Conversion rate optimization is a task that’s never completed—more an ongoing process that evolves as your target audience does. While you may have spent considerable time and effort designing and perfecting your website, there is always room for improvement. This continuous refinement ensures that your site stays aligned with the changing preferences and behaviors of your visitors.
An ecommerce conversion rate optimization (CRO) analysis provides an overview of your current performance and identifies areas for improvement. It combines qualitative data (such as your site’s conversion rate) and qualitative data (like user feedback, heatmaps, and session recordings) to paint a well-rounded picture of what you’re doing well—and more importantly, where you can improve.
This guide shares how to run a CRO analysis, including the bottlenecks to look out for and potential improvements to make.
What are the benefits of a CRO analysis?
Boost revenue
Studies estimate that out of every 100 website visitors to an ecommerce site, not even 2 of them will become customers. Even if you’re on the higher end of that benchmark, there’s plenty of room for improvement.
A CRO analysis points out where the bottlenecks are in your current user experience. Should these quirks or issues go undetected (no matter how minor they are), you could be losing thousands of dollars in potential revenue—a figure that only increases the longer it’s unresolved.
Improve ecommerce site performance
The crux of a CRO analysis means making it easy for users to buy something when they’re on your website. The site should be easy to navigate and convincing enough for visitors to convert into paying customers. Part of this involves optimizing the site’s loading speed.
Minor improvements in site speed alone are enough to significantly encourage conversions and increase revenue. Research has proven that just a one-second improvement in site speed can result in higher conversion rates.
Load speed is also taken into consideration by search engines when they’re indexing URLs. Google, the world’s largest search engine that processes over 8.5 billion queries every day, has openly said that the engine prioritizes sites with strong Core Web Vitals when determining where a URL should rank on their search engine results page.
Increased rankings could be a natural byproduct of your CRO activities—not just attracting qualified traffic, but turning organic visitors into customers once they interact with your site.
Refine your marketing strategy
As a marketing and ecommerce leader, plenty of tasks fall on your plate: strategy, planning, and execution of brand storytelling and customer growth, to name a few. Limited resources—be that budget, time, or both—often means that you prioritize marketing initiatives. And while you might have tons of new visitors coming to your website, not all of them will convert.
A CRO analysis stretches limited resources and gets you out of the vicious cycle of paying for expensive campaigns. Customer acquisition costs have been increasing across the board. But if you can squeeze more value out of the traffic you’re already driving to your site, there’s not as much pressure to cast a wider (and often more diluted) net.
With an optimized website, marketing campaigns have a higher return on investment. More of the traffic you’re driving to the ecommerce site results in paying customers, making the pitch for a higher budget and bigger campaigns a no-brainer.
What goes into CRO analysis and audit?
Assess bottlenecks using data and user insights
Bottlenecks are points in the customer journey where people drop off. Users who are tripped up by them are likely experiencing difficulty or don’t have enough confidence to proceed. Identifying and addressing them—which could be as simple as improving site speed scores, reducing form fields, simplifying navigation, or adding a carousel of social proof—makes for a great starting point for your CRO audit.
Start by identifying points of friction in your current user experience with:
- Conversion funnel analysis: Sync your store with Google Analytics and locate the automated funnel reports. These custom reports show the flow users typically pass through on their journey to becoming paid customers, highlighting pages with high drop-off rates. Just make sure that you have conversion tracking configured prior.
- Heatmaps and session recordings: Once you’ve located these high-risk pages, use heatmaps and session recordings to spy what visitors are doing on the page. Where do they scroll to just before exiting? What’s the final thing their mouse hovers over? It’ll help you find glitches in user behavior that indicate on-page elements in need of conversion optimization.
- User feedback: Sometimes it’s impossible to know what a visitor is thinking from third-party data alone. User feedback—be that on-site surveys, quizzes, or polls—gives users a chance to share their experiences in their own words. Find bottlenecks by asking what turned them away from your site and what they needed to see before they’d purchase.
Analyze website performance metrics
Shoppers expect blazing-fast shopping experiences, and they’re not willing to compromise on those expectations.
Yet issues arise when you add multiple customizations and apps to your store. “As brands grow and become more sophisticated, their websites become richer,” says Javier Moreno, data science manager at Shopify. “This richness usually comes with a price: unless you are actively paying attention to speed, changes will slow down your site.”
Google also openly talks about the importance of website performance metrics—particularly site speed—in their algorithms. Because of this, site speed has become a key priority in search engine optimization strategies because Google wants to offer excellent experiences to the users relying on their search engine.
Your server's speed is a big deal for site performance. A slow server response can harm the user experience, even if all other aspects of your site are optimized. You'll want to keep two metrics in mind:
- First Contentful Paint (FCP): This metric shows how long it takes for the page to load and render its content. It's key to understanding how fast a page loads.
- Time to First Byte (TTFB): This indicates the time it takes for the server to respond to the browser's request. A lower TTFB means faster server responses, which contributes to a quicker overall page load time.
As part of your CRO analysis, take stock of how your site is currently operating using website performance metrics lent from Core Web Vitals:
- Loading speed: How much time it takes for the page to load in a user’s browser. This metric is based on Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which is how long it takes for the largest on-screen element to become visible.
- Interactivity: How responsible the site is when a user interacts with it. It’s measured by the number of seconds it takes for the browser to display the next frame after a user interacts with the site. Google calls this Interaction to Next Paint (INP).
- Visual stability: How smooth a page is when it loads. Pages that have jumping sections and unexpected shifts will have a higher score, indicating that the user experience is suboptimal. You’ll see this named as Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) in Core Web Vitals.
You don’t need to employ multiple website performance tools to assemble high-quality data for your conversion rate optimization audit. We have our own web performance dashboard that shows these three metrics (for desktop, mobile devices, or both) and how they’ve changed over time.
You’ll also see how your website performance metrics compare to other sites in the custom report. It’ll rank each metric as “good,” “moderate,” or “poor,” and provide suggestions on how to improve, giving you an instant overview of where to assign your resources for the highest impact.
Assess and optimize product pages
Product pages act as virtual sales assistants that encourage people to buy. The difference between this and retail is that you can do it at scale—and you need to proactively answer a potential customer’s questions before you stand any chance at converting them. That’s a difficult balance to strike when you don’t want to overwhelm people with information they need, while keeping things succinct.
Instead of making blanket changes to all product pages, review product insights to prioritize which items are in need of improvement. Pay close attention to metrics like sell-through rate and B- or C-grade products from your ABC analysis report. These SKUs account for between 5% and 15% of your store’s revenue.
Once you’ve formed your priority list, gather feedback from website visitors and existing customers to make improvements to the product page. That might mean:
- Changing the tone of product description copy
- Incorporating social proof, such as customer reviews or user-generated content
- Testing copy for the add to cart button (e.g., are people more likely to click it when the price is included in the microcopy?)
- Experimenting with upsells and cross-sells for related products
- Changing how you display product variants, such as different sizes or colors
Optimize checkout flows
The checkout is the final stage in the purchase process. Users have one last chance to commit to their purchase. But with their money at stake, they might need some convincing to click the final button.
The average checkout abandonment rate is over 70%, according to research collated by Baymard Institute. Even if you’re nearing or exceeding this benchmark, there’s always room for improvement. Consider implementing the following elements into your checkout process when conducting a CRO analysis:
- Keep the checkout process simple: The longer a checkout process is, the more opportunity a user has to second-guess their purchase decision. Eliminate nice-to-know fields (i.e., title, birthday, middle name) to keep only those required to process a customer’s order.
- Offer an express checkout option: Shop Pay, Apple Pay, and PayPal Express are digital wallets that vault a customer’s payment details for one-click checkout.
- Enable guest checkout: While customer retention strategies like loyalty points and rewards require customers to create an account, forcing new shoppers to create one can deter more than a quarter from completing their first purchase, per Baymard.
- Accept multiple payment methods: Baymard found that 13% of all carts are abandoned because the retailer didn’t accept the customer’s preferred payment method. Expand your horizons and offer alternative payment methods—such as digital wallet and buy now, pay later—at checkout. It helps to show accepted methods elsewhere, like logos in your website footer, to ease these anxieties before checkout.
- Reassure with a secure checkout: Ecommerce fraud is on the rise. More shoppers are falling victim to online scams than ever before. Prove that a customer’s details are safe with you with secure checkout features like SSL certificates, social proof, and trust badges.
- Send abandoned cart notifications: No matter how hard you try to optimize your checkout experience, people will still exit for reasons outside of your control. Convince lost shoppers to return to your site with abandoned cart campaigns, either by email, social media ads, or SMS that display the items they’ve left behind.
Our default checkout is the best-performing checkout in the world. It outperforms peers by up to 36%, and by 15% on average. This allows you to piggyback off our dedication to checkout optimization and prioritize your CRO efforts elsewhere on higher impact activities, knowing the final stage in the website conversion rate optimization process has already been taken care of.
Take it from Anna Peterson, product lead at Everlane, who noticed a trend of consumers favoring express checkout. They implemented Shop Pay’s accelerated checkout as a way to cater to this trend without replatforming.
“Interestingly, post-integration, we observed a notable decrease in credit card inputs rather than in the usage of express checkout services, indicating that Shop Pay filled a specific need in our payment ecosystem,” Anna says. “This synergy and the additional convenience offered by Shop Pay ultimately made it a compelling choice for Everlane.”
If you do want to customize the Shopify checkout, that option is still available to you through more than 400 apps that have been built by Shopify’s community of app developers. Add upsells, loyalty programs, or customized delivery options that convert visitors and increase average order value—without overhauling the entire checkout design.
Prioritize the mobile experience
Mobile commerce is tipped to claim 63% of all ecommerce sales by 2028, with two in every three online purchases already taking place through a smartphone.
But there’s more to mobile optimization than making your site responsive. Mobile users should have an experience that’s specifically crafted for them, as opposed to being an afterthought that’s second to desktop users. That means focusing on the following elements in your CRO analysis:
- Improving mobile load speed: Compress images, disable video autoplay, and compress images to give blazing fast experiences to those on mobile—even if they have a poor connection.
- Simplifying site navigation: Make popular categories easy to find and use stackable navigation to avoid overwhelm.
- Eliminating popups where appropriate: A popup will likely take up the entire screen when viewed on mobile, so only use them when absolutely required.
- Using large, finger-friendly buttons: A person’s finger is much larger than a cursor would be on a desktop, so make sure that buttons—particularly those that encourage a desired action—are big enough to press accurately.
CRO analysis tools
Site Speed Audit
We mentioned our web performance dashboard earlier, but we our Site Speed Audit is another tool you can use for CRO analysis. We built it to measure your storefront’s performance. It’ll show how your site speed stacks up against other retailers of a similar size in your industry, comparing First Contentful Paint—a key website performance metric in Core Web Vitals—data against 200,000 sites across all major commerce platforms.
Hotjar
Hotjar is a conversion rate optimization tool that lifts the lid on how users interact with your site. Going beyond quantitative data and metrics, it uses heatmaps, session recordings, feedback forms, and surveys to help you understand the “why” behind your UX bottlenecks.
Optimizely
Optimizely’s website experimentation platform allows you to A/B test your website design, landing pages, and messaging with ease. Its integration with Shopify means you can customize your site design with Optimizely’s visual editor. It pulls conversion data from your Shopify admin to accurately display the results of your test’s control and variant group.
CRO analysis success stories
Dermalogica
Dermalogica is a leading skincare brand that’s been empowering their customers to take care of their skin since 1986. The brand’s online storefront was previously powered by Salesforce Commerce Cloud, but the retailer learned that they weren’t primed to offer personalized shopping experiences to customers in different territories. Dermalogica also struggled with development complexity and expensive fees associated with customization, which made it difficult to optimize their site on the fly.
Demalogica turned to Shopify as a solution to both problems. Shopify’s support for international commerce and ecosystem of apps and integrations made the move a no-brainer. As their associate digital director Kevin Rowlands says, “For companies like us that don’t have lots of technical people they can call upon, having an off-the-shelf solution that does 75% of what you need means we’re saving thousands in development costs alone.”
Just a month after replatforming, Dermalogica saw a 119% increase in sales and a 45% improvement in conversion rates. And because they leaned on Shopify’s world-class network of servers to power their new storefront, Dermalogica increased site speed by 44%—a huge improvement that had a domino effect on improved search rankings due to their 14% decrease in bounce rate.
W. Titley & Co.
W. Titley & Co. is a family-run business that sells quality country and western gear both online and through five retail stores. Less than half of their sales happened online, but they turned to Shopify to increase this percentage by improving the user experience of their online storefront.
But one of the most impactful implementations from its CRO audit was a notification that showed how much more customers needed to spend to qualify for free shipping. The retailer optimized the checkout process too, with icons that showed its fast shipping and free returns options.
Combined, these CRO activities resulted in a 190% revenue increase for W. Titley & Co. They also saw a 13% increase in average order value, and a 75% improvement in return customer rate off the back of their CRO analysis.
Molekule
Molekule originally relied on Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento) to power the online storefront they used to sell air humidifiers. But any change required assistance from development teams. “We’re not in the game of building ecommerce software, but that’s what it became with Adobe Commerce,” says Rachel Beisel, Molekule’s senior vice president of marketing. “It was the majority of the focus as opposed to focusing on growth.”
Molekule migrated to Shopify to lean on the features that come as standard (which would’ve previously been custom-coded on Adobe Commerce) and the thousands of third-party tools in the Shopify App Store. They turned to Recharge for subscriptions, Loop for returns and exchanges, and Okendo for customer reviews.
This instant ability to customize their storefront on the fly meant that Molekule was able to make quick changes that improved its conversion rate. For example, Molekule improved their ecommerce navigation to make clean air solutions more prominent and capture the 61% spike in website visitors off the back of wildfire concerns in June 2023.
As a result of this migration, Molekule managed to increase conversions by 75%. They’ve also experienced a 10% increase in traffic and a 7% growth in net subscribers.
Run a CRO audit to prioritize resources for the biggest impact
Conversion rate optimization is a long-term play. The best-performing websites are built from a series of tiny changes that compound over time.
When you choose Shopify as your ecommerce platform, you’re building on top of a platform that’s already gone through years of optimization to become the world’s highest-performing solution for enterprise brands.
Our server speed is 2.4x faster than custom built stores, and Shopify sites render 1.8x faster on average than stores on other platforms. And with 99.99% uptime history, you can rest assured knowing that your store is not only built on a solid foundation, but that those foundations can stand the test of time—even in peak seasons.
FAQ on CRO analysis
What is a CRO audit?
A CRO audit shows the effectiveness of the user experience you’re currently providing to website visitors. It analyzes aspects like usability, site speed, navigation, design, and messaging to spot bottlenecks that hold customers back from progressing in the conversion funnel.
How do you analyze CRO?
- Assess bottlenecks with user feedback and data.
- Track micro conversions.
- Analyze website performance metrics.
- Assess and optimize product pages.
- Optimize checkout flows.
- Prioritize the mobile experience.
- Do multivariate testing.
What is CRO testing?
CRO testing is the process of experimenting with your site's design, layout, or experience with the aim of beating average conversion rates. Split testing is the most common form of CRO testing. It divides traffic into a control and variant group. The latter sees the new version so you can easily compare the difference in conversion rate post-test.
