Most manufacturers do not redesign their website because they want to. They redesign because something broke: the dealer network outgrew the find-a-dealer page, the product line no longer fits the navigation, the site looks ten years older than the product, or marketing finally asked "where do these leads even go?"
Most of our manufacturing website design projects are redesigns, not blank slates. Here is what the process actually looks like, how long it takes, and the one step that protects everything you have already earned in search.
The honest triggers: buyers cannot find or compare your products, dealers complain the site sends them nothing, the catalog lives in PDFs, the site fails on phones, or your brand has outgrown the design. If two or more of those sound familiar, a redesign stops being cosmetic and starts being a sales problem.
Before anything gets designed, we learn your product line, your dealer network, and the exact path a buyer takes before asking for a quote. What does the buyer need to compare? What does the dealer need to receive? What does the current site capture, and where does it leak? Discovery turns a "new website" project into a list of jobs the website has to do.
Buyers judge the product by the website before they ever touch the product. When we redesigned for Vexus Boats, the design had to feel like their showroom: full-screen photography, a product gallery that does the boats justice, and a dealer locator that turns interest into visits. Your design target is the same - a site that sets the expectation your dealers get to fulfill, not a template with your logo pasted on.
The build is where redesigns diverge. A product catalog and marketing site is one kind of project; configurators, dealer portals, and internal tools are platform work. Big builds are phased so you see working software early - the public site can launch while the dealer portal is still in progress. Everything we build is custom-coded, which means the site fits your process instead of forcing your process into a template's box.
This is the part that separates a successful redesign from a quiet disaster. Your current site has URLs that rank and links that point at them. Change the URLs without redirects and that equity evaporates - traffic drops 30-50% and nobody can say why.
The fix is unglamorous and essential: a full inventory of existing URLs, a 301 redirect map from every old URL to its new home, canonical tags on the new pages, and a fresh sitemap submitted at launch. We crawl the old site before it goes away precisely so nothing ranks today that 404s tomorrow.
After go-live: watch search console for crawl errors, watch the funnel analytics against the pre-redesign baseline, and fix what the data exposes. We do not disappear after launch - and once the platform converts, the next bottleneck is traffic. That is the handoff point to manufacturing marketing: SEO, retargeting, and dealer-network campaigns built on the new foundation.
A product-driven marketing site typically launches in a few months. Platform work - dealer portals, configurators, internal tools - runs longer and ships in phases, so the timeline depends on what discovery uncovers. What we can promise is that the timeline is set together during discovery and tracked in the open. No surprises, no scope creep.
Thinking about a redesign? Start with our guide to manufacturing website design, or skip ahead and tell us what is broken - we have probably rebuilt it before.