Web Hosting for Boilermakers and Plate Workers

Short answer: almost nobody finds a plate fabricator through search. They find you through a supplier list, then check you online before issuing an enquiry. That makes your website a due diligence resource rather than a shop window, and it means the documents need to be complete, current and quick to download from a corporate network.

Looking for plans rather than guidance? Our web hosting plans start at £39 a year and renew at £39, with storage, daily backups and email on your own domain included.

Assume a procurement team, not a searcher

This changes what the site is for. A buyer is verifying that you hold what you say you hold before adding you to a tender list, and they are doing it quickly across several suppliers.

Practically, that means one clearly labelled page holding everything they will look for, rather than credentials scattered across an about page and a footer. Certification, insurance, quality accreditation, capability figures. If they cannot find it in thirty seconds they will email and wait, which delays the enquiry, or move to the next supplier.

Consider a single downloadable capability pack alongside the individual documents. Buyers frequently need to forward something internally, and a well-made pack is easier for them than sending six links.

File size matters more than you think here

Your documents get opened on corporate networks and from site offices, and a scanned certificate at five or six megabytes is a slow download on either.

Scan at 200dpi and save as PDF rather than as a photograph, which typically takes a six-megabyte file under one. If you build a capability pack, keep it under about ten megabytes, because plenty of corporate mail systems reject attachments above that and a buyer will try to forward it.

Expiring and revised documents need managing

Certification gets renewed, procedures get requalified, insurance renews annually. The failure mode is uploading the new document without deleting the old one.

An expired certificate stays at its URL and stays indexed. A procurement team landing on it concludes your approval lapsed, and they will not ring to check. Delete superseded files rather than leaving them alongside, and audit periodically what is actually still live on the site.

Where uploaded documents sit

By default in your WordPress media library, in a directory frequently reachable by direct URL to anyone with the link.

For public credentials that is fine. For client-specific documentation, project records or anything commercially sensitive, it is worth restricting properly, because an unlisted URL is not access control. Free SSL is a baseline regardless and any decent plan includes it.

Photograph scale, and let people see the weld

Two kinds of image do work here. Something recognisable next to a vessel or a rolled shell so a buyer can judge the scale you handle, and close-ups of a weld cap or a clean purge on stainless.

The second needs resolution, so resize to around 1600px rather than compressing hard, and consider low-resolution thumbnails in the gallery with full resolution on click. Let a CDN handle format conversion. Our plain English guide to Core Web Vitals covers load speed.

Publishing capability figures in text alongside, plate thickness, vessel diameter, shop crane capacity, is more useful to a buyer than any photograph and costs nothing to host.

Breakdown work is the exception to everything above

Planned fabrication and shutdown work is procured slowly. Emergency repairs are not, and a plant with a vessel down will call whoever answers.

If you offer emergency response, that needs a tappable number on every page and a light, fast page that loads on a poor connection at three in the morning. Do not bury it behind the corporate credentials.

Your enquiry form is carrying tenders

Enquiries here are infrequent and large, which makes a silently failing form particularly dangerous: because enquiries are irregular anyway, you may not notice the gap for months.

WordPress sends mail through PHP by default, which is frequently filtered or rejected without authentication records on your domain.

• Send form mail through authenticated SMTP rather than PHP mail
• Add SPF, DKIM and DMARC records to your domain
• Deliver to a shared address checked daily, not one estimator’s inbox
• Test monthly from a different device, with and without an attachment, since buyers send drawings and specifications

Our guides to contact forms not sending emails and SPF, DKIM and DMARC cover both.

Email deliverability into large organisations

Your customers sit inside energy, water, chemical and process companies with strict mail filtering. Quotations and documentation submissions need to arrive, and authentication records are what get them through.

Our email hosting plans include unlimited mailboxes on your domain with 10GB each, which matters when you exchange large PDF documentation daily.

Backups and continuity

Daily backups covering files as well as database, so the document library is included rather than just the pages. Check that specifically, since some backup tools exclude the uploads folder by default.

Register the domain in the company’s name with a shared contact address and set auto-renew. Our complete guide to UK domain names covers registration and renewals.

What plan you actually need

Entry-level shared hosting covers it, with reasonable storage for a growing document library. SSD storage, a CDN, free SSL, daily backups, unlimited mailboxes. Around £39 a year.

Traffic is low, so you are not buying capacity. You are buying reliability, document delivery and email that reaches corporate inboxes. Check the renewal figure rather than the introductory rate; our guide to cheap web hosting in the UK covers what should be standard.

Frequently asked questions

What should a procurement team find on my website?

Certification, insurance, quality accreditation and capability figures, on one clearly labelled page, downloadable and current.

How large should my capability pack be?

Under about ten megabytes. Many corporate mail systems reject larger attachments, and buyers routinely forward these internally.

Can buyers still find my expired certificates?

Yes, if you uploaded new ones without deleting the old. Files stay at their URL and stay indexed, and an expired certificate reads worse than none.

Why are my PDFs so large?

Usually scanned as images at high resolution. Scanning at 200dpi and saving as PDF typically takes a six-megabyte file under one.

Why do quotations land in clients’ spam?

Usually missing SPF, DKIM and DMARC records. Large process and energy companies filter far more aggressively than consumer mail providers.

Explore more

Our guide to web hosting for tradespeople covers the requirements common to every trade, and our guide to pipefitters covers the neighbouring case where welder coding drives the document library.

Our hosting plans start at £39 a year, with a free trial if you want to test document download speeds first.