Overseas Launch Roadmap for a Small Manufacturer: 90 Days to Inquiries

The short version #

Ninety days, four sprints. Weeks 1–2 cover positioning, domain, business email, and competitor research. Weeks 3–6 are site structure, English copy, and a WordPress build of homepage and service pages. Weeks 7–8 wire up WhatsApp, the SEO skeleton, and UTM tracking. Weeks 9–12 add the first hub article and case study, then review Search Console data to set the next quarter. The mistake we see at small factories isn't building too little. It's trying to build a "perfect" site in one go and still being unlaunched at month six. This roadmap inverts that: ship a usable site first, then add one block every two weeks. A budget-tight team (roughly USD 5K to 10K) can run the whole thing if they don't burn month one on custom development or mass translation. The week-by-week table at the end is the version you can print and tape to the wall.

We walked one industrial-hardware client through this last year. The owner was in his fifties. Two-person export team. Their English site was a 2017 template that took twelve seconds to load and had never delivered a single inquiry email. Inside three months they swapped the domain, rebuilt the site, hooked up WhatsApp, and got their first real inquiry from a German buyer in week 13. Ninety days is workable for a small factory, as long as you accept "rough now, refined later."

This is written for that situation: a manufacturer doing CNY 20M to 100M in revenue, first serious overseas site, one to three people who can read English, and an owner who wants inquiries but won't drop CNY 300K on a custom build. If you're larger or running B2C commerce, this roadmap doesn't fit. Read WordPress vs Custom Website vs Shopify first.

Weeks 1–2: positioning #

The step everyone wants to skip. Most teams approve a budget, buy a domain the same week, pick a template, start translating. Two weeks in, the homepage paragraph "We are ABC Factory" has no second sentence — nobody decided who they're selling to or why anyone would care.

For two weeks, don't touch code. Do four things:

• Target market: pick one or two countries, not "global." German, North American, and Southeast Asian buyers reason differently. Homepage copy, price ranges, and which case studies you show all change with the country.
• Buyer persona: write three real personas. Not "SME procurement," but "second-tier auto-parts supplier in Bavaria, EUR 2 to 5M annual sourcing budget, extremely sensitive to IATF 16949 certification."
• Competitor research: find five to ten English sites from peers in your category. Screenshot homepage, service pages, case studies, and pricing into a single Notion or Lark doc. The point isn't to copy. It's to see what buyers in your category have been trained to expect.
• Asset audit: pull factory photos, product images, English company background, customer logos (with permission), and certifications into one shared drive. Eight times out of ten this reveals "we have three usable high-res product photos," which means you schedule a photo shoot now, not in week 8.

The deliverable is a one-page PRD: target markets, personas, three to five core services, competitor links, asset inventory. That PRD is the reference for every decision over the next ten weeks.

Weeks 3–4: domain #

Hands on the keyboard, but not yet on production code. The goal is infrastructure ready so week 5 can start building.

• Domain: prefer .com with the brand name. If the brand .com is taken, add a product word (do not append -china or -cn). Cloudflare Registrar or Porkbun work well — cheap, with a DNS UI that doesn't fight you.
• Business email: Google Workspace, roughly USD 6 per user per month. Start with three: info@, sales@, owner@. Stop replying to overseas inquiries from a 163 or QQ inbox.
• Hosting: for WordPress, use Kinsta, WP Engine, or Cloudways on a DigitalOcean node. Pick the region by your primary market: Frankfurt for Europe, Virginia or Oregon for North America, Singapore for Southeast Asia. USD 30 to 50 per month covers year one.
• CDN: Cloudflare's free tier. Turn on DNSSEC and SSL while you're there.
• Foundational accounts: register Google Search Console, Analytics 4, Bing Webmaster, WhatsApp Business, and X Professional. Every admin login uses the same business email, never a personal employee account. The day that employee leaves, you'll wish you had.

For the field-by-field setup, see section 2 of Overseas Website Launch Checklist for Chinese Companies.

Weeks 5–6: build #

Install WordPress, pick a clean theme (Astra, GeneratePress, or Kadence work; avoid maximalist multipurpose templates), and build only four page types:

• Homepage: one short paragraph saying who you are, who you sell to, and why a buyer should care. Then three to five service cards, two or three case thumbnails, contact options. Skip rotating banners, animated counters, and video popups.
• Service pages: one per core service, answering four things: who is this for, how does it work, what does pricing or delivery look like, what's the next step. "Professional team providing one-stop service" is a deduction in the buyer's eyes, not a value prop.
• About: factory photos, team photos (even if there are only five of you), founding year, customer industries, certifications. Buyers check this page to confirm you exist.
• Contact: a form capped at five fields (name, company, email, requirements, market), WhatsApp button, business email, embedded map.

English copy needs a native-speaker pass before the end of week 6. The CNY 200 "English translation" gigs on Taobao will sink the site. Hire a native English writer on Upwork at roughly USD 50 to 100 per page and have them rewrite, not translate, your Chinese draft. Then route it back to your team so they can confirm the writer didn't quietly change product specs.

For theme picks, plugin choices, and performance tuning, see WordPress Overseas Website Architecture.

Weeks 7–8: conversion #

Pages exist. Now wire up the conversion paths.

• WhatsApp Business: a dedicated work number, not the owner's personal. Fill in avatar, business description, hours, product catalog. Steps in WhatsApp Business Setup Checklist for Overseas Sales.
• WhatsApp button: on every service page and in the footer, a floating button to a short link with a pre-filled message ("Hi, I saw your CNC machining service, could you send a quote?").
• Form to email: WPForms or Fluent Forms, submissions routed to both sales@ and the owner's inbox. Don't let inquiries hinge on one person checking one mailbox.
• UTM tracking: every WhatsApp link, X profile link, and email signature link gets utm_source and utm_medium. Otherwise you can't tell which channel produced an inquiry.
• SEO skeleton: per-page titles and meta descriptions, Service schema on service pages, Organization schema on the company page, sitemap.xml submitted to Search Console and Bing. No advanced keyword research yet — just the skeleton. Google's SEO Starter Guide covers the launch-day basics in one page.

The keyword research piece, with manufacturing-specific examples, is in SEO for Export Companies. Save that for week 9.

Weeks 9–10: content #

Launched isn't done. The goal for these two weeks is one real hub article and one complete case study.

• First hub article: pick the question buyers actually ask, e.g. "How to source CNC machining from China without quality issues." About 2,000 words: problem, checklist, case, CTA. Gives search engines and AI summaries something substantive to point at.
• First real case study: pick an existing overseas customer (with permission). Real name (or anonymized industry + region), problem, action, outcome, quote. Even "delivered 5,000 units in 90 days, zero returns" is a hundred times more concrete than "improved customer satisfaction."
• Internal links: cross-link hub and case, link both back to the relevant service page. Pattern in Internal Linking Strategy for Service Businesses.

Bring the native writer back for a second pass on these new pieces. The first batch sets the voice; everything later anchors to it.

Weeks 11–12: review #

The last two weeks are about reading data and setting the next sprint.

• Search Console: which pages are indexed? Any 404s or robots.txt mistakes? Which queries are bringing clicks (even two or three)?
• Analytics: which countries or devices have abnormally high bounce rates? Which page has the highest exit rate?
• Inquiries: cluster the first 13 weeks of inquiries by channel (WhatsApp, form, direct email). Which channel produces the highest-quality leads? Which inquiries are real buyers versus brokers?
• Next-quarter decision: more content, more case studies, or backlinks — pick one. After 90 days the gap is usually case studies (you only wrote one), then backlinks (you haven't started). Content depth waits for Q2.

For the full 30/60/90-day action list, see The First 30 Days After Launching an Overseas Website.

Budget #

Typical small-factory budget across the full 90 days:

If the owner is technical with a part-time developer, this can land below USD 4K. An agency running the whole thing end-to-end lands between USD 8K and 14K. Past USD 15K, be skeptical: the overrun is usually "custom features" you won't use.

Three real trade-offs #

Three decision points you'll hit during the 90 days. Settle them now and save a week of debate later.

• Multilingual now or later? English only for phase one. Add German or Spanish in Q2; don't dilute effort while the English is still rough. When you do add a language, use clean URL paths (/de/, /es/), not cookie-based auto-redirects. Pattern in Multilingual Site Structure and Hreflang.
• Mainland-China hosting? No. Even if your account manager pushes "domestic hosting is half the price," 5+ second first paint overseas isn't just an SEO cost. It directly kills conversion.
• Google Ads in the first 90 days? No. Polish the site and content until it can hold attention from organic traffic before paying for clicks. Otherwise most ad spend lands on a page that can't convert.

90-day weekly table #

The point isn't strict week-aligned execution. It's that every two weeks must produce a visible deliverable. If a sprint slips two weeks past its deadline, stop and find the bottleneck. Don't shove it into the next sprint and hope.

FAQ #

Is 90 days really enough? #

Enough to launch and get a first batch of inquiries. Not enough to consistently land ten quality inquiries per month. That takes six to twelve months of sustained content and backlink work. If your expectation is "20 orders per month within 90 days," reset it now, or week 13 will feel like failure.

Can the owner run this alone? #

Yes, if their English is solid and they can give it ten hours a week. More realistic: owner funds, one or two team members execute, a third party handles development and copy. The owner's job is direction, sign-off, hard trade-off calls. Not rewriting the homepage personally.

Switch themes mid-way? #

Don't. Once you commit in week 5, stay committed even if a prettier theme appears in week 7. A swap costs two weeks. Burn whatever indecision you have before week 4; after week 5, change content, not structure.

How long until the first inquiry? #

It varies. We've seen as fast as week 4 (existing customer searching the brand) and as slow as month 6. Don't treat "first inquiry" as the milestone. Treat "WhatsApp clicked 10 times, form submitted three" as the early signal the funnel works.

Get a diagnosis #

If you're about to start a 90-day overseas launch, or stuck mid-way (the common stalls are weeks 5 to 6 build delays and weeks 9 to 10 "we don't know what to write"), bring your existing assets, target markets, and team setup. We'll walk this roadmap with you week by week in a free initial review under our overseas website build and SEO/GEO support service, and tell you what to cut and add next.