What even is CRO?
In plain English, CRO is the art (and science) of getting more of your website visitors to do what you want them to do, be it buying a product, signing up for newsletters, or hitting that download button. It’s about making your website a smooth, persuasive machine that guides visitors straight to the checkout button. Whether it’s tweaking designs, refining content, or simplifying navigation, every little change you make can help turn passive lookers into active buyers.
CRO - It's a marathon, not a sprint.
The true magic of Conversion Rate Optimisation lies in its long-term benefits. By strategising and implementing CRO thoughtfully over time, you harness the power of marginal gains—small, incremental improvements that compound and significantly boost your efficiency and profitability.
Getting the most out of your advertising spend
It’s about making every click count and every visitor matter more. This approach not only maximises your advertising spend but also turns casual browsers into loyal customers. The better your site converts, the higher your return on investment will be, making every penny you put into promotions work harder for you. So, while it may require patience and persistence, the payoff is a more effective, efficient website that drives growth and scales your business.
So, ready to boost your site’s performance? Here’s a list of 19 actionable CRO tips that will help you optimise your e-commerce website in ways you probably hadn’t thought of yet.
1. Optimise everything for Mobile
Mobile commerce accounted for 69% of e-commerce sales in the UK in 2023 (Statista). Ensuring your site is mobile-friendly is crucial, including responsive design and mobile-friendly navigation elements that improve usability on smaller screens.
Review some of your own usage statistics and reflect this in the overall design, speed performance and feel of your website.
Keep coming back to this point too as you add more CRO tactics, tools or tech to your store and make sure nothing is overlapping on mobile, for example Sticky Add To Carts & Chat Widgets will typically stick to the bottom of the page alongside cookie policy pop-ups so make sure there is either a clear hierarchy or that certain tools are switched off or re-located for mobile.
2. Include Plenty of Social Proof
As the majority of your store’s visitors will be first-timers, we need to build as much trust in your brand and the products you provide as possible and the best way to do this is showing that other people have bought this item or from this store before AND have had a great experience.
Make sure this is included at multiple touch points; Home Page, Landing Pages, Product Description Pages so that wherever buyers are looking, they are seeing just how great your brand & products are and that they are not alone but part of a community by buying from you.
Examples include Number of units sold, Number of happy customers, User Generated Content (UGC), reviews etc.
On average, reviews produce an 18% uplift in sales. Use reviews and ratings prominently on product pages and within search results to help build trust and influence purchase decisions.
Tech partners such as reviews.io and Trustpilot are great for collecting reviews and integrating these into your online store.
Don’t have any reviews yet? Pick a platform to use and start collecting reviews from existing buyers in both written and video form, use email marketing and incentives to drive these and give your biggest fans a platform to share their experiences.
Don’t forget to engage with reviewers too, good or bad their experience will be valuable to potential buyers so this is a great opportunity to publicly showcase your awesome customer service.
If you are highlighting specific quotes or videos from buyers, make sure they focus on the benefits to buyers, not just talking about features.
Finally, consider social proof to encourage cross-sells. For example ‘300 people who bought X also bought Y’.
3. Reduce Load Times
This is becoming increasingly important, not just for SEO but also for user experience and now evident in CRO, a one-second delay in page load time can yield a 7% reduction in conversions (Neil Patel).
Streamline your store by optimising images (correct sizes and using .webp where possible), using lazy loading on images, leveraging browser caching, and reducing server response time to enhance the user experience and retain customers.
Consider hosting Landing Pages on an externally hosted subdomain which will remove a lot of the scripts and pixels the main store will load in.
Use the same principle for videos too, avoid hosting directly on your store but opt instead for hosting on either YouTube or Vimeo and let their servers do some of the heavy lifting.
4. Use Heatmapping Tools
Heatmaps have shown that 80% of users only view information above the page fold. Tools like Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar help analyse what elements your buyers interact with and how they navigate your site, allowing you to optimise layout and content placement effectively.
Review heatmaps across both desktop & mobile to find where users are clicking.
Use scrollmaps to determine how far on each page buyers are actually scrolling to determine where to place key conversion-boosters on each page.
If you do want to include very detailed information on certain ingredients or industry-specific terms, include them further down the page but link to them from some of your key features or descriptions towards the top of the page.
Spend some time watching live user recordings to fully understand how people are interacting with your store, where users click (which variants have they looked at), where their scrolls stop or where they have clicked to Add to Cart or where they have been switched off.
5. Clear and Global Calls to Action
CTAs that are clear and compelling can increase conversion rates by up to 32% (HubSpot, 2021) so make sure every CTA on your site uses action-oriented text, stands out through colour or design, and is placed strategically to draw attention.
Use CTAs to drive buyers towards your ‘Best Sellers’ or ‘Popular’ products.
Make sure this is overtly clear, keep the colour consistent across Add To Cart, Checkout, Complete Purchase etc. Making this a unique colour will help these CTAs stand out very obviously.
6. Reduce Buyer Anxiety
As noted further up the page, most visitors are first-timers, it’s our job to reduce any anxiety around buying from a new retailer.
Offering a clear and reassuring return policy can increase conversions by up to 17% (ReadyCloud, 2019).
Be sure to include delivery information before the Cart and test adding gamification on orders reaching the Free Delivery limit.
Showcase your policies on product pages, close to Add To Cart buttons and during the checkout process to alleviate shopper concerns and encourage purchases.
If you don’t have strong returns policies in play yet, take some time to consider how you could improve your product or satisfaction guarantees to make it a no-brainer for buyers to use your products or services.
Is your brand or product based in the UK? Shout about it!
Posting all orders out within a day? Make sure buyers know this!