Small Manufacturer Website: What a Shop Under 20 People Needs

A small manufacturer website needs five to seven pages: a home page, capabilities, an equipment list, quality and certifications, the industries you serve or parts you make, an about page, and an RFQ or contact page. That is enough for a buyer to decide whether your shop can make the part and how to send you the drawing. Blogs nobody updates, rotating sliders and stock photos of handshakes add work without adding quotes. Plan on one to two working days of the owner's time up front to gather facts and photos, then about 30 minutes a quarter to keep it accurate.

Why does a shop under 20 people need a different kind of website?

Because the typical American manufacturer is small, and most website advice is written for companies with a marketing department. The Census Bureau's Statistics of U.S. Businesses counts 239,265 manufacturing firms in 2022. Of those, 177,779 (about 74 percent) had fewer than 20 employees, and 97,530 had fewer than five. The National Association of Manufacturers' small and medium manufacturers page cites the same share: 74 percent of U.S. manufacturers have fewer than 20 employees. Widen the cutoff to 500 employees and the SBA Office of Advocacy says small firms represent 98 percent of manufacturing firms.

In a shop of eight or twelve people, the owner quotes jobs, runs the floor and answers the phone. The site has to work for months without attention, and the few things that do change (machines, certifications, hours) have to be quick to change.

The buyer's questions do not shrink with your headcount. An engineer or purchasing agent wants to know whether you can make the part, in their material, to their tolerance, in their quantity, and how to send the drawing. A seven-page site that answers those plainly beats a forty-page site that does not.

Which pages does a small manufacturer website need?

Here is the working set, what belongs on each page, and a rough idea of the owner time it takes to supply the content.

Page	What goes on it	Owner time
Home	One sentence on what you make and for whom, your city, the phone number, three or four photos of real work, and an RFQ button	1 hour
Capabilities	Processes, materials you run, part size range, tolerances you hold routinely, and the quantities you are set up for	2 hours
Equipment	Machine list with make, model, axes, travels or tonnage, plus inspection equipment	1 hour
Quality and certifications	Each certification with registrar and scope, how parts are inspected, and what paperwork ships with them	1 hour
Industries or parts made	The markets you serve and four to eight example parts, each with material, process and quantity	2 to 3 hours
About	When the shop started, who owns it, headcount, square footage, and a photo of the owner	30 minutes
RFQ and contact	A short form that accepts a drawing or CAD file, plus phone, street address, hours and a map	30 minutes

If seven pages feels like too much, capabilities and equipment can share a page, and industries can live as a section on the home page. Five pages is a working minimum.

Write example parts like a quote, not an ad

"Precision parts for demanding industries" tells a buyer nothing. "6061 aluminum manifold, 40 pieces, 3-axis milled and clear anodized, held +/-0.001 on the bores" tells them exactly what you do. Customer-owned designs, especially anything under an NDA or export controls, need the customer's written permission before they go online, so many shops show their own parts, generic features or cropped close-ups instead. For the capabilities page itself, our guide on writing a manufacturing capabilities page goes through it line by line.

What can a small shop leave off its website?

Every page you skip is a page that cannot go stale.

A blog you will not update. A news page whose last post is three years old tells a visitor the site, and possibly the shop, is not being looked after. If you have writing time, spend it on the capabilities and example parts pages, which buyers actually read.
Sliders and rotating banners. They push your actual message off the first screen on a phone, and a visitor who scrolls past sees one slide at most. One strong photo and one clear sentence do the job better.
Stock photos of handshakes, hard hats and glowing globes. Buyers have seen the same images on a dozen competitor sites. A slightly imperfect phone photo of your own machine says more.
PDF-only capability sheets. Keep the PDF if your reps hand it out at trade shows, but put the same content on the page as text. A PDF has to be downloaded and pinch-zoomed on a phone, and text on the page is quicker for you to update.

Does the site really need to work on a phone?

Yes. Google's own documentation states it plainly: "Google uses the mobile version of a site's content, crawled with the smartphone agent, for indexing and ranking." If a page is hard to use on a phone, that is the version Google judges you on.

The test takes ten minutes: open every page on your own phone, tap the phone number to make sure it dials, and submit the RFQ form with a real drawing attached.

How do you take good shop photos with a phone?

A current phone camera is good enough for a manufacturing website. What usually goes wrong is light and clutter, not the camera. Set aside one morning and work through this list.

Clean first. Sweep chips, wipe coolant off the doors, move the trash cans and the forklift. Fifteen minutes of cleanup improves photos more than any setting.
Use daylight. Shoot mid-morning with the bay doors open and every overhead light on. Turn the flash off; it flattens machines and throws glare off sheet metal.
Wipe the lens. A phone that lives in a shop pocket has a smeared lens, which causes that hazy, foggy look.
Hold the phone sideways at chest height. Take several of each shot and keep the sharp ones.
Put parts on a plain background. A clean surface plate or a sheet of white poster board next to a window works well for close-ups.
Show people at work, with permission. An operator in safety glasses loading a fixture is more convincing than an empty room. Ask before you post anyone.
Check the background. Look for customer drawings, part numbers, open job travelers and the scheduling whiteboard before you publish.

Expect to take 40 or 50 photos to get the 15 or 20 you will use. When you hand them over, name the files for what they show. Google's image SEO guidance recommends filenames that are "short, but descriptive," so vertical-mill-aluminum-manifold.jpg beats IMG_4521.jpg, and it calls alt text "the most important attribute when it comes to providing more metadata for an image."

How much owner time does a small manufacturer website take?

Add up the table above and the photo morning, and the owner's share is roughly 10 to 12 hours, which can be spread over two weeks of evenings. Most of it is gathering facts you already have somewhere:

Equipment list: start from your fixed asset list or the equipment schedule on your insurance policy, then walk the floor to confirm it.
Certifications: copy the registrar name, scope wording and expiration date straight from the certificate.
Materials and tolerances: pull them from the last 20 quotes you sent. What you actually quoted is more honest than what you could theoretically hold.
Example parts: look at last year's best jobs by margin or by repeat orders and pick the ones you want more of.

If writing is the hard part, talk instead. Have someone ask you the questions a new customer asks on the phone, record 30 minutes of answers, and edit the transcript down.

How does one person keep the website current?

Update on events, and check on a schedule. The events are easy to spot because they are things you already deal with:

You buy, sell or scrap a machine.
A certification renews, changes scope or lapses.
The phone number, address or hours change, including holiday closures.

Then set a 30-minute check each quarter. Pairing it with something you already do every quarter, such as estimated tax payments, keeps it from slipping.

Submit a test RFQ with a file attached and confirm it arrives, and that it did not land in spam.
Call the phone number listed on the site.
Compare certification expiration dates with what the site shows.
Read the equipment list while standing on the floor.
Swap in one or two new photos of recent work.
Confirm hours match on the website and on your Google Business Profile.

Also make sure you hold the logins for the website, the domain and the email, so nothing depends on one employee who might leave.

Why should your website match your Google Business Profile exactly?

Google's help page on local ranking says "businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local search results," and warns that if your business info isn't accurate, your Business Profile might not show up for relevant searches in your area. The same page says prominence is based partly on "how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have."

Name: use the name on your sign and your trucks, the same way every time. Do not mix the legal name, the DBA and an abbreviation.
Address: pick one format, including the suite or building number, and keep it identical.
Phone: list the main line that someone answers during business hours, not the owner's cell and not a tracking number that may change.
Hours: the same hours on the site and the profile, and add holiday closures to both.

Put the name, address, phone and hours in the footer of every page, then copy them character for character into your Google Business Profile and any directory or chamber listing you maintain.

A small shop does not need a big website. It needs a short one that is accurate, shows real work, and makes it easy to send a drawing. Our 12-point manufacturing website checklist covers each element in more depth, and our local SEO guide for manufacturers walks through setting up the Google Business Profile itself. Exhibit Domain plans are $99, $199 and $499 a month billed annually. Monthly-only billing costs 25 percent more and cancels any time, and annual plans carry a 7-day refund window. Hosting and SSL are included. See our pricing page, or request a quote for a custom project.

Frequently asked questions

How many pages does a small manufacturing company website need?

Five to seven. Home, capabilities, equipment, quality and certifications, industries or example parts, about, and an RFQ or contact page cover what a buyer needs to decide whether to send a drawing. Capabilities and equipment can share a page, and industries can sit on the home page, if you want to start smaller.

Can I use phone photos on my manufacturing website?

Yes. A current phone camera is good enough if the shop is clean, the light is good and the lens is wiped. Shoot mid-morning with the doors open and the flash off, put parts on a plain background, and check every frame for customer drawings or part numbers before it goes online.

Should a small manufacturer have a blog?

Only if someone will keep it up. A blog whose last post is years old makes the whole site look neglected. Most small shops get more from adding detail to their capabilities and example parts pages, which buyers read when they are deciding who to quote.

How often should a small shop update its website?

Update it whenever something changes, such as a machine purchase, a certification renewal, or new hours, and run a 30-minute check each quarter. That check should include a test RFQ submission, a call to the listed phone number, and a comparison of hours with your Google Business Profile.