In Manufacturing, You Inspect Every Part Except This One
Manufacturers document everything that leaves the building, except the web address. Only 70.9% of the sites I audited carry the tags that decide what a forwarded link looks like, the softest check this trade owns.
Last week I spent a morning at a manufacturing shop, watching a man walk me through a first article inspection report.
Fourteen pages. Every dimension on the drawing, next to the number they actually hit, initialed and dated, in a binder with forty more like it behind it.
Then he showed me the gauges. Then he showed me the log where they record checking the gauges against another gauge.
He wasn’t showing off. I’d asked him how a new customer’s first order gets handled, and that binder was the honest answer.
I drove home thinking about it.
The thing I do in every parking lot
Before I pull out, I paste the shop’s web address into a message to myself and send it.
Four seconds. It tells me more about how a business is organized than half an hour of introductions usually manages to.
That afternoon it came back as the address and nothing else. No company name, no picture, no line about what they make. Just the letters.
Fourteen pages for a bracket, and not one word attached to the thing that leaves the building more often than the parts do.
Who those tags are written for
The tags that fill that space are called Open Graph tags, and Google was never the audience for them.
They’re for the apps people forward links in, and they carry whatever gets drawn on the screen when your address lands in someone’s conversation.
So who was ever going to bring them up with you?
They don’t count toward the grade I hand out, either. My score is ten weighted checks, the whole list is on my methodology page, and these tags are not among them.
Which is a decent part of why nobody sells them to you. The check that decides what a stranger sees is a check nobody is scored on, and 70.9% of the manufacturing websites I audited have it handled.
The rest arrive as the letters of an address with no company attached to them.
Two of the checks I ran put this trade at 42 of 47: those tags, and the 69 out of 100 it scores overall.
The one this trade wins outright is the name on the page itself, and no owner I have met wrote that line either.
Neither one was ever anybody’s job.
Where the work really comes from
Almost nobody types a machine shop’s name into Google at eleven at night.
Work here starts with a request for quote, an RFQ, and it arrives because a person put you on a list. An engineer specs a part. A buyer builds a short list. Someone senior asks to see who’s on it.
Do you know what your name looks like when it gets there? A purchasing department is an organized machine for eliminating suppliers, and most of what it does happens before anyone in your building hears a telephone ring.
Your website doesn’t get visited at the beginning of that. It gets sent.
And it gets sent the way everything gets sent now, in a message, opened on a phone, by a person with four other things going on and a habit of judging fast.
A florist once told me flat out that nobody shares a flower shop’s website, and the half of that she had wrong was costing her weddings.
How many of the last ten jobs you quoted began with a forwarded link? You probably can’t say. Neither can your website, which is a different conversation for a different day.
“Nobody buys a bracket off a website”
Correct. I’ve never argued otherwise and I’d lose if I tried.
Nothing on your site is going to win you a program. The parts win it, the price wins it, and answering your phone on a Friday afternoon in July wins more of it than either.
But all of that gets decided after someone has agreed to a first conversation, and your link is standing at that door.
How many first conversations do you think you never got? Nobody can tell you, which is the reason this one goes unfixed for years at a time.
I have watched a buyer put two shops side by side in a message thread, where one link arrived with a name on it and the other arrived bare.
81.6% of the manufacturers I counted have a website at all, so the missing piece was never the website.
Speed isn’t the thing I’d sell you either. These sites come out of my phone test at 58 out of 100, the same average I get across every trade I run it on, and a fast page that arrives blank is still a page that arrives blank.
Why it’s the one that gets skipped
Nothing in this trade skips a check out of carelessness. You skip it because it never made it onto the traveler.
There’s no drawing for a website. Nobody hands you a spec with the tags listed on it, no customer audit has ever asked to see them, and no salesperson has ever put them on a quote, because you can’t photograph the result and you can’t charge much for the work.
Every other quality problem in your building has an owner, a document and a date on it. The tags have a designer who finished up two summers ago and a hosting bill that renews itself unread.
Nobody in your building was ever handed a traveler for the website itself, which is why none of the upkeep has an owner or a date on it.
So it sits there, undone, on a site that cost real money and works fine in every way anyone thought to check.
Two of the shops I’ve built for had theirs filled in inside an afternoon. Neither owner has raised it since, which is usually how you can tell a job was worth doing.
The other things that travel without you
Your web address isn’t alone out there. Your listing travels, your rating travels, and an old capability sheet from 2019 travels with the fax number still printed on it.
Who signed off on any of those?
None of that is on anyone’s list either, because the list in your building covers what you make.
I build for shops in this trade now, and I’ve stopped opening with design. I open by asking what leaves the building with your name on it and who checked it last.
Usually the answer is a long pause and then a laugh, because everybody already knows that the documentation stops at the shipping door and nobody has ever been comfortable admitting it.
Put it on someone’s list
Every part in that binder has a number written beside it and initials underneath.
Your web address has neither, and it leaves the building more often than anything in that binder.
So inspect it. Would it pass? Ask whoever built your site to send you a picture of what your homepage looks like pasted into a message, and give them until Friday to come back.
If it turns out that nobody holds that job, send me the address and I’ll run the check myself. One page, no binder, and you can file it wherever you keep the reports that arrived with bad news in them.
