Average Website Conversion Rates In 2021

An ode to a beautiful website:

“Sure, you are pretty and sleek, but you have brought me nothing all week!”

A website is nice and all, but is it really accomplishing what it is meant to? Taking a glance at average website conversion rates — the rate at which website visitors are “converted” into either buyers or engaging with you in some way — can help assess whether or not your expensive website is actually worth the time and effort put into it. 

Ultimately, this is what all the bells and whistles are for and if they aren’t returning investment… It might be time to consider a change.

What factors into website conversion?

Before understanding what an average conversion rate is, a good grasp of what goes into a conversion rate would help. First, the highly complicated and very sophisticated formula of conversation rates is as follows: 

Conversion Rate = Desired Actions/Total Visitors

One of the factors that can determine the conversion rate can certainly be the design of the site, such as certain interfaces or buttons that make it easy to either purchase a product, register for a service, or simply contact your business. 

Yet, there are other external factors that also complicate the matter. For one, the nature of your business and industry could heavily affect your conversion rate. For example, the conversion rate of a website that asks users to sign petitions free of charge is probably much higher than a website selling $1,000 widgets to individual collectors.

So what is an average conversion rate?

Despite these external factors affecting the average website conversion rates, the national average ecommerce conversion rate for 2021 so far is 1.94%, meaning that out of every 100 visitors, 1.94 get “converted.” This is further broken down into industry, with some industries doing much better than others.

Ok, so now what?

While it is helpful to know where you stand in comparison with your industry, it is best to know what specifically is driving or suppressing your own conversion rate. Most importantly, this average conversion rate isn’t a fixed law — “thou shall not exceed website conversion greater than 1.94%” — and can instead vary depending on the actions you take. These can involve 

• A/B testing
• Assessing the analytics and functions of your website
• Getting advice from experts
• Adding live chat functions
• Creating a countdown timer
• Remove unnecessary distractions

Once you take some of these steps, it can be possible to go forth and preach the virtues of your service to your visitors more effectively.