CRO Fundamentals: Where to Start When Everything Needs Fixing

You'd be amazed how many stores don't have basic funnel tracking set up. They know their overall conversion rate but couldn't tell you where people are dropping off.

You need to know: what percentage of visitors view a product? What percentage add to cart? What percentage start checkout? What percentage finish?

These numbers tell you everything. If people are viewing products but not adding to cart, you've got a product page problem: price, imagery, copy, something. If they're adding to cart but bouncing at checkout, you've got friction there. If they're not even viewing products, your traffic quality might be the issue, or your navigation is failing them.

I worked with a skincare brand convinced their product pages were the problem. They were about to spend $15K on new photography. Funnel analysis showed 87% of people who added to cart were completing checkout, which is excellent. The real problem was navigation: people landing on the homepage couldn't find the product categories. They were getting lost and leaving. A $500 navigation fix outperformed what the $15K rebrand would have done.

Designers want to start with homepages. They're wrong.

Someone who's reached your checkout has already decided to buy. They've found a product, liked it enough to add it to cart, and clicked through to give you money. Your only job is to not stop them.

Guest checkout is non-negotiable. If you're forcing account creation, you're losing 25-35% of conversions. I don't care about your customer database strategy or your remarketing plans. Let people buy first, offer account creation after. This is a setting change on most platforms and it's probably the highest-ROI thing in this entire article.

Look at your form fields. Every field is friction. Phone number: do you actually need it? Company name: unless you're B2B, delete it. Separate first and last name fields: does your shipping carrier even distinguish? The ideal checkout has the bare minimum: email, shipping address, payment details.

Payment options matter more than people realise. If you only take cards, you're missing PayPal users (there are still lots), Apple Pay devotees, and the growing segment who want buy-now-pay-later. Adding Klarna or Clearpay typically lifts conversion 5-12% depending on your average order value. Higher AOV, bigger lift.

And test your checkout on mobile. Actually test it: go through the whole thing with your thumbs, on a phone with an average screen size, using 4G. If any part of that is painful, you're bleeding money.

After checkout is solid, product pages are next. This is where the buying decision happens or doesn't.

Images do more work than copy. Most stores underinvest here. You need multiple angles, context shots showing the product in use, scale references so people can judge size, and zoom that actually works. For anything complex or mechanical, video is worth it.

I can't tell you how many products I've seen with three photos, all from basically the same angle, against a white background. It works for commodity items maybe, but if you're selling anything where quality or design matters, that's not enough.

Pricing clarity is underrated. If you have a discount, show it clearly, strike through the old price. If you offer Klarna, show the instalment amount: 'or $18/month.' For some products this is the difference between 'too expensive' and 'I can do $18.'

Reviews are essential. Products with reviews convert roughly 2x better than products without. This isn't subtle. If you don't have reviews, that's your priority. Email every customer asking for one, offer incentives, do whatever it takes. A product with 15 reviews beats a product with zero reviews almost every time.

The buy button should be obvious and sticky on mobile. I've seen sites where you have to scroll past three paragraphs of copy to find the add-to-cart button. Don't do that.

Slow sites kill conversions. Every second of load time costs you roughly 7% of conversions. Three seconds and you're losing half your visitors before they see anything.

Run PageSpeed Insights on your site. The score isn't gospel, but it gives you a sense. Below 50 on mobile is a problem. Above 70 is decent. Above 90 is great but usually not worth the engineering effort to achieve.

Most speed issues come from images. People upload massive PNG files directly from their phone or camera. Compress everything, use modern formats like WebP, enable lazy loading so images below the fold don't block initial render.

Apps are the second biggest culprit, especially on Shopify. Each app typically loads JavaScript on every page, whether or not it's being used on that page. I've seen stores with 40+ apps installed, and the site takes four seconds to become interactive. Audit your apps. Delete anything you're not actively using.

Themes matter too. If you're on Shopify, Dawn is the speed benchmark because it's deliberately minimal. Older themes, especially ones with lots of fancy animations and sliders, are often much slower. Sometimes a theme switch is the right call.

Don't obsess over perfect scores. Going from 30 to 70 makes a noticeable difference to conversion rates. Going from 70 to 95 typically doesn't; the gains become imperceptible to users.

You can't fix everything at once, and not all changes are equal.

I use a simple framework: multiply potential impact by your confidence it'll work, then divide by effort. High impact, high confidence, low effort goes to the top.

Adding guest checkout: huge impact, near-certainty it helps, takes five minutes to enable. Do it today.

Complete site redesign: big potential impact, but uncertain whether it'll actually improve conversion (sometimes redesigns make things worse), and months of effort. Rarely worth it compared to targeted fixes.

Adding Klarna: moderate impact, well-documented that BNPL helps, maybe a day of setup work. Solid quick win.

Run through your list of potential changes this way. The answers usually become obvious.

The mistake I see is founders wanting to do the big impressive stuff when the boring foundational things haven't been addressed. Nobody wants to brag about enabling guest checkout or compressing their images. But that's usually where the money is.

Everyone talks about A/B testing. But here's the thing: you need significant traffic for A/B testing to be useful.

To get statistically reliable results, you typically need about 500 conversions per variation, so 1,000 total conversions for a simple A/B test. If you're converting 10 people a day, that's 100 days. A test running for three months isn't practical.

For stores under maybe $1M revenue, I'd suggest skipping formal A/B testing. Instead: make one change at a time, compare results week over week, and move fast. You'll be wrong sometimes. You'll make changes that hurt. But you'll also learn faster and make more progress than agonising over statistical significance.

Formal A/B testing becomes worthwhile once you're past a certain scale, usually once you're converting 50+ orders a day. Below that, velocity beats rigour.

CRO can't fix fundamental problems.

If nobody wants your product, optimising your product page won't help. If your prices are 40% higher than competitors without a compelling reason, no amount of urgency copy will overcome that. If you're buying rubbish traffic from irrelevant audiences, the best checkout experience in the world won't convert them.

Before diving into CRO work, ask honestly: is there genuine demand for this product at this price? Is the traffic I'm paying for actually relevant? If the answer is no, CRO is a distraction.

But if the fundamentals are sound (real demand, reasonable pricing, relevant traffic), then CRO is about capturing more of what's already there. Start at checkout, work backwards through product pages, fix speed issues, and be systematic about it.

Not glamorous. No silver bullets. But this is how stores go from 1.2% to 2.5%, and that's a doubling of revenue on the same traffic.