Conversion optimisation for your webshop: the complete roadmap

According to Becom, Belgians spent 18.3 billion euros on online purchases in 2025, yet most webshop visitors leave without buying. Conversion optimisation is the discipline that changes that: earning more revenue from the visitors you already have, instead of buying ever more expensive traffic. In this guide you get the complete roadmap as we apply it at ClickForest to SME webshops in Flanders: what conversion optimisation exactly is, which benchmarks you can and cannot trust, where you lose the most customers (with the current figures from the Baymard Institute), how to fix the checkout, and how to run smart A/B tests as a smaller webshop without falling into the statistical traps. Not a list of a hundred loose tips, but an order that works.

What is conversion optimisation for a webshop?

Conversion optimisation (CRO, conversion rate optimization) is the systematic increase of the percentage of visitors your webshop turns into buyers. Not with loose tricks, but with a cycle of measuring, forming hypotheses, testing and implementing. The starting point is always data on where visitors drop off; the result is more revenue from the same traffic.

That last point makes it so interesting for SMEs: ad clicks get more expensive every year, while an improvement to your webshop keeps paying off on every visitor who arrives afterwards, from whatever channel. Conversion optimisation is thereby the lever behind your performance marketing and SEO: the same marketing investment, more results. Do you have a webshop that structurally underperforms and want to know why first? Then start with our diagnostic guide on why your webshop is not converting; this article is the sequel: the roadmap to increase conversion.

What is a good conversion rate for a webshop?

Honest answer: the average does not exist, and anyone promising you an exact figure is selling false certainty. Definitions differ (per session or per visitor), sectors differ (food converts differently from furniture) and most published “averages” are outdated copies of each other. More useful are relative patterns from large datasets, and your own conversion rate of the past months as a baseline.

The relative patterns from Contentsquare’s Digital Experience Benchmark 2026 (99 billion sessions, mostly larger sites, so read as direction): desktop converts roughly 74% higher than mobile, returning visitors convert at 2.9% versus 1.7% for new visitors, and paid search was the strongest converting channel at 2.8%. The lesson for your webshop is in the ratios: mobile is almost always your weakest link, returning visitors are gold, and you are best compared against your own figures from last month instead of a mythical market average. Calculating your conversion rate is simple: the number of orders divided by the number of sessions, times one hundred.

What is a conversion optimisation strategy?

A conversion optimisation strategy is a fixed working order: first measure where visitors drop off, then prioritise by impact, and only then change and test. The opposite of what most webshops do: implementing tips here and there without knowing whether the problem is even there. The strategy in four steps: measure, prioritise, test, lock in.

1. Measure: get your funnel data in order in GA4 (product page → cart → checkout → order), so you see the loss per step; our GA4 roadmap for Shopify gets you started.
2. Prioritise: fix the step with the biggest loss and the most traffic first. A checkout leak weighs heavier than a homepage detail.
3. Test: change one thing at a time and measure the effect, via an A/B test if your volume allows it (more on that below) or via a before-and-after comparison with sufficient runtime if it does not.
4. Lock in: document what works, roll it out to comparable pages and start again. Conversion optimisation is a rhythm, not a one-off project.

Where do you lose the most customers? The figures on abandoned carts

On average 70.22% of online shopping carts are abandoned, the Baymard Institute calculates based on fifty studies (update September 2025). The good news: the reasons are surprisingly consistent and largely fixable. The most recent Baymard survey among American shoppers (indicative for Flanders) gives these top causes, besides the 43% who were just browsing:

Reason to abandon the checkout	Share (US, Baymard 2025)
Extra costs too high (shipping, taxes, fees)	39%
Delivery too slow	21%
No trust to share card details	19%
Mandatory account creation	19%
Checkout too long or too complex	18%
Returns policy unsatisfactory	15%
Website errors or crashes	15%
Total price not visible upfront	14%

Read that table as your priority list: transparent shipping costs and delivery times, guest checkout, a short ordering process and visible trust signals together solve the majority of the fixable reasons. Baymard estimates that an average large e-commerce site can gain 35.26% more conversion purely from better checkout design; that figure applies to large players, but the direction applies to everyone. Abandoned carts that happen anyway you catch with cart abandonment emails, one of the highest-yielding flows in email marketing automation.

How do you optimise your webshop checkout?

Make the checkout shorter, more transparent and more trustworthy. Concretely: show the total price including shipping as early as possible, offer a guest checkout, limit the number of form fields, put the right payment methods on top (for Belgium: Bancontact) and show trust signals such as reviews, returns info and security labels at the payment moment itself.

On those form fields, Baymard has been crystal clear for years: the average checkout still counted 11.3 fields in 2024, while 8 suffice for most sites. Every redundant field is friction. And on the total price, Baymard co-founder Christian Holst put it aptly, long before the current figures confirmed it again:

“Total cost estimate should be in the cart. During testing, most users would expect to know what would be their checkout cost.”

— Christian Holst, co-founder of the Baymard Institute

A Flemish check that many international guides miss: the payment method point (10% drop off due to too few options) is mainly a Bancontact point here, and the delivery point (21%) is partly solved with pickup points in the checkout. Running on Shopify? Then also check our guide on setting up your webshop, where payments and shipping are covered step by step the Belgian way.

How do you increase your webshop conversion? The quick wins

The fastest gains almost always sit in four corners: product pages (photos, stock, shipping info), trust (reviews, returns policy, contact details), speed and mobile. They are not spectacular interventions, but they touch every visitor instead of a subsegment, and you need no A/B testing volume for them.

Speed comes with a caveat: the often-cited research by Deloitte and Google (37 European and American brand sites, data from 2019) found that a 0.1 second faster mobile load time went hand in hand with 8.4% more retail conversions and 9.2% higher order value. Older research, so no law of nature in 2026, but the direction has never been contradicted: slow webshops sell less, especially on mobile. And do not treat mobile as an afterthought: the bulk of your visitors is mobile while desktop converts considerably better, so that is where your biggest structural room for improvement sits; we worked that out separately in our guide on mobile optimisation for e-commerce. Finally, do not forget the average order value: conversion optimisation is about revenue per visitor, and sometimes a higher order value (bundles, free shipping above a threshold) is easier to win than a higher conversion percentage.

Want to know where your webshop leaves the most on the table? ClickForest carries out conversion optimisation for SME webshops in Flanders, from measurement to A/B tests. See our CRO approach or book a no-obligation video call.

How do you set up A/B testing smartly as an SME?

With modesty and discipline: change one thing at a time, measure long enough, and accept that most test ideas fail. The hard lesson from twenty years of experiments at tech companies is that even experts are bad at predicting what works. Ron Kohavi, who led Microsoft’s experimentation programme, sums it up like this:

“Most who have run controlled experiments in customer-facing websites and applications have experienced this humbling reality: we are poor at assessing the value of ideas.”

— Ron Kohavi, author of “Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments” and former VP Analysis and Experimentation at Microsoft

That is why you test: not to be proven right, but to discover what really works. Kohavi’s rule of thumb for big, bold changes:

“if you go for something big, try it out, but be ready to fail 80% of the time.”

— Ronny Kohavi, in Lenny’s Podcast on A/B testing

For a Flemish SME webshop with modest volumes, two practical rules come on top. One: only test where you have enough conversions; with too little volume a reliable test takes months, and then a before-and-after measurement over a longer period is more honest than a pseudo A/B test that looks “significant” after a week. Two: statistical significance is not the same as practical relevance; a tiny difference can be statistically solid and commercially worthless. So aim your testing capacity at the big levers from your funnel data (checkout, product page, price communication) instead of button colours.

What does AI mean for conversion optimisation?

Two things at once: AI becomes a visitor source and an optimisation tool. On the source side, traffic from AI assistants is growing spectacularly (Adobe Analytics measured a 693% year-on-year jump to retail sites during the 2025 US holidays), though it converts at 1.3% for now according to Contentsquare, below other channels but 55% up on a year earlier. On the tool side, AI speeds up analysis and personalisation.

For your priorities this means: treat AI traffic as a growing upper-funnel channel (make sure product data and pages are citable), and use AI tooling to speed up your research, not to replace your strategy. Salesforce estimates that AI tools influenced over 20% of global online retail sales in that holiday period; a vendor estimate with a stretchy “influenced”, but the direction is clear. How to concretely use personalisation and AI for conversion we worked out in CRO with AI personalisation, and the broader e-commerce picture is in our e-commerce trends for Belgium.

What research and which tools do you need?

Less than you think: a correct measurement (GA4 with a closed funnel), one qualitative research layer (session recordings or heatmaps to see where visitors get stuck) and a test method. More expensive suites only add value once the basics pay off. The order matters more than the brand of the tool.

“Measure everything that needs to be measured. How else do you know you’re improving?”

— Peep Laja, founder of CXL

A practical research menu for an SME webshop: funnel analysis in GA4 (where is the loss the biggest), session recordings of the checkout (what really happens there), a handful of customer interviews or an exit poll (why did you not buy), and a monthly review of your search terms and site searches (what are visitors looking for that you do not offer or do not make findable). With that you find nine out of ten big conversion problems without one extra euro of tooling.

What should you remember about conversion optimisation for your webshop?

Conversion optimisation means earning more revenue from the visitors you already have, through a fixed cycle: measure, prioritise, test, lock in. The figures point the way: 70.22% of shopping carts are abandoned and the top reasons (surprise costs, slow delivery, distrust, mandatory accounts) are all fixable. Do not believe mythical “average conversion rates”, compare against your own baseline, and test big where your volume allows it.

ClickForest helps SMEs in Flanders with conversion optimisation for their webshop: from funnel measurement and research to A/B tests and structural improvement, always linked to your broader e-commerce approach. Curious where your biggest conversion leak sits? Book a no-obligation video call and we will walk through your funnel together.