Written by
Founder & CEO, Gspikes
I own and run Gspikes, the agency I founded in 2018. Before going all-in, I led SEO at Chain Reaction — one of the region's largest digital agencies — and shipped production code at Orange and Forbes. Everything published here comes from projects I've personally built, migrated, or ranked.
Last updated · November 2026
Good manufacturing website design does three jobs: it helps an engineer find and specify the right part, it helps a distributor or dealer reorder, and it gets a quote request to the right salesperson. We checked the websites of the 70 companies in the 2026 Fortune 500’s manufacturing sectors to see how many do those jobs. Most show their products. Far fewer let a buyer act: of the 53 sites we could score, 15 offer a quote or contact-sales path within one click of the homepage, 14 a dealer or distributor locator and 11 a product finder.
Four sites do everything we tested, and one of them, Cummins, runs on Drupal. Drupal is also the second most common platform in the group, behind Adobe Experience Manager and ahead of WordPress. Below is what the big manufacturers ship, what 25 manufacturers built on Drupal asked for, and how to choose between Drupal and a PIM-plus-commerce stack for your own site.
Manufacturing website design at a glance (November 2026)
- Of 53 Fortune 500 manufacturer sites we could score, 44 (83%) have product pages, but only 15 (28%) offer a quote or contact-sales path, 14 (26%) a dealer or distributor locator and 11 (21%) a product finder or configurator.
- Four do all seven things we tested: Cummins, Carrier, Sherwin-Williams and Vertiv. None of the 10 aerospace and defense sites has a locator, a quote path, product documents or a customer login.
- Of the 55 sites we could read, 13 run Adobe Experience Manager and 10 run Drupal, including Cummins, International Paper, GE Aerospace, L3Harris and Textron. WordPress runs 7 and Sitecore 6. Fifteen sites could not be checked.
- Of 25 manufacturer case studies on drupal.org, 16 describe a product catalog or finder and 16 several languages or countries. Only 3 describe online ordering.
Manufacturing web design starts with three buyers
The engineer who needs to specify a part. They arrive with numbers: a pressure rating, a viscosity, a shaft size. They need a catalog they can filter by those attributes, then a spec sheet, an SDS or a CAD file. Genesee Polymers, a Michigan maker of silicone chemicals, rebuilt its site so customers can filter products by pH, molecular weight and viscosity and download technical and safety data sheets from each product page.
The distributor or dealer who needs to reorder. They need to log in, see their own prices and documents, and place or check an order without a phone call. End customers need the other half: a locator that sends them to the nearest dealer.
The buyer who wants a price. Many industrial products are sold on quotation. The site has to capture enough detail to quote and route the request to the right rep by product line and region. Genesee uses a “request a quote” basket built on Drupal Commerce: customers add products and pack sizes, submit, and sales follows up.
Two needs cut across all three: language and country, and search. A catalog nobody can search is a brochure.
Manufacturing website design: what the 70 biggest US makers ship
We took every company in the 2026 Fortune 500 (published June 2026) in Fortune’s five manufacturing sectors, 70 companies from Ford at number 22 to Resideo at number 500, and checked each homepage and the key pages it links to on 2 November 2026.
Product pages are common. Buying tools are not. Forty-four of 53 sites present their products. The other nine are corporate sites that send visitors elsewhere, as General Motors does to Chevrolet, Buick, GMC and Cadillac. That works if the corporate site gets buyers to the right brand site in one click.
The sector decides the feature set. None of the 10 aerospace and defense sites offers a locator, a quote path, product documents or a customer login. Their customers are governments and airlines. Materials companies are the opposite: half of the 16 we scored offer a quote or sales path, such as Cleveland-Cliffs’ contact-sales form or Builders FirstSource’s “Get a Quote”. Six of the seven chemical companies link safety or technical data sheets, usually through an SDS finder or library.
The best sites do all of it. Cummins offers a product finder for engines and generators, a parts catalog, a dealer locator, a request-a-quote form, brochures and manuals, an online parts store and 99 locale versions. Carrier, Sherwin-Williams and Vertiv cover the same seven features. International Paper links to OrderIP, its online ordering platform, plus safety data sheets and a contact page routed by business line. Eastman pairs a product finder with an SDS finder and a customer login.
What the big manufacturers’ websites run on
Adobe Experience Manager runs 13 of the 55 sites we could read. Drupal is second with 10: Cummins, International Paper, GE Aerospace, L3Harris, Textron, Westlake, Sonoco, Crown Holdings, Wabtec and Autoliv. Five announce Drupal 11 in their headers or page code and two Drupal 10. WordPress runs 7, mostly metals and packaging companies, and Sitecore 6. Licensed suites (Adobe, Sitecore and Optimizely) run 22 of the 55; open-source platforms (Drupal, WordPress and Umbraco) run 18. If you are weighing a suite, our breakdown of what Adobe Experience Manager costs covers the licence and build side.
Cummins, the one Drupal site that does all seven things we tested, announces Drupal 10 and Drupal Commerce in its generator tag. International Paper, whose redesign is one of the drupal.org case studies below, now reports Drupal 11 on Acquia. Seven of the 55 sites render through a JavaScript framework, five of them Next.js.
B2B product catalog: model the data before you design the page
The catalog is where manufacturer sites succeed or fail. Every attribute an engineer filters by has to be a real field, a number with a unit or a value from a controlled list, because text in a description can’t be filtered.
Where that data lives is the first decision. If you have a product information management system (PIM), keep it as the single source of truth and let it feed the site. Caleffi, an Italian maker of heating and plumbing components, does exactly that: its portal pulls thousands of product references from an external PIM over REST, and country teams add editorial content in Drupal, across 30 country sites in more than 20 languages. Without a PIM, a smaller catalog can live in the CMS: Genesee’s staff update specs by CSV import and upload data sheets in bulk.
Then make it findable. Master Bond, an adhesives maker with thousands of formulations, moved from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 with faceted Solr search and a custom product selector, and reports 30% more leads since. Genesis Attachments, a heavy-equipment maker, indexes the text inside its PDF manuals and spec sheets so site search finds them.
Dealer portals and distributor locators
A locator is the easy half. Genesis built its dealer locator with Geocoder, Leaflet and Views, searchable by state or ZIP code. Its value depends on the data: someone has to own the dealer records.
A portal is the hard half, because access control is the product. Finstral, a window and door maker with more than 1,000 dealer partners in 14 countries, built a partner asset hub where price lists must be separated by partner, market and permission level. Every search and document request goes through Drupal as the only authorizer, built on Drupal’s Access Policy API, and the agency says it published the resulting External Roles module on drupal.org. Volkswagen’s dealer portal for three of its brands shows or hides each article by dealership role and region.
Dealer portal software or a CMS portal?
Buy dedicated dealer portal software, usually sold as partner relationship management (PRM), when the portal’s main jobs are deal registration, lead distribution, co-op funds and partner training. Vertiv’s partner login, for example, goes to a separate partner system. Build on your CMS when the main jobs are documents, price lists, product data and news, segmented by partner type and country. That is content with permissions, which a CMS like Drupal handles well.
Where Drupal fits, and where a PIM-plus-commerce stack wins
To see what manufacturers build on Drupal, we read all 40 drupal.org case studies in the “Manufacturing and Energy” sector and coded each by hand. We removed nine that were not manufacturers or energy companies, such as a Caterpillar dealer and a used-parts marketplace, which left 25 manufacturers and 6 energy companies.
Manufacturers use Drupal for the catalog (16 of 25), for many languages and countries (16), and for several brands or country sites on one platform (10). Socomec runs 26 country sites from one site factory and SFA runs 50. Fourteen of the 25 moved off an older platform, six of them from an older Drupal version. Our guide to Drupal multilingual sites explains how translation works in core.
Online ordering is rare: 3 of 25. Worthington Biochemical runs B2B ordering on Drupal Commerce, with institution and distributor records and an integration with its in-house ERP. More often Drupal is the experience layer and the transaction happens elsewhere: on one electrical manufacturer’s multi-brand platform, carts and orders for some brands stay in Salesforce and the M3 ERP while Drupal runs the product taxonomy, translation and search.
| If your site’s main job is… | A good fit |
|---|---|
| Catalog, documents, quotes and dealer locator, in several languages or brands | Drupal, fed by a PIM if you have one |
| Ordering by known customers at moderate volume, with quotes and account pricing | Drupal with Drupal Commerce, integrated with your ERP |
| High-volume online ordering with customer-specific pricing as the core business | A dedicated B2B commerce platform plus a PIM, with the CMS for content |
| A corporate site for investors and careers, with products on brand sites | Any well-run CMS; the brand sites are where buying happens |
Caleffi is a useful check: before staying on Drupal, it looked at a CMS sold by its PIM vendor and at an Adobe platform, and cited the REST integration with its PIM and no per-site licence fees across 30 country sites. Integrations are usually where these projects get hard; our notes on enterprise Drupal integrations cover how to keep ERP and CRM syncs from becoming fragile.
The Drupal toolkit for manufacturers
Each module below had a release supporting Drupal 11 in drupal.org’s release data on 2 November 2026.
- Search API with Search API Solr and Facets for attribute filters, and Search API Attachments to search inside PDFs.
- Drupal Commerce for quote baskets and ordering, with Commerce Pricelist for customer or market pricing.
- Geofield or Geolocation, with Address, for dealer locators.
- Group for partner areas, and TMGMT to send content to translation services.
- Migrate Plus to bring products, documents and URLs over from the old site.
Industrial website design checklist
- Every filterable attribute is a field, with units.
- Documents sit next to the product: spec sheet, SDS, CAD or BIM, manual, certificates, all searchable, with old versions retired.
- A quote request reaches a person by product line and region, and lands in your CRM with the products attached.
- Dealers can be found, filtered by what they carry, and their records have an owner.
- Partners can log in to their own prices, documents and orders, and nobody sees another partner’s price list.
- Country and language versions carry hreflang tags.
- The corporate site points to the buying site in one click if products live on brand sites.
- Old URLs redirect to their new equivalents. Part numbers and data sheets attract links for years; our guide to website migration SEO covers how to keep them.
What a manufacturing website costs
On a manufacturer’s site, the visual design is rarely the biggest cost. The larger items are the catalog data model, the PIM, ERP and CRM integrations, the migration of products and documents, and the number of languages and country sites. Our guides to web design cost and website redesign cost give general ranges, and our breakdown of Drupal migration cost covers large multilingual sites with integrations. Budget the integrations and data cleanup first, because those are the line items that grow.
Methodology and data
Manufacturer sample. All 70 companies in the 2026 Fortune 500 in Fortune’s Industrials, Materials, Chemicals, Aerospace & Defense, and Motor Vehicles & Parts sectors. Fortune has no single manufacturing sector, so this leaves out drug, food and chip makers and includes a few distributors, such as Reliance. We used the website on each company’s Fortune profile (parker.com for Parker-Hannifin, whose profile lists its investor site).
Website check. On 2 November 2026 we requested each homepage and the products, contact and dealer pages it links to, with plain HTTP requests and a standard browser user agent, and did not try to get past any security check. Fifteen sites returned an access-denied, firewall or bot-check page, or no response, and are recorded as not checked. Our requests came from outside the US, so for Vertiv and Goodyear we requested the US English address directly; L3Harris redirected every request to a regional page and was scored for platform only. Owens Corning builds its menus with JavaScript, so its features could not be scored. A feature counts if a buyer can reach it from the homepage or one click away. Every automated match was checked by hand.
Platform detection. From page code and response headers, such as Drupal’s generator header, Adobe Experience Manager’s asset paths and Sitecore’s media paths and cookies. “Not identified” means no known fingerprint, not proof of a custom build.
Drupal case studies. All 40 drupal.org case studies in the “Manufacturing and Energy” sector, from our 14 October 2026 crawl of every case study published since October 2024. The 31 we kept (published March 2025 to October 2026) were coded by hand; Caleffi and the Enea group each appear twice. Case studies describe a project when it was written, not what a site runs today.
Data. Download the manufacturer website survey (one row per company, with the evidence for each platform and feature) as a CSV file, and the coded drupal.org case studies as a second CSV. Both are free to reuse with attribution to Gspikes.
Planning a new manufacturer site, a dealer portal or several country sites on one platform? Our Drupal development team builds structured catalogs, portals and multilingual platforms, and our website design service starts from the buyers your site has to serve. For a second opinion on your current site, ask us for a free review.
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