Is Your Website Losing Customers & Can CRO Help?
You’ve invested effort and resources driving traffic to your website, but are those visitors converting? A lot of companies are surprised to discover just how many potential sales slip away at the final hurdle. Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is about understanding the journey your visitors take, where they hesitate, and what might be stopping them from taking that final step. We’ve found that even small adjustments can make a significant difference to your bottom line.
CRO is fundamentally about understanding how people think, feel, and behave when they visit your site, and then creating an experience that guides them naturally toward taking action. These actions will vary depending on your goals – from completing a purchase to filling out a contact form or calling your business directly. So, where do you start? At Herdl, we begin with a CRO audit. We’ll work alongside you to understand your business, analysing user behaviour and identifying points of friction.
CRO Audit
A comprehensive CRO audit begins with gathering behavioural data: we need to know what’s happening on your site. Where do users drop off? Which pages cause friction? Our team studies heat maps, session recordings, and analytics to spot where people get stuck or confused.
Tools for understanding user behaviour
We use a variety of tools to analyse scroll depth and drop-off points for insights into user behaviour. Microsoft Clarity is an example of a heat mapping tool that shows us:
- Click maps: where users interact most frequently with your content
- Scroll behaviour: how far down your pages people typically travel
- Session recordings: actual user journeys through your site (highlighting areas of confusion).
Google Analytics complements these insights with additional information:
- Landing page reports highlight which pages generate the most traffic and revenue
- Purchase journey visualisations reveal where potential customers abandon the process
- Device category data shows whether most users visit via mobile or desktop.
This combination of qualitative and quantitative data allows us to dig into why users behave the way they do and make informed decisions rather than assumptions about what they’re looking for.
Competitor analysis
When we’re looking at how to improve your site, we’ll generally focus on industry leaders who are getting it right (rather than smaller competitors who might be making the same mistakes). We’ll go through their websites methodically, checking how their homepage works, how products are displayed, what their product pages look like, and how smooth their checkout process is.
In the journey, we might notice they display customer reviews in a particularly effective way or they’ve made their checkout process brilliantly simple. By studying what works for the top performers in your industry, we can help you implement proven strategies rather than starting from scratch. This helps us understand what’s working (and what isn’t) within your industry. It’s a useful way to spot gaps and make smarter decisions about how to outperform others in your space.
Root Cause Analysis & Testing
We see a difference between surface-level ‘fixes’ and real problems. For example, if a product page has a high bounce rate, the instinct might be to add a pop-up or a bigger CTA. But the real problem could be confusing messaging, missing trust signals, or poor product photography. Every test we run starts with a clear hypothesis: what’s the problem, why do we think it’s happening, and how will our proposed change solve it? This keeps our CRO work purposeful and rooted in evidence.
Real CRO impact often comes from meaningful changes, like reworking your value proposition, changing page layouts to prioritise trust signals, adding a call-to-action, or simplifying your checkout process. The data shows that when we remove small hurdles, conversion rates jump dramatically. A/B testing allows us to compare performance between original and optimised versions of your pages, ensuring we’re genuinely improving your conversion rates.
We also track the right metrics for the right goals. If you’re testing a product page, for example, your primary metric might be add-to-cart rate or completed purchases, not just clicks.
The Last Word
The difference between a good website and a great one often comes down to understanding the customer journey in detail. CRO provides the framework to map this journey, identify obstacles or blockers, and create pathways that feel natural and helpful rather than pushy or confusing. When your website aligns with visitor expectations and there are no unnecessary barriers, conversion happens organically. Users find what they need quickly, trust builds naturally, and the decision to purchase or enquire follows logically.
Our data-driven approach takes the guesswork out of website optimisation. If your website is attracting visitors but failing to convert, you might be missing optimisation opportunities. Our team can work with you to help identify where your customer journey needs attention and create a targeted roadmap of improvements. Get in touch today to discuss a CRO audit.