question list
- Quote request tied to the page topic
Photography happens in this window. Stock images of generic machinery are the fastest way to look like every competitor. A single day at each branch produces enough product and facility photography for the whole site.
The RFQ path gets built as its own workstream. The form asks for the part or service, quantity, size or capacity, required certification, needed-by date, and a file upload. The confirmation screen states the response commitment. Behind the form, submissions route to a shared inbox with an owner and an escalation, because the fastest way to waste a rebuild is to let quote requests sit.
Week 9: technical and migration
Redirect mapping is the whole ballgame here. Every old URL that has any ranking or any inbound link gets a 301 to its closest new equivalent. Old PDFs included, since line cards often carry more links than the pages did.
Also in this week: page speed work on the new photography, schema markup for Organization, Product, LocalBusiness and FAQPage, sitemap generation, Search Console setup, call tracking numbers per branch, and analytics with the quote form set as the conversion.
Staging review runs with the same people from discovery. Inside sales catches spec errors that nobody else will.
Week 10: launch
Launch is boring when the prep is right. DNS cut, redirects verified with a crawl, forms tested end to end from a phone on cellular data, and Search Console notified of the new sitemap.
The first 48 hours are for watching error logs and re-crawling for 404s. Something always slips, usually a PDF path.
The 60 days after launch
This is the part most rebuilds skip, and it is where the return comes from.
Weeks 1 through 4 post-launch. Watch Search Console for queries the new family pages are surfacing on. Pages sitting at position 11 to 20 get expanded first, because those move with modest work.
Weeks 4 through 8. Publish supporting articles under the family pages that are getting impressions. Add the FAQ questions that arrive through the new quote form, because those are proof of real demand.
Ongoing, the job is to keep the specification data current and to keep adding families as the line grows. An industrial catalog site is a living asset. Treating it as a one-time project is how sites end up six years stale.
What this costs and how long it takes
A build at this scope runs $8,000 to $30,000 depending on catalog size, photography needs, and whether service scheduling or inventory integrations are involved. Ten to fourteen weeks is the honest timeline when the client can turn around content review inside a week.
Smaller shops with a single service line and no catalog can land at the bottom of that range in six to eight weeks.
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