Your homepage is about your company. Your buyer is thinking about Thursday.

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17 August 2026 · Aston Gapes · about 5 minutes
Part of Get the enquiry

Two sentences. Read them one after the other.

The first is from an equipment supplier's homepage, and it is a real shape we see constantly, with the details changed:

We are a leading supplier of materials handling solutions to industry, with a commitment to quality, service and value since 1994.

The second is what the person reading it is thinking:

My forklift is down and I need one by Thursday.

Those are not the same sentence, and nothing on the page connects them. The visitor has to do that work themselves, and there are four other suppliers in the search results who might make it easier.

How the first sentence gets written

Nobody sat down intending to write something meaningless. What happens is that the brief was make us look professional, and that brief has only one answer in most people's heads: talk about the company.

So the page describes the supplier — established, leading, committed, trusted. Every word of it may be true. It is simply answering a question the visitor did not ask, which is who are you, several minutes before they care, instead of the question they arrived with, which is can you solve this.

And here is why it survives. The people who read that homepage most are the people who work there. To them it reads as accurate and dignified, because they already know what the company does. The visitor does not, and the visitor is gone in five seconds.

The five-second test

Show your homepage to somebody who does not work in your industry — a friend, your accountant, one of your kids. Five seconds, then take it away and ask them what the business does and who it is for.

If they say something industrial, you have found the largest single change available on your website, and it costs nothing but the writing.

What to write instead, without becoming undignified

The fear is always the same: that writing about the customer's problem will make a serious engineering business sound like a used car yard. It does not, because the specifics are what make it credible.

Name the problem in the customer's words. Not "materials handling solutions". The thing that is broken, the job that has to be done by Thursday, the standard that has to be met.

Then be specific enough that it could only be you. Capacities. Lead times. Which brands you carry and which you deliberately do not. What you will not sell somebody and why. A generic competitor cannot copy any of that, because they would have to know it.

Keep the 1994. Thirty years of trading is a genuine trust signal for a cautious buyer about to spend a lot of money. It is just not the opening line. It is the reassurance after the relevance, not instead of it.

The uncomfortable part

This one is harder than fixing a form, and not because it is technically difficult. It is harder because somebody wrote that sentence, somebody approved it, and it has been on the front of the business for six years.

Which is exactly why it is still there, and why the competitor who changes it first gets a run of unusually good months and never quite works out what caused them.