Industrial Equipment Website

Customers couldn’t find answers that were already on the website. The company distributes pumps, valves and process equipment to plants across the Midwest, and its website had grown over many years on a WordPress theme with layers of page-builder plugins.

It was slow on mobile, and the marketing team needed a developer for every new landing page. Thousands of datasheets, manuals and brochures sat in PDFs that customers couldn’t search, so sales engineers spent hours answering questions about specifications that were already published. And after years online, the site ranked well for many valuable searches. A rebuild could not afford to lose them.

Before designing anything, we audited the whole site: every page, the search terms each one ranked for, the links pointing in from other sites, and every PDF. We also read the questions customers sent to the sales team.

• A small set of pages carried most of the search traffic, and every one of them needed a safe new home.
• Customers searched by specification, such as flow rate, pressure, material and connection size, not by product name.
• The most-asked questions were answered in the PDFs, on pages nobody could find.
• The content had no structure. Product information was typed into pages, so nothing could be filtered or reused.

We rebuilt the content in Sanity, a headless CMS, with a proper content model: product lines, series and models with their specifications; industries served; services and repair; resources such as datasheets, manuals and CAD drawings; news; and branch locations.

The marketing team builds pages from a library of ready-made blocks, previews every change before it goes live and schedules publishing. Product claims pass through an approval step before they go live.

Products are now structured data rather than typed pages. Customers filter series by flow rate, pressure, materials and connection type, compare models side by side, and download the right datasheet, manual or CAD drawing from each model’s page. Each industry page shows the equipment that suits it, built from the same data.

AI search reads every datasheet, manual and brochure. Customers ask questions in plain words, such as the maximum operating temperature of a valve series or the seal options for a pump, and get an answer drawn from the company’s own documents, with a link to the exact page it came from.

It is built to be trusted:

• it answers only from the company’s documents, never from general knowledge;
• every answer shows its source, so customers can check it;
• when the documents don’t cover a question, it says so and offers to connect the customer with a sales engineer.

What customers ask also shows the marketing team which content is missing.

Every product page has a quote request. Each request goes straight into HubSpot with the product, quantity and application attached, and is assigned to the right sales engineer by region and product line. Sales engineers start each conversation knowing exactly what the customer is looking at.

The site is built on Next.js, with pages generated ahead of time and served from the edge, and images resized for every screen, so it loads fast on mobile at a plant or on the road. Every page was designed and tested against WCAG 2.1 AA, so it works with screen readers and keyboards and meets the accessibility expectations of US buyers.

The migration was planned page by page. Every old address was mapped to its new page with a permanent redirect, and titles, descriptions and structured data were carried across. Product, organisation and branch details were added as structured data, and the new sitemap was submitted on launch day.

After launch, we watched Search Console daily, tested every redirect and fixed any page that dropped out, until the whole site had been picked up again.

The front end is Next.js in TypeScript, deployed on Vercel, with content from Sanity. Algolia powers catalogue search and filters, and the AI search uses OpenAI models over an index of the company’s documents stored with pgvector. HubSpot receives every quote request and form, and visitors choose which tracking they accept.

The new website loads fast on mobile, and the marketing team launches pages and campaigns without waiting for developers. Customers find specifications themselves, with the source document one click away, and sales engineers spend their time on real projects instead of looking up datasheets. The company’s search presence moved across to the new site with its addresses intact.