The Silent Revenue Leak Inside 94% of NI Engineering Websites

I want to show you something about how Northern Ireland’s mechanical engineering sector presents itself online.

Not because it’s a scandal, it isn’t.

But because the gap between the quality of the work these businesses do and the quality of the digital infrastructure supporting that work is genuinely significant. And closing that gap is one of the highest-leverage commercial moves available to most firms in this sector.

For the past several months, b10 has been building out what we call Commercial Intelligence. A data-led programme that measures digital performance across business, sector by sector, using the Commercial Transformation Index. Mechanical engineering was one of the first sectors we ran.

158 firms. Here’s what came back.

The average mobile PageSpeed score across Northern Ireland’s mechanical engineering sector is 60 out of 100. Google classifies that as “needs improvement.” Half the sector scores below even this.

Let me be direct about something.

PageSpeed Insights is a technical tool but it’s measuring commercial outcomes.

A site that scores below 50 on mobile isn’t just slow.

It’s suppressed in search results, because Google’s Core Web Vitals are a ranking signal. It’s losing visitors, because research consistently shows that mobile users abandon pages that take more than three seconds to load.

And it’s communicating something to every prospect who finds it - about standards, about investment, about how seriously a business takes its commercial presence.

None of this is the fault of the engineers running these firms. Website performance is an obscure, technical domain. Most business owners don’t know their score, have never been told it matters, and have never been given a clear framework for understanding what to do about it.

That’s exactly what this series is designed to change.

Of the 158 mechanical engineering firms analysed, the distribution breaks into three clear bands:

These are the sites that work. Fast, mobile-ready, technically clean. Google rewards them with visibility. Prospects encounter them and, even subconsciously, register a credibility signal before a single word of content has been read. These sites aren’t perfect - there are a lot of flaws. But they do pass this metric.

This is the “needs improvement” band and it’s worth dwelling on the euphemism. “Needs improvement” means your mobile visitors are experiencing measurable friction. It means you’re competing for search visibility with one hand tied behind your back. It means there are specific, fixable problems that are quietly costing you.

At this level, the site is actively damaging the business’s commercial position. Visitors are abandoning before the page loads. Mobile search visibility is severely compromised. The gap between the firm’s technical reputation and its digital infrastructure is at its most stark.

Top performers average 80. Bottom performers average 36. A 44-point gap and in commercial terms, that gap is the difference between a site that converts and one that doesn’t.

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This analysis is part of b10’s Commercial Transformation Index — a 10-domain, 250-point framework for measuring commercial readiness. The CTI was built because most businesses assess their commercial health through proxies that don’t actually measure what drives revenue: brand awareness, social media followers, award wins. The CTI measures the underlying commercial system.

Website performance sits within 1 domain of the 10. And what the CTI framework makes clear is that a poor mobile score isn’t an isolated technical problem. It’s a symptom of a digital infrastructure that hasn’t been treated as a commercial asset. The fix isn’t just technical. It’s a mindset shift about what the website is for and what standard it should be held to.

The full CTI covers website, CRM, Marketing, Sales Framework, Operations, Automation, Pricing, ICP, Positioning, and Retention and Customer Success. Each domain interacts with the others. But Digital Infrastructure is where most firms can achieve the fastest, most measurable improvement because the problems are specific, the solutions are known, and the impact on ranking and conversion is direct.

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Uncompressed images are the most common cause of poor scores in this cohort. Not the most exotic cause, the most common. Converting to WebP or AVIF format and implementing lazy loading typically delivers a 15–25 point improvement without touching any other aspect of the site.

JavaScript and CSS files loaded synchronously in the page head delay the browser from rendering anything visible. Deferring non-critical scripts is often a one-line change with a disproportionate impact on Largest Contentful Paint - Google’s primary mobile performance metric.

If your Time to First Byte is above 600ms, no amount of code optimisation fully resolves it. The fix is at the infrastructure level, managed hosting with edge caching. For firms on basic shared hosting, upgrading alone can move the needle significantly.

We’re running this analysis across multiple sectors throughout 2026. Accountancy, legal, engineering, consultancy, agencies, and professional services are all in the pipeline. Aggregate findings are published openly. Firm-level data is available for any business that wants a detailed picture of where they stand.

A more detailed report for the mechanical engineering cohort, including interactive charts and recommendations, is live at b10hub.com. If you want to run your own business through the CTI including a full 10-domain assessment — that’s available at here.

The sector’s work is excellent. The websites should be too.

Here’s to your success,
The b10 Team