How to Increase Ecommerce Conversion Rates: 13 Proven Strategies for 2025

In fact, over 1 in 5 sales are now made online^[1]. Imagine taking your current sales and taking off 20%! That’s what retailers that don’t capitalize on ecommerce are doing.

But, say you’ve already made your website and have started to see sales trickle through. What happens if you’re getting visitors to your site, but they’re just not following through and making the purchase? What can you do if your webstore isn’t working? Well, that’s what we’re looking at today.

We’re here to bring you some of the latest proven strategies to increase conversion rates on your website. Today, we’ll cover:

• What ecommerce conversion rates are

• Why your conversion rate matters

• What conversion rate optimization (CRO) is

• Areas of your website that influence conversion rate

• X strategies to give your conversion rate a boost

By the end of this blog, you should be ready to make changes, small and large, that see your websales boom! Can’t wait to get started? Let’s jump right in!

What is my ecommerce conversion rate?

There are two main areas that influence the success of your website. The first is traffic, which is the number of visitors your website gets. In other words, how many people are looking at the products you sell online? The second is your conversion rate. That’s the proportion of people that look at your products and then actually buy them.

So your ecommerce conversion rate is basically a reflection of how interested visitors are in your products. It’s arguably the best website review you can get. If customers look at how you’ve displayed your products on your website and go “Ooh, I want one of those”, you’re doing a good job. If they go to your website, hang around for a bit and then leave, they probably saw something that didn’t impress them.

Why your conversion rate matters

Both conversion rate and traffic matter for your website, because one cannot work without the other. It doesn’t matter if you convert every site visit into a sale if you only get two or three site visits a day. You’re still not making many sales. On the other hand, if you have a thousand visitors to the site every day, but a conversion rate of 0.2%, you’ve still only made two sales.

Get both traffic and conversions and you’ve got the magic mix: plenty of people visiting the site and lots of them following through and making a purchase. Now, your website is pulling its weight!

What is conversion rate optimization (CRO)?

Now you know what your conversion rate is, it’s time to look at the more active part of the strategy: conversion rate optimization (CRO). CRO is the constant process of improving your website to boost that percentage of visitors that make a sale, subscribe, or engage with your website in the way you want them to.

CRO shouldn’t just be about changing things to see what works, or copying what your competitors are doing. CRO is a highly data-driven field, seeking to understand why people on your website do the things they do. Once you understand how people are engaging, you can make strategic changes that drive up sales.

Typically, CRO likes to focus on points of friction in the journey through your website. Often, this means looking at factors like the loading time of pages (often influenced by the data size of product images), product descriptions, and the flow through the checkout process. CRO uses things like heatmaps and session recordings to see what people are looking at, as well as A/B testing and surveys to see exactly when and why visitors to the site lost interest or got stuck.

Once you have a better understanding of your website, you can make that knowledge pay in a big way, making targeted improvements to the content and design of your website to improve the user experience. Tweaking copy to sell the products better, redesigning the page to make the popular points stand out, or simplifying the site to speed up the sales. 

But none of this happens just once, or overnight. CRO is a constant process. Customer values, competitors, and practices continually change in ecommerce (which, after all, has grown so much in the short time it’s been around). Good CRO is a cycle of tests, lessons, and improvements. When done consistently, it not only boosts conversions but also enhances customer satisfaction and builds long-term loyalty, giving your ecommerce store a competitive edge.

Parts of your website that influence conversion rate

It’s all well and good understanding what CRO means, but when you’re looking at your website, with dozens of pages, products (dare I say hundred or thousands of products?), the checkout, the terms and conditions, images … it’s overwhelming. So where do you start?

Well, if you want to test the improvements you make, it helps to start focusing on one thing at a time. Your conversion rate isn’t going to change overnight, so it’s important to start by winning each battle you pick. So let’s break it all down into the individual areas you can work, and then you can evaluate the impact your changes have on your online sales.

8 CRO areas to work on

• Mobile-friendliness: When you sit down to work on your website, you might do it on a tablet on mobile. But did you know that well over half of online sales actually come from mobile phones?^[2] That means that if you don’t consider what your website looks like when seen from a mobile device, you’re probably going to miss out on a lot of sales. One of the best first steps you can take to improve your CRO, is to make sure people that visit your website from a mobile don’t leave it immediately. A mobile-friendly website is a must-have!

• Checkout: Any friction in your basket or checkout can be a real gut-punch for your business. The visitor already wants to buy something; you’ve done all the hard work, but an issue at checkout and the sale is lost. Changes you make should look to shorten any forms and data entry, possibly incorporating popular payment methods like Google or Apple Pay, PayPal or Klarna. Be clear about shipping costs, and add a progress indicator to show how far there is to go. Keep that checkout fast, transparent, and simple to ensure every customer completes their purchase.

• Social proof: Buying online, customers can’t inspect the products, so reviews, ratings, and features that build trust can remove that doubt that many people get when looking at things online. Third-party platforms like Trustpilot can provide that confidence that you and your products are reliable. This could also mean including detailed case studies from happy customers that really offer that credibility you’re looking for. Combine that with a clear returns policy and visitors to your site won’t hesitate to give you that leap of faith.

• Navigation and discoverability: Whether it’s upping your items bought per customer, or just helping get a first-time visitor to the right place, helping customers discover the right products for them is a crucial part of your website: we call it navigability–making each page clear and easy to find. Strong navigation means creating clear menu categories, incorporating a search bar, and building a net of links that fit everything together neatly. Add filters and product recommendations to weave everything together like the perfect sponge recipe! A website that’s easy to explore keeps shoppers engaged longer, increases product views, and ultimately leads to higher conversions.

• Load speed: Slow website are not fun to be on. The slower your website is, the more conversion it will kill. People in the 2020s are used to instant results, so even a short delay will lead to customers bouncing straight off your site (especially those on mobiles, which as we said, most of them are). You can improve your load speed by compressing images, enabling caching (Google it), or using a better hosting provider. Faster loading doesn’t just improve user experience–it gets you more visitors, more conversions, so a lot more sales!

• CTAs: A call to action is anything on your site that pushes customers to take the next step. It could be a button that says “Buy now” or “Subscribe here”, but it’s the door you put onto your site that leads them to the place you ultimately want them to go. A weak CTA might be hard to spot, so fewer visitors will see it and click it, even if they want to; a strong CTA is visible, compelling, and in just the right place that the mouse or finger naturally glides towards it. Test everything from colours and sizes, to phrasing and placing. When visitors know exactly what to do next, they’re far more likely to keep moving through your sales journey.

• Layout and imagery: The first thing any visitor to your site will notice is the layout and most prominent images. Clutter, inconsistent spacing, or low-quality images all give the sense that your site (and therefore your business) is unprofessional. On the other hand, getting layout and imagery right helps users absorb information and improve their visit. High-quality images also give customers a better sense of what they’re buying. Simplify your design and ensure you get your best images in the best places, with multiple angles of products and lifestyle shots to back them up. When your layout and imagery look polished and intentional, customers feel more comfortable making a purchase.

• Style and content: The tone of your content, the clarity of your messaging, and your website’s style needs to reflect your brand and communicate your products’ value. Confusing descriptions or walls of text, as well as an inconsistent tone can be overwhelming and off-putting. Focus on writing clearly and concisely and highlighting on benefits, not just features (what will the product do for the buyer, not just what does it have). Try bullet points if needed, and scannable formatting that mens shoppers can skim through pages if they like. Test fonts, colors, spacing. Bring all your content together into simple clear messaging and customers will trust your brand and make the sale!

5 strategies to give your conversion rate a boost

Now you know the areas to focus on, and you’ve no doubt already got some ideas for strategies you can use to improve conversions on your website. But if your want to do your CRO like a PRO, here are some of the tricks the professionals are doing on a daily basis.

A/B testing

A/B testing is one of the most straightforward but effective ways of learning what’s working and what’s not. Instead of just making a bunch of changes you think will help, you isolate an element (say, your headline) and you test two variations of that headline without making other changes (version A, version B). Whichever one performs better … well, use that one! Make sure to run the test for long enough to get enough traffic that it’s clear which one is having more impact. Over time, these evidence-based changes can have a significant impact which you’ll have actually quantified.

Collecting guest data

Even when visitors to your website never actually become customers, they can still bring valuable data or offer you the chance to bring them back with features like “back-in-stock” notifications that help you build your marketing list. This helps you re-engage visitors when you don’t get them the first time around. Keep forms simple, and offer discounts to encourage them to sign-up. Once collected, you can use this data to push your marketing strategy with tailored product recommendations, or get feedback from failed conversions that gives you concrete reasons why you didn’t make the sale!

Heat mapping

Heat maps are a brilliant way to work on your conversion rate. They tell you about every little bit of engagement, from how far down your site users scroll to where they click and even where they hover. This tells you what’s catching their attention and what’s being ignored. And the visual data presentation can make it really easy to see where the problems are. Is this important button too far down the page? Are users clicking on something they expect to be interactive that actually is just a picture? Heat mapping is an invaluable CRO tool and not one to be overlooked!

Performance analysis

As with heat mapping and A/B testing, CRO is all about data. The more you can learn about your website and how people engage with it, the better. Performance analysis is all about that. Where are visitors going? Where are they leaving from? Which page is driving sales and which is losing people’s attention? Getting the answers to these questions helps shape your entire CRO strategy. Gather this data and review your performance analysis on a regular basis to ensure your approach to your website strategy is data-led.

Plan your conversion funnel

The conversion funnel is the journey a customer takes from learning about who you are and going to your website all the way to making a purchase. This journey may feel natural to the customer (it should feel that way), but all being well, every step they make should be one you’ve anticipated. The links they click on will be ones you’ve strategically placed, then they get product recommendations, add them to their cart, and checkout smoothly. Planning this funnel and refining it to make it more sophisticated and personalized (personalization makes a huge difference) is guaranteed to improve conversions.

Conversion rates for your website: 

Boosting your ecommerce conversion rate isn’t about guesswork—it’s about using clever data collection strategies to make clear improvements to your website that remove sticking points and show your products in the best light.

By focusing on the areas that matter most, from mobile experience to checkout flow, and using data-driven strategies like A/B testing, heat maps, and funnel planning, you can steadily increase both engagement and sales. CRO is an ongoing process, but every improvement, large or small, builds a smoother, more compelling customer journey. Put these strategies into action, track the results, and watch your online store deliver the conversions and revenue it’s truly capable of.

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