I Built a Website for the Memorial Stone Industry. Here Is What I Learned

Nish Patrick — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 12:12:30 +0000

When I took on the Stone Discover UK project, I assumed it would be a simple catalogue site. Memorial headstones are a niche, and the buyers are not browsing casually. They are monumental masons, funeral homes and stone retailers who buy in bulk.

It turned out to be one of the most useful projects I have worked on, because everything I assumed about "normal" e-commerce was wrong. Here is what I learned.

1. B2B buyers are not B2C shoppers

My first instinct was a cart and a checkout. But trade buyers do not add a headstone to a basket and pay. They want to know:

Can you supply bulk quantities?
What is the lead time?
Can you do custom sizes and engraving?
Do the products meet cemetery authority requirements?

So instead of a checkout, the main call to action became a Get a Quote form. Trade buyers also wanted a downloadable catalogue they could share internally, and a contact page with a real phone number and email.

Lesson: Build the flow your buyer actually follows, not the one you are used to building.

2. Structure the catalogue around how people search

The memorial trade has its own vocabulary. People search for "Ogee headstone", "kerb sets" or "book headstone", not "granite slab".

I organised the catalogue by product type, so each category has its own page and its own search intent:

Each category links down to individual products, such as the Black Ogee Headstone, and the homepage links to every category. That gives a clean hierarchy for users and for search engines.

Lesson: Learn the customer's language before you design the navigation.

3. Reference pages are underrated

Trade buyers care about the material. Granite colour, polish and durability matter because the memorial has to stay legible outdoors for decades.

So I built a dedicated variety of granites page. It explains the colours, such as Absolute Black, Bahama Blue, Indian Aurora and Imperial Red, so buyers can decide before they ask for a quote. A photo gallery shows finished work, and an in-stock page shows what can ship quickly from the UK warehouses.

Lesson: Every question a buyer would otherwise email you about is a page you can build.

4. Blog content does the heavy SEO lifting

In a niche like this, nobody is writing tutorials, so there is a lot of room for helpful content. The blog targets questions that trade buyers really ask:

Each post is written for one specific search intent and links back to the relevant category pages. That internal linking passes authority to the pages that actually generate quote requests.

Lesson: In boring industries, useful content beats clever content.

5. Technical SEO basics still matter

The site runs on Next.js, which makes the basics easy to get right. For every page I made sure of:

A unique <title> and meta description
Canonical URLs
Open Graph and Twitter card tags
Descriptive alt text on product images
A clean URL structure (/memorials/kerb-sets/)

Structured data is also worth adding. A minimal Organization schema looks like this:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Organization",
  "name": "Stone Discover UK",
  "url": "https://www.stonediscover.co.uk/",
  "email": "info@stonediscover.co.uk"
}

Lesson: The fundamentals do most of the work. Get them right before chasing tricks.

6. Trust signals matter more in sensitive industries

Memorials are an emotional purchase, and for trade buyers a supplier mistake means a family waiting longer than they should. Trust signals did a lot of work:

A clear About Us page explaining who makes the products and where
Real addresses, phone numbers and opening hours
An FAQ answering lead times, MOQs, samples and compliance
Visible warehouse locations (Liverpool, London and Southampton)

Lesson: The more sensitive the product, the more transparent the site needs to be.

7. Keep the UX calm and simple

This was not the place for flashy animations. The design needed to feel respectful and professional, with plenty of whitespace, readable text and obvious next steps on every page. Mobile mattered too, because a lot of trade buyers browse and message from their phones, so a WhatsApp contact button was an easy win.

Lesson: Match the tone of the site to the emotion of the industry.

Final thoughts

Building for a niche B2B industry taught me more than a generic project would have. The main takeaways:

Understand the buyer's real process before writing any code.
Structure pages around how people search.
Write content that answers real questions.
Get the SEO fundamentals right.
Build trust through transparency.

If you are curious about the finished result, you can see it at Stone Discover UK.

DEV Community: Nish Patrick