How We Measure
Industrial Site Design measures more than 25,000 industrial marketing websites with a single repeatable procedure. Applying the same method to every site is what makes a comparison between one site and the rest of the field meaningful.
The signals fall into three classes, separated by how they are produced. Mechanical measurements, model-generated classifications, and aggregated preference. Each class carries a different level of confidence, and each is reported separately.
Objective signals
These signals are mechanical. The same tools, run against the same URL, return the same result.
CMS platform. We fingerprint the live site against signature rules for more than 60 platforms. Coverage includes WordPress, Craft, Drupal, HubSpot, Webflow, Sitecore, and AEM, along with industrial commerce systems that are rarely tracked elsewhere – CIMCloud, Unilog, BirdDog, K-eCommerce, and more. A platform is assigned only when a concrete fingerprint matches, and we record which signal produced the match.
Performance. Four Lighthouse category scores – Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO – pulled from Google's PageSpeed Insights API on the mobile strategy. Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO are stable between runs. Performance is a throttled timing measurement and varies from scan to scan. We rescan quarterly.
Domain age. Registration date, expiry date, and registrar. The registration date does not change, so we capture it once.
Security posture. We check SSL certificate validity, HTTP-to-HTTPS redirection, the negotiated TLS version, and security response headers like HSTS, X-Frame-Options, X-Content-Type-Options, and Referrer-Policy, with CSP and Permissions-Policy scored as additions. The grade is bounded at both ends. No valid SSL is an F, a valid certificate floors the grade at D, and pre-1.2 TLS caps it at C. This measures transport and header configuration only. It is not a vulnerability scan, and it does not indicate whether a site can be breached.
Size and architecture. We locate a site's sitemaps through robots.txt and the well-known paths, then walk the sitemap graph to count pages, excluding images, PDFs, and off-host URLs so the count reflects content. Alongside the count we record URL depth, the top-level section tree, and the locales declared in hreflang alternates, which is how multi-language sites are identified.
Color palette. We extract the five most dominant colors from each site's screenshot and classify each one into a named bucket by hue and saturation. Low-saturation colors resolve to white, black, or gray; the rest are bucketed by hue. This describes color as rendered on screen, not a brand's specification.
AI-assisted judgments
These signals come from a language model reading a site's content. Outputs are structured and bounded by confidence thresholds, but they are classifications, not measurements.
Industry role. We classify each company by its role in the supply chain — original equipment, parts and components, distribution, and so on — with a confidence score attached. Classifications at 80% confidence or higher are accepted automatically. Anything below that threshold is held for human review.
Agency detection. We scan footer links for credit phrases: "designed by," "site by," "built by." Detected agencies are created as their own entries, which is what allows the gallery to be browsed by the agency that built the site.
Preference
Head-to-head ranking. This signal is not a measurement. Sites are presented in random pairwise matchups and a winner is selected. Each site carries an ELO rating updated by the same algorithm that ranks chess players: new sites move in larger increments so they converge on their level quickly, and upsets shift ratings more than expected results do. The rating reports which of two designs people prefer. It does not report which site is better.
Reading the CMS snapshot
Each CMS profile page carries a panel of bars summarizing the industrial sites we have measured on that platform. The bars describe what has been built on the CMS, not what the CMS is capable of. A platform can support a 5,000-page catalog and still show a "Small business" scale bar if that is how its industrial users deploy it.
Every bar reports the typical case across the sites we measured on that platform, and every share is calculated over the sites we could measure, not the whole field. The bar fill indicates position on an absolute scale; the label carries the value. Thresholds are calibrated to this industrial index and would differ for another population of sites. We retune them as the field shifts.
Scale
The median page count of sites on the platform, a read on the size of company that tends to build there.
- Brochure: Under 30 pages
- Small business: 30 to 149 pages
- Mid-market: 150 to 599 pages
- Enterprise: 600+ pages
Commerce
The share of sites that are catalog-shaped, meaning content concentrates heavily in one product or catalog section rather than spreading evenly across the site.
- Capabilities-led: Under 15%
- Blended: 15 to 34%
- Catalog-leaning: 35 to 54%
- Catalog-dominant: 55%+
Footprint
The share of sites that serve more than one language, a proxy for how far the typical customer reaches geographically.
- Single-market: Under 10%
- Regional: 10 to 24%
- Multi-market: 25 to 49%
- International: 50%+
Publishing
The share of sites running a real authored-content operation such as an active resource library, news, or technical content.
- Static: Under 5%
- Occasional: 5 to 11%
- Consistent: 12 to 24%
- Content engine: 25%+
Security
A composite of HTTPS and security-header posture across the platform's sites, blending the distribution of letter grades with how consistently sites force HTTPS. Scored 0 to 100.
- Neglected: Under 55
- Baseline: 55 to 72
- Fortified: 73 to 89
- Airtight: 90+
The bars draw on the same signals described above – page counts, multilingual detection, and the security grade – aggregated to the platform level. They record the deployed reality of what a platform actually delivers across its industrial install base, independent of its capabilities or marketing claims.