By Kavish Arora, Co-Founder, DigiStreet Media
A power company’s website has an unusual problem. It is selling continuity — and if the site takes eight seconds to load, it has argued against itself before a single word is read.
We rebuilt bpee.com for BPE recently, an Indian manufacturer of UPS systems, lithium batteries and battery energy storage selling into data centres, banks and factories across 25+ countries. Most of what we learned had nothing to do with how the site looks.
The buyer is not one person
A 500 kVA UPS for a data centre is not bought by anyone. It is specified by an engineer, costed by a commercial owner, and signed by someone who will never read your homepage.
| Who | What they need from the site | Where most sites fail them |
|---|---|---|
| The specifying engineer | Ratings, topology, compliance, dimensions, what it parallels with | Specs hidden in a gated PDF |
| The commercial owner | Total cost, service network, spares, lead time | No pricing signal of any kind |
| The signatory | Is this company still here in ten years? | Named clients replaced with anonymous logos |
| The maintenance team | AMC, support terms, who to call at 2am | Support buried under “Contact us” |
Build for only the first and the deal stalls at the second. This is why an energy website needs more depth than a brochure and more structure than a catalogue.
Consumer and enterprise cannot share a homepage
This is the single most common mistake, and BPE is a clean example of it.
Their previous site opened with a badge celebrating twenty-six years. Below that sat market segments including Home Office. The page title read “Buy UPS Online for Home & Office — UPS for TV and WiFi”.
Meanwhile the business was selling modular UPS in the hundreds of kVA and complete battery energy storage systems into BFSI and data centres.
Both audiences are real. Both are worth money. But an engineer landing on a page about backing up a television has already concluded you are not the supplier — and a homeowner landing on a page about BESS topology has concluded the same thing in the other direction.
The fix is not to drop one audience. It is to stop making them share the front door. Enterprise leads the homepage; the transactional store gets its own path.
Speed is not a technical detail here. It is the pitch.
For most businesses, page speed is an SEO factor and a bounce-rate factor. For a power company it is a credibility factor, because uptime is literally the product.
| What we measured on the rebuilt site | Result |
|---|---|
| Server response (TTFB) | 0.11 seconds |
| HTML delivered | 0.23 seconds |
| Google PageSpeed (reported by BPE) | 70+ |
| Full load, including a video hero (reported by BPE) | Under 4 seconds |
| Bounce rate after launch (reported by BPE) | 20% |
The video hero matters in that list. It is normally where performance dies — a full-width autoplaying video is the single heaviest thing most sites carry. Getting one to coexist with a 70+ score is a build decision, not a plugin.
The platform decision is a ten-year decision
BPE’s old site was WordPress and it was slow. We moved it to Webflow.
That is not a universal recommendation — we build more sites on WordPress than on anything else, and for most businesses it is the right answer. But the trade-off is worth stating plainly:
| WordPress | Webflow | |
|---|---|---|
| Speed out of the box | Depends entirely on hosting, theme and plugin discipline | CDN-served by default, no plugin stack |
| Degrades over time? | Yes, as plugins accumulate | Largely no |
| Maintenance | Updates, security patching, plugin conflicts | Minimal |
| Flexibility | Enormous — anything is possible | Constrained, which is sometimes the point |
| Best for | Content-heavy sites, complex integrations, in-house editorial teams | Marketing sites where performance must hold without a retainer |
For a manufacturer with no in-house web team and a hard requirement that the site stays fast for years, the constrained platform wins. For a company publishing three articles a week and integrating a CRM, it does not.
The point is that this call gets made once, usually in week one, and almost nobody revisits it. Make it deliberately.
Structure the catalogue for the person searching a part number
Energy and power companies have deep catalogues. BPE runs modular UPS across six series, lithium batteries, BESS, active power filters, grid-tied inverters and a full accessories range.
Two structural rules matter more than the design:
- Every product gets its own URL. An engineer searching a series name or rating should land on that product, not on a catalogue page with a filter.
- Industry paths run alongside product paths. The same UPS is a different argument to a bank than to a factory. Data centre, BFSI, healthcare and manufacturing each need their own route in.
This is the same principle we wrote about in SEO for manufacturers: specification pages beat brochure pages, because the specification is what people actually search.
Say what you do before you say how long you have done it
The old BPE site led with twenty-six years and a stat strip: 25 years, 1200 products, 20 countries, 5 million satisfied clients.
The new one leads with what the company does and for whom — reliable, intelligent, scalable power systems for industries where continuity is critical — and supports it with 25+ countries, 1M+ installations, operating since 2000.
Same company. Same facts, roughly. But longevity is a reassurance you offer after a buyer has decided you are relevant, not the reason they should keep reading.
Certifications are content, not a footer link
In power and energy, a certificate is often the thing that gets you onto the tender list. Most manufacturer sites treat them as a PDF behind a link called “Credentials”.
That is backwards. If a buyer’s procurement policy requires a specific standard, that requirement is a search — and the page that answers it should be a page, with the standard named in the heading, the scope of what it covers, the issuing body and the validity period.
The same applies to the things a buyer checks after the specification clears:
- Service network. Where are the engineers, and what is the response commitment? A buyer in Chennai will not specify a supplier who can only reach Delhi.
- Spares availability. For a fifteen-year asset, spares policy is a purchase criterion, not an afterthought.
- Installed base. Not a logo wall — named installations, sector, scale. “1M+ installations” is only useful if a visitor can find one that resembles theirs.
- AMC terms. The maintenance contract is often where the margin lives and almost always where the client relationship lives.
None of this is glamorous, and none of it appears in a design brief. It is the content that turns a shortlist into an order.
If you sell direct, decide where the store lives
Plenty of power companies now sell the smaller end of the range online — a 1 kVA UPS does not need a sales call. The question is whether that store sits inside the corporate site or beside it.
| Store inside the site | Separate store | |
|---|---|---|
| Brand consistency | One design, one navigation | Two experiences to maintain |
| SEO | Product pages build authority for the main domain | Authority split across two properties |
| Risk | Consumer content can dilute the enterprise pitch if badly placed | Cleanly separated audiences |
| Cost | One build, one platform | Two builds, two sets of maintenance |
We put BPE’s store inside the site, on Webflow e-commerce, with the enterprise proposition leading the homepage and the transactional path clearly signposted rather than mixed into it. That gets the SEO benefit of product pages on the main domain without letting the consumer range set the tone.
The wrong answer is the one BPE had before: a store and an enterprise business sharing a homepage with no hierarchy between them, so the page argued for neither.
A checklist, if you are briefing this work
| Ask | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Who is the primary buyer, named? | If the answer includes both a homeowner and a data centre, you have two sites to build |
| What is the speed target, in numbers? | “Fast” is not a specification. Put a PageSpeed number in the brief |
| Does every product get a URL? | Determines whether you can ever rank for specification searches |
| Who maintains it after launch? | Decides the platform more than any feature list |
| Are the accounts in your name? | Hosting, domain, analytics. Non-negotiable |
| Is there a transactional side? | If you sell direct, decide early whether the store lives inside the site or beside it |
Where we sit
We build websites for manufacturers — power, automotive components, industrial equipment, engineering. It is most of what we do, and the full scope and prices are on our manufacturer website design page.
If you want to see the BPE project in detail — the before and after, what changed in the positioning and what the numbers were — the full case study is here. The rest of our work is in the case studies.
Or send us the brief and we will tell you which platform we would pick and why, before you commission anything.
