BUILDGIN
01 Textiles and apparel
The mill with a catalogue nobody can search
A constructed example. Forty years of grades and counts, published once as a print catalogue and never again.
The situation
Picture a spinning and weaving mill somewhere in the Surat or Coimbatore belt. It has been running since the late seventies, it supplies garment exporters and domestic brands, and it has a range in the low hundreds of items across counts, blends and finishes. The order book is healthy and most of it arrives through relationships built over decades.
The website was built in 2011 by a vendor who has since moved on. It has four pages and a downloads section. Everything the mill actually sells is inside a PDF made for a printer. None of that’s anyone’s fault, and every one of these findings is about the site rather than the business behind it.
What the audit finds
Your whole product range lives inside one file made for paper
Counts, blends, GSM and finish are all sitting in a catalogue that was laid out to be printed. When a buyer searches for one specific count, they find nothing at all, because none of that information exists as text on a page a search engine can read.
What it costsA mill with 200 items competes as though it had four pages. Every product search happens somewhere else.
Nobody can tell what your minimum order is
The minimum quantity you’re willing to run isn’t stated anywhere on the site. So every enquiry opens with the same two questions, and roughly half of them turn out to be from buyers you were never going to be able to serve at that volume.
What it costsYour sales team spends half its enquiry time disqualifying people the website could have filtered out for free.
Your export credentials are buried in a paragraph
Certifications, capacity and years of export experience are all there, written as prose halfway down an About page. A buyer scanning quickly won’t find them, and those three things are exactly what decides whether they take you seriously.
What it costsAn overseas buyer comparing three mills drops the one that appears to have no certifications.
Every photograph is of the factory, none is of the fabric
Machinery shots tell a buyer you’ve scale. Fabric shots are what actually closes an order, because the cloth is the thing they’re buying. The site is entirely the first kind and has none of the second.
What it costsA merchandiser can’t judge the handle or the finish, so they ask for samples from whoever showed them the cloth.
The home page is over 9 MB, which is far too heavy
A slider carrying six full screen images loads completely before anything appears on screen. Most of those images are never seen by anyone, and the visitor is usually on mobile data while they wait.
What it costsRoughly twelve seconds on a real 4G connection. Published benchmarks put mobile abandonment past three seconds at 53 percent.
The enquiry form asks for nine things before it will submit
Two of those are GST number and annual turnover, and both are asked before the buyer has even decided they’re interested. Most people abandon the form rather than hand that over to a company they’re still evaluating.
What it costsThe people most likely to abandon a nine field form are the larger buyers, who have alternatives and less patience.
Why this happens
None of this was a bad decision at the time. In 2011 a PDF catalogue was the fastest way to get a range online. A six image slider was what every serious website had. And asking for a GST number up front felt like qualifying the lead. Each choice made sense on the day it was made.
What changed is where the buyer stands. They arrive on a phone now, searching for a specific count rather than a company name. They compare three suppliers in the time it used to take to open one brochure. The site didn’t get worse. The ground moved underneath it.
What a rebuild changes
Where to start
- Publish the top twenty products as pages1 week
Take the twenty items that account for most of your revenue and give each one a page with its specification as text. Leave the other 180 in the PDF for now.
- Strip the home page slider1 day
It’s the single largest cause of the load time and almost nobody scrolls past the first image anyway.
- Cut the enquiry form to four fields1 day
Name, company, what they’re looking for, and a phone number. Ask for the GST details once there’s a conversation.
A constructed example, built from patterns that recur across dozens of real dated sites. Yours will read differently, which is the point of running an audit rather than assuming.
