The Q1 2025 benchmarking report for UK bathroom retail brands has just been published. Learn how the top 12 UK bathroom retail brands perform across the digital space.

The latest Q1 2025 benchmarking report for UK bathroom retail brands has just been published. It covers the largest 12 UK bathroom retail brands, including Bathroom City Ltd, Bathroom Mountain, Bathroom Supastore, Bathroom Takeaway, UK Bathroom Warehouse, Bathroom Planet, Bathroom Discount Centre, Better Bathrooms, Victorian Plumbing, Plumbworld (Online Home Retail Ltd.), Bathrooms.com, and QS Supplies.

The research gives an inside track on who is winning the biggest share of voice online and quantifies the gaps, risks, and missed opportunities for other UK bathroom retail brands to win brand exposure locally, online views, and orders. The report highlights quick wins that will improve enquiries from your online strategy and identifies the barriers that may be reducing your site’s ability to optimise digital performance.

To see a preview and contents page of the Q1 report, click here. To get a copy of the full report and the key takeaways, please complete the enquiry form or schedule a call.

Q1 2025 WINNERS LEADERBOARD

For a glance into just six of the metrics we evaluated these top 12 bathroom retail brands on, check out our quick-look table below;

Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's best and poorest-performing UK bathroom retail brands or request a copy of the report for the full review.

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What The Industry Research Report Covers

The 70+ pages of research benchmarks each retailer based on 50+ metrics and indicators of a successful digital strategy, including organic visibility, domain authority, paid media ads, conversion performance, technical performance, site speed, universal search, content, social ads, accessibility, and mobile performance.  

Driving Optimal ROAS from Paid Media Channels

Some of the leading players in the space are high spenders on paid media channels such as Google, Bing and Facebook - but have a poor or sub-optimal conversion improvement strategy. Without an optimised, sophisticated conversion strategy that maximises the conversion rate, the return on investment is unsustainable or will underperform. Scaling spend on paid media is not achievable unless the conversion rate delivers optimal performance in the sector. Some in the space have paid media spend levels from £30k+ per month but dedicate minimal resources and budgets to conversion testing.  Given the cost per clicks on ad networks will continue to rise, we recommend spending at least 10% of your paid media budget on ongoing conversion optimisation testing schedules to ensure your paid media ROI maintains long-term viability, competitive advantage, and sustainability.

Technical Website Compliance

Savvy digital marketers know that having a technically sound website is an essential component of a successful fully integrated digital strategy - plus a site capable of maximising conversion performance.  Bathroom retail brands should pay particular care to ensure they’re not directing customers to broken links, which sends them to a dead end. Instead, all brands should regularly maintain and, if applicable, provide replacement links.

Bathroom Takeaway received 18 4xx errors — the highest of all brands. While this figure isn’t significantly high, any 4xx error can negatively harm a website’s SEO and hurt their reputation with their customers.

Site Speed & Conversion Rate Performance

When 62% of consumers are less likely to convert if they have a negative mobile site experience, ensuring that your site is quick and easy to load will see a significant improvement on your overall conversion rates. A fast mobile site speed can increase conversions, while a slow mobile site speed (below 50%) can encourage users to leave a website and potentially never return.

The mobile site speed for this quarter ranged between 83 and 20, with Bathroom Takeaway receiving the lowest score. This bathroom retail brand should ensure all images are compressed and optimised and ensure they’re using a mobile-friendly website theme to improve their mobile site speed.

Building Competitive Advantage with Domain Authority

Domain authority (DA) is an essential metric for measuring the effectiveness of SEO performance, and helps create a reliable overall gauge of how effective your site is at achieving organic traffic, i.e. ‘free’ traffic that isn’t gained through sponsored ads. Bathroom retail brands should focus on creating and uploading high-quality content that’s shareable to encourage high-authority websites with a similar target audience to link back to them. Forming relationships with other websites can also increase the quality and volume of their backlinks.

A ‘good’ DA really comes down to how your competitors are performing, however it is generally considered average between 40 and 50, good between 50 and 60, and excellent above 60. The DA score for this quarter ranged between 66 and 16, with Bathroom Planet reporting the lowest score. This bathroom retail brand was in the bottom 3 for the fewest domain backlinks, and they should consider adopting and following a PR strategy to improve their score for the next quarter.

Organic Performance – Mobile & Desktop

A strong organic performance is strategically important as it ensures your site ranks above competitors for core, transactional keywords. When 93% of your customers won’t go past the first page of Google, your absence or lack of targeting for essential keywords will cost you conversions. In a cost-of-living crisis, we can expect to see a fluctuation of organic traffic on both desktop and mobile, though brands can improve their traffic by ensuring their website is user-friendly and following a keyword strategy.

Seven of the brands reported a decline in organic traffic on desktop, while 8 reported a decline on mobile. With this data in mind, all brands should ensure their websites are mobile-friendly to avoid missing out on potential traffic from mobile users.

Universal Search Opportunity

Google Universal Search Results are an evolving opportunity to make your pages visible on a SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Universal results often appear before traditional listings and are eye-catching for users. Universal search results refer to rankings on a SERP that are not the traditional ‘blue line’ Google link, and a retailer can appear for universal search results without being strong in standard rankings. Bathroom retail brands should be utilising all Universal Search features, paying particular attention to ‘images’ and ‘reviews’.

Victorian Plumbing secured the most Universal Search appearances (52,743), with the majority of these coming from ‘reviews’ and ‘images’. On the other hand, UK Bathroom Warehouse reported the fewest appearances (357).

The Longtail Keyword Opportunity

Longtail keywords are often considered high intent and potentially more likely to convert as a searcher is being more specific. Optimising for longtail keywords also puts your content strategy in a strong position to rank for new search terms as they enter Google’s index. There are many longtail keyword options bathroom retail brands could be using such as ‘online bathroom supplier’, ‘buy bathroom suites online’, or ‘buy bathroom accessories'.

Plumbworld secured the most longtail keyword appearances for position 3 (3,287), while Victorian Plumbing saw the most for positions 4–10 (8,713). Securing appearances for these positions is an effective and quick way for a brand to increase their ranking in online search engines.

Facebook Adverts

With the number of Facebook users in the United Kingdom (UK) hitting over 44 million users in 2023, it is not surprising that companies have jumped at the opportunity to advertise on the social media platform. Facebook’s UK digital advertising revenue has been estimated to have breached 2.6b GB pounds in 2019.  For bathroom retail brands, Facebook ads are an opportunity to showcase new product releases and expand their audience reach.

We’ve included an example of Bathroom Takeaway’s sponsored posts. This bathroom retail brand included a video — a media choice that receives more interaction compared to a static image.    

Top Social Shares & Content

When it comes to social media and on-site content strategies, it is important to release content that has a longer shelf life. An article is considered 'evergreen' if it has maintained its relevancy to an audience for a long period of time. It's great for your engagement, but great for Google, too, who will recognise content which achieves traffic over a long period of time. Social media could be especially useful for sharing information about different styles and special offers.

Victorian Plumbing has the most Facebook Likes (105,700) and the most Instagram followers (45,700). It’s also important that brands monitor their engagement rate, and Bathroom Mountain received the highest score for this category (358).

Website Readability & Accessibility

Around 20% of people in the UK have a disability – 2 million of which are people living with sight loss. In addition, 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women have some degree of colour vision deficiency. When websites are not designed to meet these needs, even subconsciously, brands lose customer interest as they turn to other bathroom brands that can better meet their accessibility requirements.

Plumbworld received the most accessibility alerts (685), and Bathroom Planet received the most contrast errors (33). All brands should aim to reduce their alerts and errors to improve readability and accessibility no matter the device consumers are using and if they have a colour vision deficiency.

GET THE FULL 70-PAGE Q1 2025 REPORT

To get a copy of the full report, please complete the enquiry form. If you want to talk to us about accelerating your digital performance, please call us on 01543 410014 or schedule a call with Mike Movassaghi.

Photo by Taylor Beach on Unsplash