The Q1 2025 benchmarking report for UK blinds and shutters brands has just been published. Learn how the top 11 UK blinds and shutters brands perform across the digital space.
The latest Q1 2025 benchmarking report for UK blinds and shutters suppliers has just been published. It covers the largest 11 national blinds and shutters brands, including Hillarys, Blinds 2Go, Blinds Direct, Just Shutters, 247 Blinds, Eclipse Blinds, Shuttercraft, Homefair Blinds & Shutters, Shutterly Fabulous, Perfect Shutters, and Plantation Shutters.
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 blinds and shutters brands to win brand exposure locally, drive online views, and generate 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.
For a glance into just 6 of the metrics we evaluated these top 11 blinds and shutters brands on, check out our quick-look table below;
Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's best and poorest-performing UK blinds and shutters brands or request a copy of the report for the full review.
The 70+ pages of research benchmarks each site based on 50+ metrics and indicators of 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.
Some of the leading players in the space are high spenders on paid media channels such as Google, Bing & 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.
Pay-Per-Click marketing is constantly evolving, with more and more advertisers being forced to hand over a lot of control to Google's algorithms as the push for automation grows ever stronger. There are still key elements of control that we have though, the main one of these being budget which is ultimately something the algorithms can't take from you. That's why being smart with your budget and ad coverage is essential to achieving strong results and bettering what your competitors have to offer.
For Q1 2025, the average budget wastage across these UK blinds and shutters brands was £11,942 with some of the top players in the market spending a considerable amount on areas and audiences unlikely to deliver a return. We can see this in more detail when looking at the average monthly cost per cost-per-click (CPC) amongst advertisers, with the average of this metric being £7.45 . This highlights how competitive the market is and how important it is to control your budgets effectively. In this quarter, Perfect Shutters has the highest budget wastage at £45,900, and Shuttercraft has the lowest budget wastage at £6.
There are varying monthly ad budgets across the competitors in the report. While this gap highlights the competitive advantage that larger budgets can provide, it's not just about spending more; it’s about spending smarter. By focusing on driving efficiency in campaign management, targeting, and budget allocation, businesses with smaller budgets can still effectively compete with larger players. Investing in data-driven strategies and refining ad performance can help close the gap and maximise the return on every pound spent, enabling growth even in a competitive landscape. Relative to their spend, Blinds 2go has the lowest monthly cost-per-click (CPC) at £1, and Shutterly Fabulous has the highest at £35.
The report highlights the importance of budget efficiency by comparing monthly ad spend with estimated CPC in relation to your competitors, see who has the highest and lowest CPC. To maximise the effectiveness of your budget, it’s essential to focus on driving CPC down while maintaining or improving campaign performance. In this report, Perfect Shutters has the highest estimate monthly ad spend at £45,900, and Shuttercraft has the lowest at £6.
By optimising targeting, refining ad copy, and leveraging data to identify high-converting opportunities, you can ensure every click delivers maximum value. This approach not only stretches your budget further but also boosts your return on ad spend (ROAS), enabling you to achieve stronger results without simply increasing expenditure.
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. Having a technically sound website will ensure potential customers can find the information and products they're looking for when it comes to browsing for new blinds and shutters.
Plantation Shutters flagged the most 4xx errors (65). These errors indicate broken links throughout a website, which can impact a brand’s credibility, hurting the amount of traffic they receive. These errors can also harm a website’s analytics, such as increasing bounce rates and/or reducing time spent on a website.
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 makes a significant improvement on your overall conversion rates. While site speed might not seem the most pressing issue for brands within the home interiors sector, blinds and shutters brands will still benefit from having a fast site which instils a positive impression of the brand from first click.
The mobile site speed for this quarter ranged between 90 and 28, with 247 Blinds reporting the lowest mobile speed. Page speed is an important factor for search engine algorithms, and faster-loading websites rank higher, leading to more traffic and visibility.
Domain authority 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. Blinds and shutters brands have a wealth of opportunity to build backlinks and improve their domain authority, and can work with external publications and bloggers to build trust, visibility, and referral traffic.
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 62 and 4, with Homefair Blinds & Shutters flagging the lowest DA score. This blinds and shutter brand receive backlinks from the fewest domains (158). It’s important that brands aim to secure backlinks from various sources to demonstrate their trustworthiness to search engines to help with their rankings.
A strong organic performance is strategically important as it ensures your site ranks above competitors for key, 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. Only two blinds and shutters brands in our report have gained organic traffic year on year, which is unsurprising due to the cost of living crisis and need for many consumers to cut back on luxuries and outgoings.
Three of the brands reported a decrease in organic traffic on desktop, whereas 5 reported a decrease on mobile. With this in mind, all brands should take action to improve their website’s credibility and web experience on mobile, such as by using a responsive theme and reducing page weight to increase site speed.
Google Universal Search Results is 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 site can appear for universal search results without being strong in standard rankings. Brands within home improvement sectors, such as blinds and shutters, should look particularly to Image Pack results as an opportunity to display products from the SERP itself, and entice users to visit their site.
Hillarys reported the most Universal Search appearances (11,519), with the majority of these coming from ‘reviews’ and ‘images’. By websites optimising their Universal Search appearances, they can outperform competitors who focus purely on traditional SEO methods.
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 brand new search terms as they enter Google’s index. Blinds and shutters brands should be looking at high-potential keywords which show a strong conversion intention, such as 'buy blinds with fitting' or 'window shutters next day installation'.
Blinds 2go secured the most longtail keyword appearances for position 3 (1,750), while Blinds Direct reported the most appearances for positions 4–10 (2,957). Securing appearances for positions 4–10 is a successful opportunity to increase their rankings in the top spot. Small adjustments, such as internal linking and improving content quality can further increase their online visibility.
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. Facebook ads are a great way for blinds and shutters brands to reach people who are specifically looking to make improvements to their homes.
We’ve included examples of Shuttercraft’s sponsored posts. This brand should reduce the number of lines of text to support scannability for social media users.
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 longer. It's great for your brand engagement, but great for Google too, who will recognise content which achieves traffic over a long period of time. Blinds and shutters brands can use social media to join in with trending homeware images and content, such as sharing seasonal styling inspiration along with any offers or sales events they're holding.
Blinds 2go has the most Facebook Likes (168,200) and the most Instagram followers (317,700). All brands should also assess their social media engagement rate to track whether or not their followers are interacting with their posts. This quarter, Plantation Shutters secured the highest total engagement (7,422).
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, brands lose customer interest as they turn elsewhere. For blinds and shutters brands, while it may be tempting to favour visuals over function, care should be taken that their site remains accessible and easy to read.
247 Blinds reported 111 accessibility alerts and 154 contrast errors — the highest in both categories. These alerts and errors can be harmful to a user’s web experience if they’re accessing the website from a screen reader and/or they have a colour vision deficiency. This brand should regularly monitor their alerts and make adjustment to their website’s user experience to reduce these figures.
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 Matt Alaniz on Unsplash