Chemical Distributor Website Redesign: A B2B Case Study

Wilfrid Smith Website Redesign

How we rebuilt the website of a specialist UK chemical distributor with almost 100 years of history – and made a 300+ product range easy to navigate.

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Wilfrid Smith is an independent UK distributor of industrial raw materials and chemicals, established in 1927. The company represents more than 150 global suppliers, offers over 300 products and supplies customers in 28 countries.

Their previous website worked, but it made the business look smaller and less technically capable than it is. We redesigned and rebuilt it in WordPress around a searchable product finder, restructuring the site so that visitors understand the company and its credentials before they reach the catalogue.

Project at a glance

Why the Wilfrid Smith website needed redesigning

The old site was not broken. It was inaccurate.

The information was there, the products were listed and the company had an established online presence. The problem was that the website no longer gave a fair impression of the business behind it – a substantial, highly experienced company working with manufacturers and customers across a wide range of specialist industries.

Websites rarely become outdated overnight. They fall behind gradually, as a company grows, its services develop and expectations around how people use the internet change.

The previous site was built around a series of industry categories, a long product directory and conventional company information. It contained plenty of useful material, but visitors had to do more work than they should have needed to understand the scale of the company.

We were not interested in redesigning a website simply to make it look newer. It needed to change how quickly people understood the business.

Structuring a website for 300+ products and 150 suppliers

The answer was to give visitors several different routes into the same information, rather than assuming everyone thinks about the products the same way.

Businesses such as Wilfrid Smith are not easy to present online. They represent numerous manufacturers, supply hundreds of specialist products and work across industries ranging from personal care and pharmaceuticals to plastics, rubber, ceramics, coatings, textiles and horticulture.

Not every visitor arrives looking for the same thing:

• Some already know the exact trade name of the product they require.
• Others only know its general type or application.
• Some want to see which manufacturers Wilfrid Smith represents.
• Others are assessing the company as a potential distribution partner.

The temptation with a business like this is to put everything on the website and expect visitors to find their way through it. Instead, visitors can now begin with an industry sector, search the product range, browse alphabetically or explore the company’s manufacturing partners.

Our job was not to simplify what Wilfrid Smith does. It was to simplify the experience of finding and understanding it.

Building a product finder for a specialist chemical range

With more than 300 products, the product finder is the most important part of the new site. It allows visitors to search and browse by trade name, general product name, industry sector and manufacturing principal, as well as alphabetically.

That structure matters because technical products are not described consistently. An existing customer may know a specific product name. Another visitor may be searching for a broader ingredient, additive or material.

Somebody else may know the manufacturer but not the precise product supplied by Wilfrid Smith. The website needed to accommodate all of those starting points.

A basic list would have been easier to build, but it would have placed too much responsibility on the visitor.

The product finder also gives the company a stronger foundation for growth. New products, sectors and partnerships can be added within the existing structure, rather than forcing the site to be reorganised each time the range changes.

Chemical industry web design without the clichés

Wilfrid Smith’s existing identity stays – the handwritten logo and blue palette – we just used it with more confidence.

The new homepage design uses a stronger opening image, larger typography and a clearer statement of what the company does. A restrained palette and generous use of space give the content room to breathe, while headline figures immediately communicate the company’s experience and reach.

Chemical industry websites easily become a predictable mixture of laboratory photography, molecular graphics and cold corporate language. Some of that visual vocabulary is useful, because it helps visitors recognise the sector. Too much of it makes very different companies look interchangeable.

Wilfrid Smith is an independent business with a long history and a knowledgeable team. The website needed to feel professional and technically credible without making the company appear distant or anonymous.

Why we put the company ahead of the product catalogue

A technical buyer arrives looking for a material, but the product alone is not the whole decision.

They also need confidence in the distributor supplying it, the documentation available, and the people providing commercial and technical support. The old website placed heavy emphasis on product categories, which made functional sense but pushed the company itself into the background.

Wilfrid Smith’s independence, experience and relationships with international manufacturers are a large part of why customers choose to work with them. So the new site gives greater prominence to the business behind the products: its history, its people, its partners and its quality standards are now easier to find. The ISO 9001 accreditation and quality processes have a dedicated section rather than being treated as supporting information.

What B2B website visitors actually need to know

It is easy to start a website project with a conventional list of pages – Home, About, Products, Services, Contact. We prefer to start with the questions visitors are likely to have.

Who are these people?
The homepage establishes the business, its history and its credentials. The About page puts faces to names.

Do they supply the product I need?
The product finder handles specific requirements, with several ways to search.

Do they understand my industry?
Industry sections help visitors identify relevant areas of expertise.

Which manufacturers do they represent?
A dedicated partners section lists the principals Wilfrid Smith works with.

Can I trust their quality procedures?
The quality and ISO 9001 section answers this directly.

How do I speak to somebody?
Contact options remain straightforward throughout the site.

That may sound like common sense. Common sense is often what gets lost when a website grows around an internal company structure rather than the needs of its customers.

The result: a website that matches the business

The biggest change is not that the site looks more modern. It is that it now represents the company accurately.

It communicates the scale of the product range, the breadth of industries Wilfrid Smith supports and the experience that comes from almost a century in business. Visitors can understand what the company does more quickly, find products in several different ways, and see the manufacturers, quality standards and people behind the operation.

Wilfrid Smith had outgrown their old website. This one fits the company as it is now.

What we will be measuring over the next six months

The website has only recently launched, so it is too early to make  claims about search performance, user behaviour or enquiries. We would rather say that openly than attach an impressive-looking percentage to a period too short to tell us anything useful.

Over the coming months we will be looking at:

• How visitors use the product finder, and which search routes they favour
• Which sectors and product pages attract organic search traffic
• How effectively those visits develop into genuine enquiries

That will let us refine the site based on real behaviour rather than assumptions. We will update this case study with those findings.

For now, the clearest result is the transformation itself: a more confident, usable and representative website for a long-established UK business.

Services provided on this project

• Website strategy and planning
• B2B website design
• WordPress development
• Content structure and information architecture
• Product database and product finder
• Responsive website design
• Google Business Profile setup
• Google Analytics and Search Console setup

Frequently asked questions

How long does a B2B website redesign take?
A project of this size – strategy, design, WordPress build and a searchable product database – typically runs to 8 weeks. The largest variable is content: how much exists, what condition it is in, and how much needs restructuring before design begins.

Can you migrate a large product catalogue to a new website?
Yes. We build product databases in WordPress with custom fields and taxonomies, so a range of several hundred products can be searched, filtered and browsed in multiple ways. New products, sectors and suppliers can then be added without redesigning the site.

How much does a website like this cost?
Cost depends on the size of the product range, the amount of content restructuring required and the level of custom functionality. We scope every project individually. A website of this type starts at £3,000.

Do you protect existing search rankings during a redesign?
Yes. We map old URLs to new ones, implement redirects, retain and improve on-page content, and set up Google Analytics and Search Console so performance can be monitored from launch.

Do you only work with businesses in the North of England?
No. We are based in Stretford, Manchester, and work with clients across the UK. Wilfrid Smith supply customers in 28 countries, and much of our work is with established businesses wherever they are based.

Thinking about a new website?

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