Getting plenty of hits on your website, but no leads? You could do with some CRO, aka conversion rate optimisation. This can help to turn those looky-lou website visitors into paying customers, with just a few easily implementable tweaks. Whether you want to sell more products, capture more leads or just improve user interactions on your site, these CRO tips can help you optimise your website for better results.

It might sound simple enough to say something like, ‘we had 50 conversions last month, so this month I want to see 100 conversions’ but this isn’t a practical goal. Consider how many website visitors you get in a set period and use this to calculate your conversion rate. For example, if you get 100 conversions for every 1000 website visitors, your conversion rate is 10%. First, define what counts as a conversion, e.g. a purchase or signup, and keep track of these in your website’s backend or use a tool like Hotjar or Google Analytics to track your conversion rate.

Slow-loading pages can kill your conversions. No one wants to wait any longer than 2 seconds for a webpage to load in 2025, and any more than this dramatically increases the chances of visitors clicking away from your site. Use tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights to identify anything that could slow your loading times, and check that your site is fully responsive on all devices to avoid losing mobile users.

Think about the journey that users have to take from landing on the front page of your website to taking the action you want them to take, whether that’s filling in a contact form, buying products, or signing up for a service. The longer this takes, the more likely they are to give up and go elsewhere. Remove any unnecessary steps between a user landing on your site and your conversion goal by mapping out the user journey, implementing more streamlined checkout processes and intuitive menus, and regularly testing the conversion journey to make sure it’s quick and easy. Here’s an example of how to shorten the customer journey:

A small eCommerce brand selling fitness gear had a homepage filled with multiple featured products, blog links, and a lengthy welcome message. To buy a resistance band, a user had to:

1. Land on the homepage
2. Click “Shop Now”
3. Choose a category (e.g. “Accessories”)
4. Scroll to find resistance bands
5. Click the product
6. Add to cart
7. View cart
8. Proceed to checkout

After a CRO audit, the site was restructured so that the homepage was updated with a clear, central CTA: “Shop Resistance Bands”. Popular products were linked directly from the homepage, categories were reduced and re-labelled more intuitively, and the cart and checkout were combined into one streamlined step. How the user journey is half as long:

1. Land on homepage with prominent banner: “Shop Resistance Bands”
2. Click directly to the resistance bands product page
3. Select product and add to cart
4. Checkout via a simplified one-page checkout flow

This is a simple but effective CRO method that can increase conversions massively without any major restructuring of the website.

If you are running a PPC advertising campaign or similar, you shouldn’t just point it towards your homepage – instead, create a landing page tailored towards the offer or campaign you have been promoting. This helps to align visitor expectations with your own goals and streamlines the journey. Here’s an example of what could happen without a specific landing page:

A marketing agency is running a paid Facebook ad campaign promoting a free downloadable eBook titled “10 Ways to Improve Your Email Marketing”. The goal is to generate leads by encouraging users to submit their email address in exchange for the download. Without a tailored landline page: 

• The ad links to the agency’s homepage, where the eBook isn’t immediately visible
• There’s no CTA or clear instructions on what the visitors should be doing
• They just end up leaving the page

However, with a tailored landing page, they get:

• A clear headline, e.g. ‘download your free email marketing guide’
• A short description of what they will receive
• A simple form asking for their name and email
• No menu or external links – just a focused conversion goal 

Now, visitors who clicked through from the ad know they are in the right place, they can complete the desired action quickly, and convert from visitors to leads. If your campaign promises something specific (a guide, discount, webinar, product demo), the landing page must mirror that promise clearly, immediately, and without distraction. Otherwise, you risk losing the visitor before they even consider converting.

If someone came up to you on the street and offered you an iPhone for £50, you’d probably not take them up on the offer. Why not? Because you don’t trust them (Pro tip – don’t buy iPhones in the street), and why would you? It’s the same for your website visitors. Providing reviews, testimonials, and other trust signals on your website can help visitors trust your brand, making them more likely to convert. Also, consider including a physical address for your business, links to social media pages that are regularly updated, and adding photos of you and your team to help humanise your brand – this can all help build that all-important trust.

CRO is as much about what you remove from a page as what you add. Many businesses fall into the trap of wanting to include every single feature, product and service on the front page of their website or even on multiple pages, leading to confusion in visitors who ultimately give up. Including multiple CTAs, irrelevant content, pop-ups, long navigation menus, sidebars and more can split user attention and weaken the focus on the action you want visitors to take. Each page should have a single, clearly defined goal, such as downloading a resource, booking a call, completing a purchase, or signing up for a newsletter. The fewer choices a user has to make, the more likely they are to convert.

You can use tools like Hotjar, VWO or ContentSquare to run A/B testing on headlines, CTAs, layouts, and offers to help you refine your website to maximise conversions. It’s easy to keep doing the same thing and wondering why conversations are low, but doing some experimentation can give you valuable data to inform your optimisation strategy, rather than relying on assumptions and guesswork. You can incorporate the above tips with some A/B testing to find out what works for your business –  keep experimenting and tweaking those ads, pages and offers to improve your CRO.

There we have it! We hope this helps – let us know if you follow these tips and what successes you have (or not, I guess). If you are still having trouble increasing your conversion rates, give us a shout here at Identity Agency, and we can help.