B2B Website Conversion Benchmarks by Industry: Where Does Your Site Actually Stand?

"What's a Good Conversion Rate?" Is the Wrong Question

I hear this one constantly. A B2B marketing director pulls up their analytics dashboard, sees a 1.8% conversion rate, and asks whether that's good or bad.

The honest answer: it depends. But probably not great.

The more useful question is this: what separates the companies converting at 5-8% from everyone else converting at 1-2%? Because the gap between average and excellent in B2B is enormous, and the reasons behind it are almost never what people expect.

It's rarely about the logo. Or the colour palette. Or the hero image.

It's about speed and structure. And whether your site actually answers the questions your buyers are asking instead of the questions you wish they were asking.

The Benchmarks: Industry by Industry

Let's get the numbers out of the way. These are 2026 averages from First Page Sage, covering B2B companies with established digital marketing programs:

A few things worth noting.

Oil and gas sitting at the top might surprise you. But think about it: the buyer intent in that sector is extremely high. Nobody is casually browsing oilfield equipment suppliers. When someone lands on your site in that space, they already know what they need. The sites that make it easy to request a quote or download a spec sheet capture that intent. The ones that hide everything behind "Contact Us" lose it.

B2B SaaS sitting at the bottom is painful but predictable. SaaS sites have the highest traffic volumes but the lowest purchase intent per visitor. Lots of researchers, lots of free-tier window shoppers, lots of competitors doing competitive analysis. The conversion rate reflects a wide funnel, not a broken one.

What the Top 10% Do Differently

Here's what I've noticed working on enterprise sites across multiple industries: the top performers don't have better branding. They have better fundamentals.

They Load Fast

This is the unsexy answer nobody wants to hear. A 1-second improvement in page load time increases conversions by 7%. Not 0.7%. Seven percent.

If your site takes 4 seconds to load and your competitor's loads in 1.5 seconds, the math is working against you before anyone reads a single word. We've written extensively about why Core Web Vitals matter for business owners and the numbers hold up across every industry we've worked in.

They Have Content Paths, Not Just Content

The average B2B purchase involves 13 stakeholders. Thirteen people. Different concerns, different research, different things they need to hear before they'll say yes.

A site that only speaks to the decision-maker ignores the technical evaluator, the procurement officer, the end user, and the security reviewer. The top 10% build distinct content paths for each role in the buying committee. Case studies for the C-suite. Technical specs for the engineers. Compliance documentation for procurement. Integration guides for the implementation team.

They Let Buyers Self-Serve

61% of B2B buyers prefer a completely rep-free buying experience. That's not a prediction. That's the current state. And 83% prefer ordering or interacting via digital self-service rather than talking to sales.

The top-performing sites give buyers what they want: pricing information upfront, downloadable resources without a gate, product comparisons they can share with their team, and a way to start a conversation only when they're ready.

The sites still gating every PDF behind a form are optimising for lead volume at the expense of lead quality. And their sales teams know it.

The 88% Rule

88% of users will not return to a website after a bad experience.

In B2C, that's a problem. In B2B, it's a catastrophe.

When a consumer has a bad experience on a retail site, they go to a competitor and buy a similar product in five minutes. Low stakes, fast recovery.

When a B2B buyer has a bad experience on your site, you've lost a deal you didn't even know was in play. They go to your competitor, share that competitor's materials with their buying committee, and you never appear in the conversation. There's no second chance because you were never told you had a first one.

First impressions in B2B are permanent. There is no second visit.

Stop Tracking the Wrong Things

Most B2B companies are measuring their website performance with metrics that tell them almost nothing.

Form Fills Without Quality Scoring

You got 200 form submissions this month. Great. How many were from companies that match your ICP? How many had decision-making authority? How many were students doing market research?

If you can't answer those questions, you're not tracking conversions. You're counting noise. We covered this problem in detail in our analytics guide, but the core point is simple: a form fill is not a lead. A qualified form fill from a relevant company is a lead.

Traffic Without Source Attribution

"Traffic is up 30% this month" means nothing without knowing where it came from and what it did. A thousand visitors from a Reddit thread who bounced in 8 seconds is not the same as fifty visitors from a targeted LinkedIn campaign who spent 6 minutes reading your case studies.

Track traffic by source, by page, and by outcome. Everything else is dashboard decoration.

Bounce Rate as a Health Metric

Bounce rate is context-dependent to the point of being almost useless on its own. A 70% bounce rate on a blog post might be completely fine. A 70% bounce rate on your pricing page is a five-alarm fire. Stop looking at site-wide bounce rate. Start looking at bounce rate by page type and by traffic source.

The Page Speed Multiplier

I keep coming back to speed because the data keeps proving it matters more than anything else.

The hidden cost of cheap hosting is something we've covered before, but it's worth revisiting in the context of B2B conversions specifically.

Consider this scenario. You're spending R50,000 per month on paid ads driving traffic to your B2B site. Your site loads in 4.2 seconds. Industry data tells us you're losing roughly 25-35% of that traffic before they even see your content.

That's R12,500-R17,500 per month in wasted ad spend. Your ads aren't wrong. Your targeting isn't off. Your server is just slow.

Fixing your hosting infrastructure and optimising your frontend costs a fraction of one month's ad budget. And unlike ads, the improvement compounds: every visitor, from every channel, for every month going forward, benefits from the speed improvement.

If you're spending money driving traffic to a slow site, you're pouring water into a leaking bucket and wondering why it won't fill up.

A Practical Audit You Can Do Today

You don't need an agency to start. Here's a five-step self-assessment:

1. Run PageSpeed Insights on Your Top 3 Pages

Test your homepage, your most-visited landing page, and your contact/demo request page. If any score below 70 on mobile, speed is your bottleneck.

2. Time Your Own Experience

Open your site on your phone, over a mobile connection. Time how long it takes from clicking a Google result to being able to read the first sentence. If it's more than 3 seconds, you have a problem.

3. Ask Someone Outside Your Company What You Do

Show your homepage to someone who doesn't work in your industry. Give them 10 seconds. Then ask them what your company does and who it's for. If they can't answer both questions, your messaging is the bottleneck.

4. Check Your Form-to-Qualified-Lead Ratio

Take your total form submissions from last month. Now count how many turned into actual sales conversations. If it's less than 20%, your site is attracting the wrong people or asking the wrong questions.

5. Map Your Content to Buying Committee Roles

List the roles involved in your typical purchasing decision. Now check whether your site has specific content for each role. If everything on your site speaks to "the decision-maker" and nobody else, you're leaving the rest of the committee to your competitor's website.

The Bottom Line

Benchmarks give you a starting point. Your own trend line is what matters.

If you're converting at 1.5% in an industry that averages 2.2%, you have a gap. But the gap is almost never a branding problem. It's speed. It's structure. It's measuring the wrong things and making decisions based on incomplete data.

Fix the fundamentals first. Everything else gets easier after that.

The companies that figure this out stop worrying about benchmarks entirely. They become the benchmark.

Related reading

• Core Web Vitals for non-developers -- The Google performance metrics that directly affect your conversion rate.
• Analytics that matter: sales funnel reports and conversion tracking -- How to track the events that actually drive revenue, not vanity metrics.
• The hidden cost of cheap hosting -- Why your hosting infrastructure is probably costing you more than you think.
• From template site to high-performing asset: our website redesign playbook -- The process for turning an underperforming site into a business tool.