What Is a Good Conversion Rate? UK Benchmarks by Industry

Ask ten marketers what a good conversion rate is and you will get one number back: somewhere around 2 to 3 percent. That number is close to useless on its own, because it answers a question nobody actually asked. A 2 percent rate is a quiet disaster for a craft-supplies shop and a strong result for a dealership selling cars. The figure only means something once you attach it to an industry, a device, a traffic source, and a definition of what you are counting.

This page gives you the UK numbers properly split, so you can find where your own rate sits rather than panicking against a global average that was never measured on a site like yours.

The formula, and the trap inside it

Conversion rate is simple arithmetic:

Conversion rate = (conversions ÷ visitors) × 100

Five orders from 100 visitors is a 5 percent conversion rate. That part is easy, and our guide to calculating your conversion rate walks through more worked examples. The trap is the denominator.

“Visitors” can mean three different things, and each one produces a different number from the same traffic:

• Sessions (visits). GA4 reports conversion rate against sessions by default. One person who returns three times counts as three.
• Users (unique people). Many CRO and ecommerce tools count here. The same person returning three times counts once, so the rate looks higher.
• Pageviews. Rarely the right denominator for a site-wide rate, but some landing-page tools use it.

If your agency quotes 1.8 percent and your Shopify dashboard says 2.4 percent, the most likely cause is not a tracking bug. It is that one counts sessions and the other counts users. Before you compare yourself to any benchmark on this page, write down which denominator you are using. A “good” rate measured against users is not the same as a good rate measured against sessions.

The second definitional question: what counts as a conversion? For an ecommerce store it is a completed purchase. For a SaaS product it might be a trial signup or a demo request. For a content site it is usually an email signup. Mixing these is why benchmarks get so muddled. A SaaS “conversion rate” of 8 percent and an ecommerce “conversion rate” of 8 percent describe completely different events.

It helps to separate macro conversions (the thing that makes money: a sale, a qualified lead) from micro conversions (add to basket, email signup, PDF download). You optimise for macro conversions, but you track micro conversions to find where the macro rate leaks. If your add-to-basket rate is healthy but purchases are not, your problem is checkout, not the product page.

UK ecommerce: the live numbers

For a British-market answer, the most useful public source is IRP Commerce’s UK eCommerce Market Data, which pulls live transactional figures from UK merchants and refreshes through the month rather than reusing last year’s US Shopify report.

As of April 2026, the overall UK ecommerce conversion rate sits at 1.70 percent, down about 6 percent year on year, with an average order value of roughly £129 and mobile accounting for around 62 percent of sales. That headline figure hides enormous variation between sectors:

Source: IRP Commerce UK eCommerce Market Data, April 2026.

Look at the top and bottom of that table together. Arts & crafts converts at over 5 percent; baby & child converts at under half a percent. The instinct is to say the baby retailers are doing something badly wrong. They are not. Their average order value is over £700, more than five times the arts & crafts figure.

This is the relationship that nearly every benchmark page ignores: conversion rate moves inversely with price and consideration. Low-cost, repeat or impulse purchases (craft supplies, pet food, kitchen gadgets) convert fast because the decision is cheap and often made in one session. High-value considered purchases (a car, a nursery’s worth of baby equipment) convert slowly because buyers research across several visits, often across several devices, before they commit. The conversion gets attributed to whichever session happened to close it, so the per-session rate looks tiny.

If you sell furniture, vehicles, jewellery or anything else with a long decision and a high price, a 0.5 to 1 percent conversion rate can be perfectly healthy. Benchmark within your vertical and your price band, not against a blended figure.

One honest caveat about IRP: it withholds the raw transaction counts and sample sizes behind these figures, marking the absolute totals as “Withheld.” The percentages are credible and they are genuinely UK live data, which makes them the best public source for the British market, but the methodology is not fully transparent. Treat them as a strong directional benchmark rather than gospel.

Why you see “1.7 percent” and “3.4 percent” both called “the UK average”

If you research this yourself you will run into two competing UK averages, and they appear to contradict each other:

• The IRP figure of around 1.7 percent, drawn from live UK merchant transactions.
• A 3.4 percent figure repeated across many UK marketing blogs.

They are not measuring the same thing. The 3.4 percent number is a blended benchmark built largely on global Shopify and session-level samples, not strictly UK live transactions. A different denominator and a different sample produce a higher number. Neither is “wrong,” but for a British-market store comparing itself to British-market reality, the live transactional figure is the safer anchor. Expect the genuine spread to sit somewhere between roughly 1.7 and 3.4 percent depending on whose data and which denominator you trust.

Median, not average: where you actually rank

Even a clean UK figure can mislead, because conversion-rate distributions are right-skewed. A handful of excellent stores pull the average up, so the typical store sits below it. This is why “average” is the wrong tool for self-assessment. Use the median and the percentiles instead.

For Shopify stores, the distribution looks roughly like this:

• Average store: about 1.4 percent
• Median UK site: about 2.35 percent
• Top 20 percent threshold: above 3.2 percent
• Top 10 percent threshold: above 4.7 percent

So if you convert at 2.4 percent, you are not “below the 3 percent everyone quotes.” You are slightly above the median: a normal, healthy mid-table store. To reach the top fifth of UK stores you need to clear roughly 3.2 percent, and the top tenth starts near 4.7 percent. That framing is far more useful than a single average, because it tells you how much headroom you actually have.

A note for new stores: it is completely normal to sit under 1 percent for the first few months while you find product-market fit and learn who your customer is. A sustained sub-1 percent rate on an established store usually points to a traffic-quality or product-page problem rather than a broken checkout. Diagnose with your micro conversions before you start ripping the basket apart.

Device: the mobile friction tax

Mobile is where most UK ecommerce traffic now arrives, around 62 percent of it, yet it converts at roughly half the desktop rate. Shopify’s own figures put mobile near 1.2 percent against desktop near 1.9 percent, and broader UK benchmarks show a wider gap still, with desktop around 3.9 percent versus mobile around 1.8 percent.

This is the mobile friction tax: small screens, fiddly forms, slower connections and distracted, on-the-go browsing all suppress completion. Two practical takeaways:

1. Always segment your conversion rate by device before you judge it. A blended 2 percent might be a strong 3.5 percent on desktop dragged down by a weak 1.2 percent on mobile. The blended number hides your single biggest opportunity.
2. If mobile is 60 percent of your traffic and half your desktop rate, mobile checkout is almost certainly your highest-leverage test. Express payment options (the wallet buttons that skip manual card entry) and shorter forms tend to recover the most here.

Across the whole funnel, cart abandonment runs at roughly 70 percent industry-wide, so most of your lost revenue sits between “added to basket” and “paid,” not on the product page.

Landing pages convert higher, and that is normal

A standalone landing page is a different animal from a whole ecommerce site. It has one goal, one offer and far less to distract the visitor, so its conversion rate is naturally higher. Comparing your landing page to a site-wide ecommerce benchmark will make it look heroic; comparing your site to a landing-page benchmark will make it look broken. Keep them apart.

Unbounce’s Conversion Benchmark Report, built from more than 41,000 landing pages and 57 million conversions, puts the median landing-page conversion rate at 6.6 percent across all industries, with wide variation by sector:

Events convert highest because intent is high and there is built-in urgency; SaaS converts lowest because the decision is considered and the sales cycle is long. Same inverse relationship as ecommerce. Unbounce’s own framing is the right one to copy: “good” is the 75th percentile in your industry, not a universal number.

B2B and lead generation: a different scale entirely

If you run a B2B site, do not benchmark yourself against ecommerce at all. A “conversion” here is a form fill, and the rate depends heavily on how much you are asking for in return.

Typical B2B lead-gen forms convert in the 2 to 5 percent range. Even very large operators rarely turn more than 5 percent of traffic into qualified leads. The strongest predictor is the friction of the offer:

• High-friction long forms (lots of required fields): roughly 1 to 2 percent
• Demo requests: roughly 2 to 5 percent
• Free-trial signups: roughly 5 to 15 percent
• Lead magnet / content download (just name and email): roughly 10 to 30 percent

For B2B SaaS specifically, self-serve signup pages tend to run 4 to 10 percent, demo-request pages 1.5 to 4 percent, and content pages 0.5 to 2 percent, with elite performers reaching 8 to 15 percent. A 2 percent demo-request rate is solid; a 2 percent content-download rate would be poor. Match the benchmark to the ask.

Traffic source changes the answer too

Two stores can have identical sites and very different conversion rates purely because of where their traffic comes from. Branded search and email traffic arrive warm and convert several times higher than cold paid social, where you are interrupting someone who has never heard of you. Email commonly converts three to five times better than social.

So before you compare your rate to anything, look at your channel mix. A 1.5 percent blended rate made up mostly of cold paid social might contain a 4 percent email segment doing excellent work. If a competitor “beats” your conversion rate, they may simply have a warmer traffic mix, not a better site. This is also why pouring more cold paid traffic onto a page can drag your headline conversion rate down even as revenue rises.

The benchmark is a starting line, not a finish line

Here is where most benchmark articles stop, and where the actual work begins. Knowing you sit at the median is diagnostic, not directional. It tells you roughly how much room exists; it does not tell you what to change.

The benchmark that actually pays the bills is not your number against the industry. It is your number this month against your number before your last test. Industry data tells you whether to expect a quick win or a long grind (a sub-median store usually has obvious fixes; a top-decile store is fighting for tenths of a percent). After that, the only honest measure of progress is a controlled A/B test against your own baseline. Benchmarks tell you whether to be worried. Your own experiment history tells you whether you are improving. Our conversion rate optimisation guide covers how to turn a benchmark gap into a test queue, and our roundup of the best A/B testing tools for 2026 compares the platforms that run the statistics for you.

A practical sequence:

1. Pin down your denominator (sessions or users) and your conversion definition.
2. Segment by device, then by traffic source, then by your top landing pages.
3. Find your worst-performing high-traffic segment. That is your test queue.
4. Run one change at a time against a control, and judge it against your previous rate, not the industry average.

Frequently asked questions

What is a good conversion rate for a UK ecommerce site? For UK ecommerce overall, the live cross-industry figure sits near 1.7 percent, the typical (median) site lands around 2.35 percent, and clearing 3.2 percent puts you in the top fifth of stores. But your real target depends on your sector and price: above 5 percent is normal for craft supplies, while under 1 percent can be healthy for high-value categories like cars or baby equipment.

How do I calculate conversion rate? Divide conversions by visitors and multiply by 100. Twenty orders from 1,000 visitors is a 2 percent conversion rate. The catch is the denominator: decide whether “visitors” means sessions (GA4’s default) or unique users, and keep it consistent, because the two produce noticeably different numbers from the same traffic.

Is a 1 percent conversion rate good or bad? It depends entirely on context. One percent is poor for a typical low-value ecommerce store, where the median is over 2 percent, but it can be perfectly healthy for a high-consideration, high-price category like cars or furniture, or for an established B2B demo-request page. On a brand-new store, sub-1 percent for the first few months is normal while you find product-market fit.

Why is my mobile conversion rate so low? Mobile typically converts at around half the desktop rate across UK ecommerce, even though it carries the majority of traffic. Small screens, fiddly checkout forms, slower connections and distracted browsing all suppress completion. The usual fixes are express wallet payment buttons that skip manual card entry, shorter forms, and faster page loads. Always segment by device before judging your overall rate.

What is the difference between macro and micro conversions? A macro conversion is the outcome that makes money: a sale or a qualified lead. A micro conversion is a smaller step towards it, such as add to basket, an email signup or a PDF download. You optimise for macro conversions but track micro conversions to locate where the macro rate is leaking, for example a healthy add-to-basket rate but weak purchases points to a checkout problem.

Why do I see different “UK average” conversion rates quoted? Because they measure different things. Live UK transactional data (IRP Commerce) puts the overall rate near 1.7 percent, while a widely repeated 3.4 percent figure is a blended benchmark drawn largely from global Shopify and session-level samples. Different sample, different denominator, different number. For a British-market store, the live transactional figure is the safer anchor.

The short version

There is no universal “good” conversion rate. For UK ecommerce, the live cross-industry figure sits near 1.7 percent, the typical site lands around 2.35 percent, and beating 3.2 percent puts you in the top fifth. But the only benchmark that pays is your own number after your last test. Match yourself to your industry and average order value first (a 0.5 percent rate selling cars is healthy; a 0.5 percent rate selling craft supplies is broken), then optimise against your own baseline.