Technology should support a clear commercial and operational model.
We advise on industrial platform technology where the website, the product catalogue, the content system, the identity layer, the integrations to ERP and CRM, and the delivery process all have to work together. That usually means a CMS your marketing team can operate without a developer, product data read from the system that already owns it, single sign-on against your corporate directory, and measurement that reflects what visitors consented to.
We favour an architecture your team can understand, operate and improve, rather than a stack chosen for novelty. The sections below cover the platforms, integrations and governance decisions we work with most often on industrial and manufacturing projects.
Most of our industrial platform technology work sits on WordPress, built as a structured system rather than a theme with plugins layered on afterwards. Before recommending it we look at who owns the product data, how much technical content is published and by whom, how many markets and languages are involved, what the site has to integrate with, and whether an in-house team will maintain it after launch.
See WordPress for industrial B2B for the content model, component library and editorial roles we build on every project. Where a group has already standardised on another CMS for defensible reasons, we work inside that decision rather than reopening it.
A catalogue maintained by hand on the website drifts from the ERP or PIM within months. The architectural answer is that the website renders product data and does not store a second copy of it: specifications, part numbers, certifications, lead times and availability stay in the system of record and are synchronised into the site on a schedule the source can realistically support.
See PIM and product data for the mapping, synchronisation and failure handling involved, and B2B product catalogues for how that data is presented to technical buyers.
Industrial platforms rarely stand alone. Quote requests need to reach the CRM with the product context attached, distributor enquiries need routing by territory, and stock or pricing signals come from the ERP. We build those connections around what already owns each piece of data, with retries, queuing and alerting so a failed handoff surfaces the same day rather than being discovered when a lead is missing weeks later.
See industrial website integrations, plus HubSpot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud for the marketing side of the same picture.
Gated areas work better when access follows an identity your organisation already manages. We connect the site to the corporate identity provider through SAML or OpenID Connect, so an engineering team, a sales office or a distributor signs in with credentials they already hold, and group membership drives what each account can see: net pricing for one dealer tier, CAD files and installation manuals for a specifying engineer, order history for a procurement lead.
See portal development and B2B distributor portals for how authenticated areas are scoped and governed.
Export-driven groups need one platform that serves every market while local teams still publish their own content. That is a structural decision: which fields are shared technical facts held once and rendered everywhere, which content varies by country, and how language and region are declared to search engines so market sites reinforce rather than compete with each other.
See WordPress Multisite for running several affiliate or brand sites under shared governance, WPML and translation for the multilingual configuration, and international SEO for the search side.
For industrial companies selling into the EU, analytics has to be configured around a consent model rather than installed and left alone. We map consent categories to the signals GA4 expects, gate the tags accordingly, and verify the behaviour in the browser under each consent state instead of trusting the configuration screen. Scope varies by jurisdiction and by the categories your organisation defines, and your legal counsel or data protection officer confirms what applies.
See GA4 and consent mode for the implementation detail and analytics and tracking for the wider measurement plan.
Platform risk in industrial groups tends to accumulate quietly: a subsidiary site left unpatched for a year, a plugin whose author stopped publishing updates, editor accounts left active long after people changed roles. We set up managed core and plugin updates on a tested release cycle, staging environments, least-privilege roles, restricted administrative access and monitored backups, then document who is responsible for each of them.
See website security and website support and maintenance for how that runs after launch.
Replatforming is scoped as its own project, with URL mapping, redirect planning, asset and document migration, and a content audit that decides what is carried forward before anything is rebuilt. The point is to protect the search visibility and technical documentation an industrial site has accumulated over years.
See AEM, Sitecore and Drupal migrations, and website migration for the sequencing we follow. We start with a frank assessment of whether moving makes sense for your usage at all.
Every platform, integration and identity layer we build on or connect to for industrial B2B clients.
What technical and engineering stakeholders ask before committing to a platform.
We begin with the business and operating requirements, then assess content volume, product data ownership, the integrations the site has to hold, who needs authenticated access, security, performance and the capability of the team who will run it after launch. Industrial platform technology decisions follow from those constraints rather than from a preferred stack.
In practice that means answering a short list first: does the ERP or PIM own the catalogue, how many markets and languages are in scope, does the site need gated areas for distributors, and who maintains the platform once we hand it over. The recommendation changes materially depending on the answers.
Yes. We connect gated areas to the identity provider your organisation already runs, typically Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, Google Workspace or an on-premise directory, through SAML or OpenID Connect. An engineering team, a regional sales office or an internal procurement group signs in with their existing corporate account, so access follows joiners and leavers automatically instead of depending on a separate password list somebody maintains by hand.
External distributors and dealers are usually not in your directory. For them we pair the same login with an invitation and approval step owned by the channel or sales team, so a portal account is created under the same authorisation as a trading account. Group membership then drives what each account sees, whether that is net pricing for a dealer tier, CAD files and installation manuals for a specifying engineer, or order history for a procurement lead. See portal development and B2B distributor portals.
When the requirement supports it. See headless WordPress and enterprise WordPress for when a decoupled build earns its extra complexity, and when a well-built traditional install serves the same requirement with less overhead.
The case for headless is strongest where the same product and technical content has to feed several surfaces at once, such as a public catalogue, a distributor portal and a configurator running on separate front ends. It is weaker where one marketing team edits one site and would lose live preview in the process. We assess content reuse, editing needs, hosting responsibility and delivery timelines before recommending either approach.
Yes. See PIM and product data for how the site reads from your product information system or ERP rather than storing a separate copy. A change made once upstream, such as a revised technical datasheet, an updated lead time, a new certification or a discontinued reference, reaches every market page on the next synchronisation, which removes the manual re-entry that causes catalogues to drift apart across countries.
How fresh that data can realistically be depends on what the source system exposes. Daily catalogue synchronisation is usually achievable even from scheduled file exports, while near-real-time stock levels generally need an API.
That is common on long-lived industrial systems and it does not block the project. Where a direct API is unavailable we integrate through scheduled exports, a database view, an intermediate staging table or a middleware layer that already sits in front of the ERP. The practical consequence is update frequency rather than feasibility, so we set expectations on data freshness before development starts.
We also define what happens when the source is unreachable. The catalogue continues serving the last known good data with a freshness indicator, the failure is logged, and an alert reaches your team so an outage gets fixed rather than persisting quietly. See industrial website integrations.
Yes. See AEM migration, Drupal migration and Sitecore migration for the three platforms we most often move companies off. Each migration maps existing URLs, content and digital asset libraries before launch, and the destination is a WordPress build scoped to your real content model rather than a like-for-like recreation of the old structure.
On industrial sites the document estate is usually the largest risk: datasheets, safety data sheets, certificates and manuals accumulated over a decade, often linked from third-party sites we do not control. Those URLs are inventoried and redirected as a distinct workstream. See website migration.
We implement the technical side: cookie categories, banner behaviour, tag gating and consent signals passed to analytics and marketing tools, then verify in the browser that declining a category stops the corresponding collection. See GA4 and consent mode.
What consent is required, and in which markets, is a legal determination. Scope depends on where your visitors are, what data you process and the categories your organisation defines, and your legal counsel or data protection officer confirms what applies before we configure to it. We implement to that definition and flag any technical limitation we find. Related reading: does industrial B2B website data have to stay in the EU.
By deciding at field level what is shared and what varies before anything is configured. Technical specifications, part numbers and certification data are held once and rendered in every language, while marketing copy, application examples and local contact details are translated or written per market. Language and region targeting is then declared so country versions reinforce each other in search.
See WPML and translation for the configuration, WordPress Multisite for the multi-site structure, and hreflang for industrial B2B websites for the targeting signals themselves.
Every build is scoped so a marketing or communications team can operate it independently once handed over. Training runs on your own content and covers the specific components and workflows built for your content model, rather than generic WordPress documentation, and it is included in the project rather than surfacing later as a paid add-on.
Handover includes written documentation of the component library, the publishing roles and the integration behaviour, plus a support period while the first live content goes through the new process. Ongoing maintenance remains available beyond that. See website support and maintenance.
Tell us what you run today, what owns your product data and which markets you sell into, and we will set out the industrial platform technology we would recommend and why.