There are three major problems with A/B testing for improving websites:

• It doesn’t tell you why your visitors preferred the winning version. It only tells you which version won (if any).
• It doesn’t give you any feedback from visitors about the improvements you were A/B testing.
• The majority of websites don’t even have enough traffic for doing A/B testing, or only for key pages.

So I decided to create a new technique to help solve these problems.

It’s called User-Focused A/B Testing, and it helps you discover ‘why’ users prefer different page versions, not just ‘what’ they prefer. And it doesn’t require lots of traffic like traditional A/B testing does.

And more importantly, it gives you great feedback and insights for creating high-impact website improvements, meaning a much better chance of increasing your website conversion rate and revenue.

So let’s get started with learning the 7 steps of User-Focused A/B Testing.

1: Create a variation of the page you want to improve

First you need to create the variation of the page that you want to improve. You may already have some ideas of what you want to improve, but ideally the improvements should come from insights gathered from doing conversion research (web analytics, expert reviews, user testing, visitor recordings, and surveys), as this ensures much better results on improving conversion rates and sales.

2: Do a ‘preference test’ with 100 users

The ‘preference test’ at Lyssna is a great alternative to traditional A/B testing, and it allows you to gather feedback from your target audience on which version they prefer and most importantly, why they prefer it. And you don’t need any website traffic to do this.

To create a ‘preference test’ simply take a screenshot of both pages and upload them to the tool, add a question that asks which page version (or page element) they prefer, and then add a follow-up question asking for the reasons why. This can be for a whole page, or for a specific thing like a headline.

To give you enough responses to analyze and gain insights from, I suggest testing 100 users. You will need 200 credits for this, which costs $200.

It will be one of the best $200 you will ever spend for learning about your website user’s preferences!

To make sure the users match your target audience, you need to also set the demographics that you want them to be. You can target by age, gender, country, household income, education status, employment status, and even B2B demographics like job title and industry.

You can also recruit your own users by sharing a link to your preference test, which you could do either via email to your customers or by showing it to your website visitors in a pop-up.

You can also do something similar with another tool called Maze.  You simply create a survey that includes an image of both versions, and then use their panel to ask them which version they prefer, and why they prefer it.

3: Record your visitors interacting with both versions

Next you need to launch both versions of your page for a short time so that you can watch recordings of your visitors interacting with both of them to see if there are any differences in how they use them.

To do this, you will need to use an A/B testing tool to do a split test, so 50% of users will see each version. It doesn’t matter that you won’t have enough traffic to get an A/B test result, you are just using it as a tool to launch both versions at the same time.

Then use Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity to do the visitor recording of both page versions. To give you enough insights, you will need to watch at least 100 recordings of each page. To find recordings of those pages, you can just set up a filter in the tool to match the URL of them both.

In the recordings, look for variances of where they are moving their mouse, where they seem to be hovering over more, what they click on, and what they seem to ignore. Also look for any elements of each page they seem to have difficulties using, as the new page should try to improve on this.

4: Set up a visitor survey to gain feedback on both versions

This short survey enables you to gather insights from people who are currently using your website — who are essential users to gain feedback from.

I suggest using Hotjar or Survicate to create this survey and pop-up an invitation to start it (don’t show it too soon after visitors arrive though, as it will often annoy them, so I suggest after a minute).

In the survey, show them both page versions and ask them the following questions in particular:

• What are your first impressions of both pages? Do you notice the differences?
• Which page version would increase the chances of you purchasing?
• Do you think there is anything missing on either page?
• Is there anything confusing or hard to understand on either page?

You also need to ask questions relating to exactly what you have improved.

You should get at least 50 responses to analyze, and to increase your response rate, offer a chance to win a gift certificate or discount as an incentive.

5: Create a user test with 5 users (optional)

This step is optional depending on if you have budget for doing user testing, and how in-depth you want to get with gaining feedback.

User testing helps you gain in-depth qualitative feedback from visitors about your new page variation, and is delivered in the form of a screen recording of them using your website and audio of them answering your questions.

Use a low cost tool like Userfeel to set up a user test with 5 users that match your target audience — it’s important to add screener questions for this, e.g. the users should be familiar with what you are offering or have purchased previously.

When creating the user test, you need to add a task for them to compare the two pages, and then ask them the following questions to get better insights:

• Which version is more engaging? Do you notice the differences?
• What are your favourite elements on both page versions?
• Is there anything confusing on either of the pages?
• Is anything missing that you would like to see added to each version?
• Which version would be more likely to make you purchase?

Then to get even more insights and maximize the feedback time you get, add some questions that relate to the elements that you are improving, for example, what do you think of the imagery or product filters on both versions. With any time remaining, you can then get the user tester to give feedback on your whole website.

6: Analyze the insights and declare a winning version

Next you need to spend time reviewing the results to see which page version your users seem to prefer, and the reasons why.

To help you determine the winning page version, you should create a simple document that highlights the positives and negatives for each page.

This analysis will also give you great insights and ideas for improving the winning page even further, like improve usability or clarity on the page. And if users often said they didn’t notice the difference between the two pages, you should make the improvement more prominent.

If the new page doesn’t get very good feedback, you need to gather more conversion research (web analytics, expert reviews, user testing, visitor recordings, and surveys) to create better improvement ideas for it, and then do another round of User-Focused A/B Testing.

7: Launch the winning version and monitor impact

You should feel confident now that you have discovered which page your users like better — hopefully the improved page you created. If users it to the current page, you need to launch it.

To ensure the improved page does have a good impact, you need to monitor the impact of it on your conversion rate and revenue in Google Analytics over the next few weeks, and compare it to the previous weeks and the same period last year.

If you are lucky enough to have enough traffic (at least 5,000 visitors per week to the page you want to test), ideally you should run an A/B test on this winning page to determine that it has a positive impact on your conversion rate and revenue.

Do this User-Focused A/B Testing on all of your key pages

Don’t just stop after you have done this for one of your pages.

To get the best results from this, do this User-Focused A/B Testing on each of your key pages to improve them too, particularly your homepage, product pages, and your checkout or signup flow.

Go ahead and try this for your next website improvement. I’m sure you will love the great results you will quickly get on your conversion rate and revenue.

There is an excellent new technique for quickly improving revenue and conversion rates for any website.

It’s called ‘Fix Broken Shit First’ website optimization.

And it works very well — fixing the most common broken ‘shit’ on your website will lead to very high impact on your conversion rates and revenue. And it often has more impact than doing any A/B testing, or guessing what to improve.

This technique of fixing broken shit was introduced by Craig Sullivan, Arnout Hellemans and Tim Stewart, who proved how effective this can be. So a big shout to these gurus.

Your website has broken shit which is hiding

It doesn’t matter how good the UX, design and copy of your website are if visitors can’t easily complete common use cases due to ‘broken shit’.

And your website probably has a lot of hidden broken shit that needs fixing. I have found that the majority of websites do, no matter how good they look. And I’m not talking about broken links or 404 errors either.

You probably don’t even realize you have hidden broken shit, and worse still, you often won’t realize the big negative impact it’s likely having on your user experience and website revenue.

I think it’s so important that it should be the first step of doing effective CRO (conversion rate optimization) for any kind of website.

Examples of common ‘shit’ to fix first on websites:

• Poor or not understandable field error validation in checkout
• Broken/squashed layout on smaller devices with 380 width
• Mega menus that cover important content and CTA buttons
• Layout broken on tablet due to stretched buttons or too large images
• Product image gallery not working properly on mobile
• Site search not working well or giving bad results
• Live chat widgets covering and blocking CTA buttons on mobile
• Pop-ups that can’t be easily closed because the X is too small or hidden
• Tool tips that don’t work on mobile or their content is cut-off
• Underlined text that visitors think are links and try to click on
• Elements that look like CTA buttons but aren’t
• Cookie banners covering and blocking CTAs buttons on mobile
• Deleting signup field details when clicking back to them
• Drop-down selectors for products not working as expected
• Very slow loading images on mobile product pages
• Zoom function not working on product images
• Category page filters that don’t work or show wrong results

How to discover your hidden broken shit

Don’t just rely on checking your website occasionally on your desktop and mobile, or relying on your developers to do this, as you won’t find that much. To discover the most hidden broken shit, you need these tools in particular:

Cross browser testing tools
Getting a tool that lets you check your website for broken shit on all common devices and browsers is essential, and you should use these tools particularly when you launch something new. I recommend Browserstack.com for doing this QA. These are the most common devices and browsers that you need to check:

• Desktop, mobile (most popular phones including a 380 width one) and iPad latest model
• Safari, Chrome, Edge, Safari (In-app) and Android Webview

But developers who use these QA tools usually only check if functionality is broken — they often don’t understand if the user experience has become poor, which often becomes the hidden broken shit you need to fix.

That is why you also need tools that give you insights from your users while they are using your website, as this will reveal some of the more hidden broken shit on their journeys. That is why you need the next two tools.

User testing tools
To find the most common and obvious broken shit, I suggest getting at least 5 user tests done on mobile and 5 done on desktop. This where you ask tasks and questions to user testers that match your target audience. You should get the user testers to review the most common journey on your website, from your most common entry pages to your checkout, as this will increase the chances of them finding broken shit on the key parts of your website.

I recommend using Userfeel for doing these user tests, as you don’t need an expensive subscription to use it.

Session recording tools
You need to watch and review 100’s of recordings of your users on your website to find hidden broken shit, on most common desktop and mobile browsers. Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity are great tools that offer session recording.

In particular, you need to filter for and check session recordings with ‘rage clicks’ as they often indicate user frustration with broken or confusing parts of your website. This will often reveal some great hidden broken shit to fix.

But it’s not just tools you need. To ensure you discover the most hidden broken shit, you also need experts.

Get help finding broken shit from an expert in UX or CRO
You also need to use someone in your business or externally who understands UX or CRO to analyze the tool results to discover the most hidden broken shit (the broken shit your developers have missed). If they are good, they will have a great eye for small broken shit that negatively impacts user experience. In the very least you should get your web designer to review your session recordings.

I also recommend getting a CRO website review from an expert like myself, as this will quickly uncover a lot of hidden broken shit for you that your CRO, UX or web designers may not find or notice.

How to prioritize and fix your broken shit

Using these tools and experts you are likely going to find lots of broken shit to fix which will increase your website revenue. So how do you know what to fix first?

• First  of all fix anything in your checkout or signup flow.
• Then fix anything on your top entry pages, like your homepage or your category pages.
• Then fix any elements that are essential to users being able to easily use your website like navigation, filters, search and forms.
• Then fix the small things that impact less common groups of users, like users who use the less common smallest width phones.
• Double-check the broken shit is fixed and hasn’t broken something else. This is essential.

Every time you launch fixes for broken shit you need to check that it’s really fixed. Sometimes developers don’t fix it properly, or worst still, their fix breaks something else. So once you have launched the fixes, do another round of session recording analysis to see if anything related has now broken.

Regularly review for hidden broken shit

I suggest you also do this hidden broken shit review every 3 months to check if anything has broken without you knowing it. This is because things can break without launching anything, particularly due to things like auto-updating plugins, or developers updating part of the website code or tags without realizing it has slightly broken a less commonly used part of your website.

So spend some time today using those tools checking for hidden broken shit and then fixing it. It is the first most effective step of doing effective CRO. Then after that you can do further conversion research like doing surveys for your visitors and customers to discover their doubts, issues and frustrations. That will give you even better website improvements and A/B test ideas that will give you better results on your conversion rates and revenue.

There are now 100’s of elements to consider when improving your ecommerce conversion rate and sales.

And it’s not just about A/B testing any more, there are many newer conversion rate optimization (CRO) techniques to use like persuasion and personalization.

So what actually works best for improving ecommerce conversion rates?

To help you understand this, I have created a list of what elements and techniques will likely have the most, and least, positive impact on your website conversion rate. And some of them you might be surprised at!

This list of elements is based on my learnings from 15 years experience improving 100’s of ecommerce websites, including ManlyBands.com, JosephJoseph.com, and UnboundMerino.com.

Let’s get started, with rankings from least important to most important:

Low importance on conversion rate

A/B testing the colour of your CTA buttons
Different CTA button colours will often only have a very limited impact on conversion rate, unless it matches other elements on your page and doesn’t stand out. Ideally they need to stand out from the rest of your page, but there are many other higher impact website elements to improve first.

Improving your webpage load times
A controversial one here, as this is often mentioned as important. The truth is that unless your pages are noticeably slow at loading (over 5 seconds) and you are in a very competitive market that visitors can easily go elsewhere to buy what you offer, then improving load times likely won’t have much impact on your conversion rates. I’ve experienced this with many clients.

Personalizing your website to improve engagement
This newer trend has many tools specializing in this. While this helps to show more relevant content to your visitors and can work well, you should only start personalization efforts after you have improved your website to a good CRO standard first. It doesn’t matter how much you personalize your website if it has poor usability and isn’t very engaging, it still won’t convert very well.

Improving things that your HiPPO wants
Your HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion) may often want something changed or improved on the website based on their opinion or what they have seen on other websites. Listening to them rarely increases your conversion rate and revenue (unless they are a CRO expert) and is the opposite of creating good insights and A/B test ideas from doing conversion research to improve your website.

Medium importance on conversion rate

Improving your navigation menu, filtering and search
These elements are often one of the first things used on your website, so need to be highly usable. The better they are, the more likely that visitors will find what they are looking for faster and easier, and convert. It’s particularly important on mobile category pages to make your filters more prominent and easy to use, ideally using sticky elements so they are always visible.

Using website persuasion techniques like scarcity or urgency
This technique can sometimes work well to influence visitors to purchase or signup for something, for example having limited availability of what you offer or showing a time limited discount or sale. It all depends on what type of products you are selling and your exact target audience. Always test different ways of doing this though, as some types might not work well for your audience.

Improving your shopping cart and checkout
In particular you should improve it by reducing friction (remove header navigation for example), increasing the perception of security, and prominently showing risk reducers like guarantees, free shipping, and free returns. But don’t just focus on this — you need to optimize the whole visitor journey up to this point, including your homepage, category pages and product pages, or you won’t even get that many users to your checkout.

High importance on conversion rate

Prominently showing unique value proposition on key entry pages
It doesn’t matter how engaging your website is if you don’t clearly show your unique value proposition — the reasons that someone should purchase from your website instead of your competitors (low price guarantee, biggest selection, highest rated etc). And don’t presume that your visitors know it already, on the contrary, they will often be doing comparison shopping. Therefore you need to add key elements of your unique value proposition prominently on your key entry pages, like in a benefits bar under your navigation, and on your homepage.

Improving your mobile website further — not just responsive
Don’t just settle for a basic responsive website that changes the layout and sizes. You need to make more adaptations to meet their needs better, for example, making sure your links and CTA are easily clickable, that your fonts are big enough to ready easily (above size 14 font), and by using sticky navigation elements. You also need to check your layout doesn’t break or look squashed on smaller devices that have only 380 width.

Improving social proof to get more visitors buying
This should be done in many ways. The most essential one is to show many reviews (with customer images in them) on your product pages and include at least a few 1 or 2 star ratings to make your reviews believable. Then on your homepage and product pages you should also include third party ratings, media mentions, and awards, and test the location and prominence of them.

Optimizing your ads to increase relevance
It is essential to improve the engagement and relevancy of your ads, in particular by improving the message continuation from your ad to when they land on your website, and including your unique value proposition and benefits in the ad wording. Driving ads to relevant product pages rather than your homepage will also ensure higher conversion rates.

Very high importance on conversion rate

Doing conversion research to gain better insights
Conversion research is essential for gaining better ideas to improve your website conversion rates and revenue. This helps you discover your user’s main problems, doubts and hesitations so that you can improve your website to meet their needs better. User tests, visitor surveys, customer surveys, and visitor recordings are the highest impact ways of doing conversion research. Using tools like Hotjar.com and Userfeel.com are highly recommended for this. Most of my best performing A/B tests are created by doing this, and that is why I specialize in offering conversion research.

Getting more customer images and prominently showing them
One of the most important things for ecommerce websites is to show many customer images, as these help your visitors better understand what your products look like. For example, if you are selling clothes, they let users see what they look on regular people, not just the models wearing them on your product images. So it’s essential to gather more customer images by incentivizing reviews, and to then clearly show them in your reviews, and even show a section that features these images. I’ve A/B tested this for clients with great results.

Capturing visitors emails and optimize your email automations
Don’t presume your visitors will convert first time — over 95% of them will leave with purchasing. Capturing email addresses by offering a good incentive (like a first-time purchase discount) is essential to get them coming back if they don’t purchase immediately. When using a good series of automated follow-up emails, this source will often become your highest converting source of traffic. And it will convert even better when you optimize your checkout abandonment emails too.

A/B testing headlines and copy above the page fold
Copywriting is one of the biggest influencers on conversion rates, particularly for elements like homepage headlines and product descriptions. That is because if you don’t engage your users with good copy when they arrive, they may not understand why to buy your products and often leave. Using benefit focused wording works well, as does wording that explains why to choose you instead of competitors. Using bullet points also makes your key wording stand out much better. A/B test different variations on your product pages in particular.

Adding product videos and making them more prominent
You really need to create and show video of your products being used, as this helps users visualize your products much better than images can. You should also ensure the videos are very prominent by including them in your image gallery on product pages, and A/B testing this for my clients has gained some of my best A/B test results.

This list will help clear up any confusion as to what will have the biggest impact on your ecommerce conversion rates and revenue, but to get the best results you need to A/B test different variations of the highest impact elements.

Google Optimize was the most used A/B testing tool, but Google sunset it and it can’t be used as of Sept 2023.

There are now so many A/B testing tools to choose from, but many are very expensive. And unfortunately there are no good free options. The best two are currently VWO versus Convert.

I created this guide to help you decide which of them to use, as I’ve got over 15 years experience in A/B testing.

It provides you with a side-by-side comparison of each tool, and a closer look at each one’s pricing and features.

And as I work so closely with both of these tools, you will also get exclusive deals for upgraded and longer free trials.

VWO versus Convert Comparison

This table will help you understand how VWO compares against Convert for the most important features.

Cost rating	6/10 Pricing details and their free plan have recently been removed from their website. Based on Jan ’26 pricing, they were more expensive than Convert.	9/10 Plans start at $299/pm for their Growth plan when paying annually, including nearly all features any good A/B tester would need, including good targeting and triggering, and 100K users per month.
Test setup experience and usability	9/10 Great A/B test creation process, with very good user experience and onboarding. Simple to use visual editor and advanced code editor.	7/10 Good, but the user experience for the new visual editor needs improving, along with their onboarding. Code editor is great though.
Testing types available	8/10 A/B tests, split tests and multi-page tests are included in all plans, but MVT only in Pro plan and up.	8/10 A/B tests and split tests included in all plans. MVT and multi-page tests are only in Pro plan and up.
Test targeting and triggers	6/10 Good, but full and customized options for targeting and triggers only in their most expensive plans.	9/10 The most advanced and customizable targeting and triggers are included even in their lowest level plan.
Success metrics	9/10 Great – good selection of goals and metrics, including revenue.	9/10 Great – good selection of goals and metrics, including revenue.
A/B test reporting	8/10 Good reporting, but results segmentation only in pro plan and up.	9/10 Very good real-time results reporting and segmentation on all plans.
Customer support	7/10 Email support included in all plans, and phone and live chat in higher level plans. Account manager included in the enterprise plan.	9/10 Email and in-app messaging support included in all plans. Phone support and account manager included in the growth plan and up.
Overall rating	7/10 An excellent tool, but the most important features are only in their most premium plans, and are much more costly than Convert.	9/10 Very good tool that offers the lowest cost plans with the most features, although their onboarding and visual editor is not as good as VWO.
Free trial?	Get an upgraded 45-day free trial	Get a longer 30-day free trial

Now let’s get more detailed, with an overview of each of these tools including pros and cons.

VWO Review

The first A/B testing tool for you to consider is VWO. They are one of the pioneering A/B testing tools who launched in 2010. They initially started off as a low cost tool, but have recently added many excellent features for advanced users.

In also expanded their offerings to include different plans with additional CRO tools, like heat maps, session recordings and surveys. Those tools are very useful for doing conversion research to create better A/B testing ideas.

VWO Pricing: 

They no longer have pricing available on their website, and there is no free trial anymore.  You need to schedule a demo to get pricing details.

To give you an idea of what their pricing might be, this is what it was in Jan ’26 for the VWO testing plan. It is likely to have increased since then.

• Growth: $490 per month billed annually, and 50K users
• Pro: $1127 per month billed annually, and 50K users
• Enterprise: No price was shown and you had to contact them.

They also have these other plans for more advanced needs:

• VWO Insights – includes CRO tools for session recordings, survey tools and form analysis
• VWO Personalize – for doing advanced personalization campaigns
• VWO Rollouts – lets you deploy winning versions without needing development

Here are the pros and cons of the VWO Testing plan, which is the plan most of their clients choose.

VWO Pros:

• Intuitive user interface with great A/B test design wizard to help you get better results.
• Includes A/B test duration estimator tool which helps you see if you have enough traffic.
• Includes their very good ‘VWO Plan’ for managing and recording insights from A/B tests.
• Great integration between all the tools on their platform, including visitor recordings and surveys.

VWO Cons:

• Their free plan is no longer available and you now have to schedule a demo to get pricing details.
• While they now offer many CRO tools, the different plans and tools are confusing to understand.
• Advanced and customizatable targeting and triggers are only available in their most expensive plan.
• Report segmentation (for example by device or traffic source), is only available in pro plan and up.

VWO Rating on G2: 4.4/5 (as of March 2026)

Get an Upgraded Free Trial of VWO

I arranged a deal with VWO to give you a 45 day free trial, and you get 50% more users to test on during the free trial, and no credit card is needed to try all the features. And when you sign up and contact me to let me know you used my link, I will send you a video with 5 personalized A/B test ideas for your website that will increase your conversion rate and revenue.

Convert Review

The other leading Google Optimize alternative to consider is Convert. They evolved from being a great low cost A/B testing tool to becoming one most popular A/B testing tools, with all the advanced features you need.

Convert Pricing:

They offer 3 plans, with additional features included in their higher cost plans. Here are the prices as of March 2026.

• Growth: $299 per month, paying annually (with 100K tested users)
• Pro: $420 per month, paying annually (with 250K tested users)
• Enterprise: You have to contact their sales team for customized pricing

These plan prices increase when you want more users per month. For example, the Growth plan increases to $560 per month if you want 250K users per month.

Convert Pros:

• Great for A/B testing pros, including a very good code editor for CSS and Javascript.
• Has the best value A/B testing tool plan for those who need over 200K users per month.
• The real-time reporting is very good and has excellent interactive graphs.
• It is one of fastest loading tools for website user experience, with no flicker experienced.
• For advanced users, you can switch between Frequentist and Bayesian stats engines.
• They have a helpful tool to import your A/B test history from other tools.

Convert Cons:

• The new visual editor is a bit too different and has some user experience issues.
• Their onboarding could be much better. That is being improved soon though.
• MVT and multi-page tests are not included in the Growth plan, only in higher plans.

Convert Rating on G2: 4.6/5 (as of March 2026)

Get a Longer Free Trial of Convert

I have partnered with Convert to get their free trial extended from 14 days to 30 days, and no credit card is required to try all the features. You won’t find this deal anywhere else. And when you sign up and contact me to let me know you used my link, I will send you a video with 5 personalized A/B test ideas for your website that will increase your conversion rate and revenue.

4 Questions To Discover Which Is Best For You

So what tool is better, VWO or Convert? As you can see from my comparison earlier, Convert now has the lead for features and pricing, but VWO also has its advantages. The simple answer is it really depends on your budget and your exact needs.

To find out which tool is best for you, ask yourself these 4 important questions:

1: How much can you afford? Are you willing to spend at least $299 per month on an A/B testing tool now that VWO no longer offers a free plan?
2: How many users do you need per month? Check how many you need per A/B test using this calculator then estimate how many users per month you need based on how many tests per month you want to do. Bear in mind that often 100K users will only be enough for 1 or 2 tests per month.
3: How advanced are your needs for targeting and triggers? For example, you may often need to set up A/B tests to target only repeat customers, or to trigger them to start based on clicks on elements like navigation or mini-carts.
4: Is cost your only consideration? How important to you is the best user experience, upgraded support, and better onboarding when using an A/B testing tool?

Then review each of these statements to see which A/B testing tool is best for your needs:

• Now that VWO no longer offer a free plan, the lowest cost option is $299 per month for the Convert Growth plan. This includes 100K users per month.
• If you are doing 5 or more tests per month, go with the Convert Pro plan of $420 per month which includes 250K users. The VWO cost for the same amount of users was much more expensive for similar features, at $2032 per month as of Jan ’26.
• If you need customized or advanced targeting or triggers for your A/B tests, VWO was much more expensive as you needed their enterprise plan (starting at $2032 per month for 250K users as of Jan ’26). Convert includes this even in their lowest cost plans.
• If cost and features aren’t your only consideration, and you want the best tool user experience with better onboarding, then go with a VWO plan, as they are currently better than Convert.

Both VWO and Convert don’t require credit details to sign up, so I suggest you check both out and see which of their limitations has the biggest impact on you.

Get a Free A/B Testing Tool Consultation

Still unsure about which A/B testing tool is right for you? I can help review your tool needs with a free CRO and A/B testing consultation, and give you a free CRO teardown with recommendations to improve any page on your website.

I’m a CRO expert with over 15 years of experience. I work closely with A/B testing tools like Convert, VWO and Optimizely, and have increased revenue for 100’s of online businesses with my A/B testing services.

It’s no longer just about driving more website traffic to to increase revenue. To really increase sales you need to optimize your website experience to convert more of your visitors. This new technique is called conversion rate optimization (CRO), and many websites already gain great results from it.

Are you ready to take advantage too?

This isn’t just a basic conversion rate optimization guide.

While it starts with the basics, this guide reveals the essential aspects of CRO, including:

• The four main elements of conversion optimization
• The importance of conversion research
• A CRO process flow to maximize your success
• How to gain more budget and buy-in for CRO

It’s a detailed guide and is therefore quite long, so here’s a table of contents:

What Is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?

Conversion rate optimization is the art of converting more visitors on your website into your goals (e.g. sales or leads). By increasing your conversion rate, you’ll be able to boost your website revenue without actually needing more traffic.

What Are the Benefits of Doing CRO for Your Website?

The biggest benefit of conversion rate optimization is that it helps you generate much more revenue from your website. Here is how:

• Generates more sales on your website, with your existing traffic, which means you don’t have to spend more money driving traffic.
• Increases your average order value (AOV) so when your users purchase, they buy more products per order, or more expensive products.
• Maximizes your return on investment (ROI) from your marketing spend, and reduces the cost per acquisition.
• Improves your website so it engages more visitors, and increases the chances of them returning and converting into customers in the future.

What Kind of Results Can I Expect From Doing CRO?

This depends on how much effort you put in and your level of expertise. With modest efforts you can increase your conversion rate by 5-10%.

This may not sound like much, but it often has a big impact on your revenue.

If you maximize your efforts with CRO you can get amazing results like these I got for my clients:

• 44% increase in conversion rate for UnboundMerino.com, and $216K in annualized revenue.
• 164% increase in conversion rate for ManlyBands.com, and $988K in annualized revenue.
• 19% increase in conversion rate for JosephJoseph.com, and £260K in annualized revenue.
• 66% increase in conversion rate for an online mattress retailer, and $2.6M in annualized revenue

What Are the Main Elements of CRO?

CRO is made up of four overlapping main elements – conversion research, user experience (UX), website persuasion, and A/B testing and personalization. Making strong use of these will increase your chances of gaining more conversions, and therefore boosting your sales.

• Conversion Research: Gather insights and improvement ideas from conversion research. This comes from web analytics, heat maps, visitor recordings, surveys, user testing and expert CRO reviews. This is the most essential piece of CRO, and cannot be done effectively without it.
• Website Persuasion: Don’t just hope your website converts your visitors. To engage and convert many more of them, use copywriting best practices and influence techniques, including the usage of social proof, scarcity, urgency and reciprocity.
• User Experience (UX): Improve your website user experience so visitors can browse and convert more easily, including using best practices for improving your website navigation, forms and user flow. Without it, it doesn’t matter how well your website ranks in the search engine results page (SERP) or how persuasive it is.
• A/B Testing and Personalization: A/B tests and personalization techniques are used to discover and show the highest converting experience for your website. This is very useful, but not essential, particularly because so many websites don’t have enough traffic or conversions for this.

All of these elements overlap and feed into each other to gain better results from CRO, particularly conversion research. For example insights from conversion research feed into better ideas for A/B testing and personalization.

Why is Conversion Research So Important?

Don’t just guess at what to improve on your website, or only listen to what your boss wants to improve, as this often fails to get good results on your conversion rate and revenue.

Conversion research is essential for determining what needs improving and why from your users and customers.

There are 5 elements of conversion research that you need to use to gain the best results:

1. Visitor recordings. Use these to watch exactly what visitors do on your website. They are great for discovering visitor issues, like page elements or form fields they find hard to use. Always gain insights from these recordings for pages you want to improve.
2. Heat maps. These are a good compliment to visitor recordings. Don’t just presume you know what website visitors click on or how far they scroll – check these for your key pages. Great for revealing CTAs, images and content that should be clicked on more.
3. Surveys. It is essential to find your visitors and customers issues, doubts, hesitations and needs with visitor surveys and customer surveys. Discovering this will help you create very high-impact website improvement ideas and boost your website optimization efforts.
4. User testing. Gain feedback from your target audience while they try to complete tasks on your website and ask them questions. This is a great way to discov what your target audience think of your website, their issues with it, and what needs improving.
5. Expert reviews. This is done by an experienced CRO expert (often called heuristic analysis), and is one of the fastest and most effective way of getting CRO insights and recommendations.

Insights from these elements of conversion research then feeds into better ideas for the other elements of CRO, including A/B testing.

Avoid copying ideas from website competitors – just because they are doing something doesn’t mean it works well or will work on your website. Instead monitor what best converting websites are doing like Amazon.com and AO.com. Ideas from your HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion) rarely work well either, unless they are an expert in CRO or web usability.

Conversion research is often neglected or not well understood, apart from web analytics, so you have huge potential to take advantage of this element of CRO in particular.

How is Website Persuasion Used in CRO?

You need to persuade your website visitors to purchase or sign up – don’t just hope they will. This is why you need to use the technique of website persuasion, which is one of the 4 main elements of conversion rate optimization.

Compelling copywriting plays a huge part in persuasion, particularly headlines, bullet points and CTAs. Mention how your website solves pain points and benefits.

Social proof, urgency, scarcity, reciprocity are essential influence techniques to use, as made famous by Robert Cialdini’s ‘Influence’ book.

Social proof is particularly important to show prominently, including reviews and ratings, testimonials, ‘as featured in’ and logos of well known customers. Doing this will increase the chances of visitors thinking your website is liked by others, and also using it.

Showing urgency and scarcity messages can also work well. People don’t like to feel like they may miss out, so this messaging can help convert visitors, for example showing when there is only a few products left in stock, or a countdown timer for when a sale will end.

Why is User Experience (UX) Essential For CRO?

It doesn’t matter how good your website looks or how persuasive it is, if visitors find it hard to use they will not convert very often.

Therefore you need to ensure you adopt website usability best practices to improve your website user experience. Navigation, landing page forms and user flow elements are very important elements of UX  to improve, and here are some good examples:

• Use tool tips for fields or pieces of content that require explaining.
• Improve your navigation menu and internal search.
• Use good filters and sort options on category pages.
• Ensure your website looks good on different mobile device widths.

Best practice UX improvements should be just launched and don’t need A/B testing first. UX trends should be A/B tested first though.

Can You Do CRO With Low Traffic for A/B Testing?

A/B testing is certainly a part of conversion rate optimization, along with personalization, but it is not essential. While it is very useful for discovering which versions of your website ideas convert better, many websites don’t even have enough traffic to do A/B testing.

You will need at least 5,000 unique visitors per week to the page that you want to run an A/B test on, and at least 200 website conversions per week.

If you don’t have enough traffic you should just launch your website improvement ideas and then monitor their impact on your conversion rate. Here is a great guide that explains how to do CRO if you have a low traffic website.

Do I Need to A/B Test All Improvements or Just Launch Them?

You don’t have to A/B split test every CRO improvement you want to make to your website. This would require a lot of traffic, time and effort.

However, there are improvements you can just launch, even if you have enough traffic to A/B test them. These are considered best practice and will improve any website, so should just be launched without needing A/B testing first. This frees up time to A/B test other elements with higher impact.

Launch it – website improvements to launch instead of A/B testing:

• Usability fixes and improvements (like improving confusing navigation, unfriendly checkout error messages, and font sizes that are too hard to read)
• Prominent unique value proposition elements on your key entry pages (the key reasons to purchase on your website versus competitors)
• Purchase risk reducers like guarantees, free shipping and free returns, particularly on your product pages
• Social proof on key pages like customer reviews, testimonials, media mentions, third party ratings and awards

You can certainly do follow up A/B testing to fine tune these or iterate on the exact location or style of them, but the key thing is to just launch them first because they are so important to have.

A/B test it – website elements always worth A/B testing:

Any time it’s unclear whether the improvement will actually perform better, you should A/B test it, and when you have multiple variations you think might do well, but aren’t sure which will do best. Here are some examples:

• Big ideas that change many things at once, including page redesigns
• Headlines on your homepage or key entry pages
• Copy for your product descriptions and benefits
• Influence and persuasion elements mentioning scarcity or urgency
• Ideas taken from competitor websites (they often won’t work well)

Can You Run Many A/B Tests at The Same Time?

To get better results on your conversion rate and revenue, you need to be able to A/B test frequently, ideally at least a few times per month depending on your website traffic.

A good way to increase the amount of A/B testing you can do is to launch several at the same time, but be aware of potential issues. The key thing is to make sure they don’t influence each other too much, and try to only have one A/B test running per page, or you risk the results being inaccurate or unfair. If you have a signficant amount of traffic you can run more than one per page by setting up mutually exclusive A/B tests, which involves segmenting your users into segments so that they are only part of one A/B test at time.

How to Make Best Use of Personlization for CRO

Don’t just do A/B testing, move beyond this by also doing personalization to improve your websites’ conversion rate.

Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, you need to personalize your website to engage more visitors and boost conversions. Headlines and hero images on key entry landing pages have particularly good impact for personalizing.

One of the best ways to use personlization is to target visitor segments with more relevant content:

• Returning visitors with content relating to what they saw previously
• Frequent purchasers with loyalty content like rewards or discounts

This personalization can be done with any good A/B testing tool, like VWO or Convert.

However, it doesn’t matter how well personlized your website is if it doesn’t have a good user experience or doesn’t persuade them to convert. To see best results from personalization you need to ensure your website has first been improved with the other elements of conversion rate optimization.

What Tools Do You Need For CRO?

For doing conversion rate optimization, you need three key types of website tools:

• A web analytics tool. This is essential because it helps you monitor your current website conversion rate and success metric performance. It also helps you to gain great visitor insights and find poorly converting pages for improving. Google Analytics needs to be set up and used for this, which is free.
• Visitor and customer feedback tools. Getting great feedback from your visitors and customers is essential for understanding their needs and issues. This is because it helps you gaining high-impact ideas for improving your website and conversion rates. The most important tool to use for this are creating customer and visitor surveys using Hotjar.com. User testing tools like Userfeel.com are important for gaining detailed feedback too.
• An A/B testing tool. Ideally you need to test different versions of your content (like different call-to-action buttons or page layouts) to see which version increases your conversion rate and revenue the most. Read my comparison of A/B testing tools to help you understand which tool is best for your needs.

Is There a Process I Can Use to Get Better CRO Results?

Conversion rate optimization shouldn’t be done randomly or only as a once-off project -an ongoing process is needed for success. I created a CRO success flow that helps ensure you get the best results for improving your conversion rates and website sales. Here are the 5 steps of this process:

Step 1 is to do in-depth conversion research, this is essential and was discussed earlier in this guide.

Conversion research then feeds into CRO ideation step 2 where ideas are created for improving your website, along with ideas from website persuasion and UX elements (2 of the other parts of CRO).

Prioritization of CRO ideas in step 3 is important to ensure you launch ideas with highest impact.

Next in step 4 you launch the website improvement or A/B test it (if you have enough traffic).

To help you track the status of each of your improvement ideas you should also use a roadmap spreadsheet. I use these with each of my clients and it really helps to project manage your CRO efforts and ensure that all your improvement ideas get launched.

The last and very important thing to do for step 5 is to review, learn and iterate from what you have launched or tested. This then feeds back into forming more conversion research, and the process continues again.

What Website Elements Have Biggest Impact on CRO?

Unfortunately there is no silver bullet that will work every time. Depending on your type of website, your unique value proposition and your type of visitors, there are hundreds of website elements in your overall website design that contribute to increased conversion rate.

However, by improving the elements below, you’ll have a much better chance of increasing your conversion rate:

• Call-to-action buttons. These important call-to-action (CTA) buttons that influence visitors to take an action on your website have a high impact on your conversion rates. To improve their effectiveness, improve the wording, style, color, size and even the location of them on your pages. Dual CTA buttons can be used effectively when there is more than one main goal, as can adding useful related text very close to the button. Here are some good examples as inspiration:
  
• Headlines and product page descriptions. If your text doesn’t grab the attention of your site visitors and intrigue them to read the rest, then there will a greater chance of them exiting your website, lowering your conversion rates. Test improving your headlines by keeping them simple, and using wording that solves for visitors’ needs or explains benefits. You should condense long blocks of text in product descriptions, and use bullet points instead – these are far easier for visitors to scan and understand quicker. Here is a good homepage example:
  
• Your home page and key entry pages. These are often referred to as your landing pages, and usually get the most traffic on your website, so they often have the biggest impact on conversion rates. Making sure these are engaging, focused, uncluttered and solve for your visitors main needs will greatly increase your conversion rate. Using targeting for your A/B tests on these pages to customize your visitors experience will meet their needs better and increase your conversion rates too.
• Shopping cart and checkout pages or signup flow pages. These are key because if your visitors struggle with these pages (regardless of how good their prior experience has been on your website), then they will abandon your website, lowering conversion and your potential revenue. In particular, you need to make your forms simple to complete. A few ideas include removing nonmandatory fields, improving your error validation, using risk-reducers like security seals, highlighting the benefits of using your website, and adding guarantees and shipping/returns offers.
  
• Product or service videos. You really need to create and show short videos of your products or service being used, as this helps users visualize and explain benefits and features much better than images can. You should also ensure product videos are very prominent by including them in your image gallery on product pages, and A/B testing this for my clients has gained some of my best A/B test results.

Fix Hidden Website Issues to Improve Conversion Rates

It doesn’t matter how well you improve your website if hidden issues aren’t discovered and resolved.

And I’m not talking about 404 issues or broken links — it’s the less visible things impacting user experience that you may not have checked very well or your developers may have missed.

Here are some of the other most common ecommerce hidden websites issues:

• Broken/squashed layout on smaller devices with 375 width
• Mega menus that cover important content and CTA buttons
• Cookie banners blocking your CTA buttons or live chat
• Poor or not understandable field error validation in checkout or signup
• Layout broken on tablet due to stretched buttons or images that are too large
• Product page image gallery is not working properly on mobile
• Site search is not working well or giving poor results

See more examples of hidden common website issues that you need to fix.

The best way to discover these hidden issues is by using a tool like BrowserStack.com to check your website in the most common browsers and devices, and do regular user testing with a tool like Userfeel.

Fixing these has a huge positive impact on the conversion rate and revenue for your website.

What is a Good Conversion Rate?

This is a common question, and the answer is that good conversion rates vary. This is because conversion rates are hugely dependent on your website type, your unique value proposition, and your online marketing efforts.

For a rough benchmark though, 2% is the average conversion rate for ecommerce websites and anything above 5% is considered very good. But to prove my point, it’s not unusual to have conversion rates above 50% for good, focused paid search lead generation landing pages.

Also, don’t compare your conversion rate to your competitors or what you have read in a blog post or a report – it’s risky because it may set you up for a fall or set incorrect expectations to your boss. It’s more important to increase your current conversion rate – never stop improving!

How to Gain More Budget and Buy-in for CRO

Now that Google Optimize has sunset, there are no free A/B testing tools, and you will also need budget for the tools you need for conversion research. That means you will often need to gain budget from senior stakeholders for doing conversion rate optimization.

I suggest that you try to borrow 10% of your marketing budget for a few months to prove the ROI of A/B testing. To help do that, explain to your marketing team that increasing conversion rate increases their ROAS and cost per acquisition.

You should also show your senior stakeholders the likely ROI of running more A/B tests. Do that by calculating the potential revenue impact by increasing your A/B tests launched per month. Also remind them of any good results you have gained previously, or if you have proof that your competitors are A/B testing. That should help you gain more buy-in and budget for A/B testing.

How to Launch A/B Tests With Low Developer Resources

A common challenge with doing CRO and A/B testing is not having enough resources from developer, often meaning you can’t lauch improvements or A/B tests very quickly.

The simplest thing to start with is doing more A/B testing on your copy (homepage headlines and product page descriptions work well) and imagery, as that usually doesn’t require any help from developers. You can even do that in visual editors without needing developers (but do good QA to make sure it doesn’t break anything).

You will ultimiately need to find more developers though. You can either hire and train up new resources, but its often quicker and easier to use a good A/B test development agency to help you build tests much faster and more often than your own developers can. I recommend EchoLogyx and Team Croco for this, as they both do great work at low costs. They can even help with design too if you are lacking those resources.

Resources For Deep Diving Into CRO

Now that you have read this conversion rate optimization guide, to help you learn even more about CRO, there are a number of useful resources you should check out, from great training to courses.

• CXL Institute (includes excellent online courses)
• CXL Live (the best CRO conference)
• Landing Page Optimization Workshop (highly recommended)
• Expert Ecommerce CRO Roadmap (my free CRO tool)

Read more about my CRO services, or arrange a free CRO teardown to see how I can quickly increase your website conversion rate and revenue.

Conversion Rate Optimization FAQs

Creating high-impact landing pages is essential to get better results from your online marketing efforts.

There are many tools that can help you create effective landing pages with ease. But which is best?

To help you decide, I compared the most popular landing page tools – Unbounce versus Instapage and Leadpages.

In this article I created a comparison table including ratings for key aspects of the tools, listed the pros and cons, and who each tool is best for.

What Is A Landing Page and Why Use Tools To Create Them?

A landing page is a standalone page with a single goal like lead capture or selling a product.

They are called ‘landing’ pages because users directly ‘land’ on them after clicking a link in Google Ads, Facebook Ads, emails or other marketing campaigns.

Rather than just sending users from your marketing campaigns to your homepage or other pages of your website, these landing pages can created and customized for each of your marketing campaigns, thus increasing the relevance of them to your users, and increasing the chances of them converting.

This is where landing page building tools come in. Here are the main benetits of them:

• Lets you create high quality landing pages quickly and easily without needing help from developers
• Few design skills are needed as they come with customization features and many stylish templates
• You benefit from templates featuring best practices to convert more visitors into sales or leads

Unbounce vs. Instapage and Leadpages: Which Is The Best?

Now that you know a bit more about why to use landing page tools, let’s move on to the actual ratings and comparisons for these major landing page creation tools:

• Unbounce
• Instapage
• Leadpages

Take a look at the comparison table below for a broad overview of each landing page tool. This including key aspects, pricing, pros and cons, and what business each tool is best for.

Instapage vs Unbounce vs Leadpages: The key differences

Cost ratings	7/10 Plans from $74 a month for ‘Build’ level.	7/10 Plans from $79 a month for ‘Create’ level.	9/10 Plans from $37 a month for ‘Standard’ level.
Amount and quality of templates	9/10 Over 100 high quality templates with built in conversion best practices. All mobile optimized.	9/10 Over 90 good quality templates which are all mobile optimized.	7/10 Highest amount of templates offered, but many cost extra. Varying quality, but all mobile optimized.
Ease of use of the page editor	8/10 Ease to use page editor. Advanced features are harder for beginners though.	8/10 Simple to use and intuitive editor menu system. Ideal for beginners.	8/10 Easy to use editor that is very intuitive and ideal for beginners.
Ability to customize pages	9/10 Excellent ability with full drag and drop options. Not limited to a grid system.	9/10 Good drag and drop and CSS page editing options. Also includes ‘Instablocks’ for sharing across many pages.	5/10 Very limited page customization ability as it uses a rigid grid layout for editing.
Amount of landing page features	8/10 Great amount of features. Includes popups, sticky bars, dynamic text replacement and Smart Traffic optimization.	8/10 Good amount of features. Lacks popups, but includes re-usable blocks, and on-page commenting collaboration features.	8/10 One of the few to include built-in shopping cart tools, but other features are not as good quality as others.
Mobile responsive features	7/10 There is a seperate mobile page version to optimize which is good, but its restricted to 320 width. Hopefully this will get improved soon.	9/10 There is a seperate mobile page to optimize, with full customization options including adjustable widths for different phones.	8/10 Mobile responsive is automated. They don’t give you a seperate mobile version, but let you show or hide content just for mobile.
Popup lead generation options	9/10 Offers good easily customizable popups including exit intent features, and available with all plans.	5/10 Basic popup boxes with all plans, but no exit intent popups included (I recommend using OptinMonster for this).	9/10 Strong emphasis on popups with their excellent ‘Lead Boxes’ feature, including exit intent options.
Analytics and reporting options	8/10 Simple reporting of traffic and conversions, with good option to get traffic and conversion reports by email.	9/10 Excellent reporting functionality and conversion tracking, now with click heatmaps on premium plans.	8/10 Good reporting and graph options make it easy to understand traffic and conversions.
A/B testing options	6/10 Only in the ‘experiment’ and up plans (from $112 per month).	8/17 A/B testing only included in their $159 per month plan.	7/10 Only included in the ‘pro’ level and up plans (from $74 per month).
Support options	8/10 Phone, email and live chat support at all plan levels. Coaching included in enterprise level.	9/10 Customer success manager, live chat and email support at all plan levels.	8/10 Varies by plan. Email and chat support only at lowest plan. Phone support only in highest plan.
Third party ratings	4.3/5 on G2 As of October ’25	4.3/5 on G2 As of October ’25	4.3/5 on G2 As of October ’25
Rich’s expert ratings	8/10 Has the best page editing options and flexiblity, but currently has disappointing mobile restrictions.	8/10 Best-in-class features, but the most expensive tool. Better suited to teams with advanced needs.	7/10 Lowest cost and great popup options, but their page editor has the least flexibility as it is based on a grid system.
Free trial?	14-day free trial plus 20% off first 3 months	14-day free trial – no credit card needed	14-day free trial  – credit card needed though

As you can see from the comparison table above, all three options are highly-rated and will be effective in helping you build engaging landing pages.

The choice you make will likely come down to your level of expertise, budget, and business needs. In the next section, I’ll unpack each tool in more detail.

Unbounce Review

They are the pioneering landing page builder tool, first appearing in 2009. Since then Unbounce have become one of the leaders in the market. They continue to add cutting edge tools like popups and sticky bars, and have acquired other tools and adopted their features, like AI copywriting and optimization.

Overall they are excellent choice for smart online marketing team who want to get the most flexibility for creating landing pages.

Unbounce Pricing: 

They offer 4 plans to meet the needs of most marketers. Here are the prices as of October ’25.

• Build: $99 per month (or $74 paying annually)
• Experiment: $149 per month (or $112 paying annually)
• Optimize: $249 per month (or $187 paying annually)
• Concierge: $649 per month

Unbounce Pros:

• Has the most flexible drag-and-drop editor for complete customization of landing pages
• Their popups and sticky bars feature for lead generation is excellent
• Great high quality templates with many conversion best practices built in
• Has dynamic keyword replacement for getting better results from paid search campaigns
• Offers the best support options even at the lowest plan level, including phone support

Unbounce Cons:

• Their mobile page version currently only lets you choose 320 width, which is quite narrow.
• A/B testing only in the ‘experiment’ level and up which starts at $112 per month
• Doesn’t offer built-in shopping cart tools – you have to use their Unbounce Apps
• Beginners may prefer other landing page tools that have a simpler grid editing system

I also suggest you read my detailed Unbounce review that includes more details on these pros and cons.

Rating on G2: 4.3/5
As of October ’25

I arranged a great deal with Unbounce to give you up to 35% off!

Use my exclusive partner deal to get 20% off your first 3 months or 35% off your first year. You also get a free 14 day trial included, and no credit card is needed to try all the features.

Instapage Review

This landing page is a newer tool that has become very popular, and has recently started to focus more on enterprise level features and marketing teams with advanced needs for landing page creation.

Overall, Instapage is an excellent landing page builder, with many very good features, including team collaboration options that you can’t get with other tools.

Instapage Pricing: 

They offer 3 plans. Here are the prices as of October ’25.

• Create: $99 per month (or $79 when paying annually)
• Optimize: $199 per month (or $159 when paying annually)
• Convert: You have to contact their sales team for customized pricing

Instapage Pros:

• The highest amount of templates are included of out all tools, with fairly good quality
• Has one of the easiest to use editors for customizing pages, great for beginners
• Great collaboration options for building landing pages across teams, including commenting
• The best options for mobile responsiveness and customization out of all tools
• Offers great built-in click heatmaps on their premium plans

Instapage Cons:

• They don’t include A/B testing in their lowest cost plan, only on $199 plan and up
• Doesn’t offer built-in checkout features, so you have to intergrate with other tools
• More expensive than Unbounce which offers similar features

Rating on G2: 4.3/5
As of October ’25

Leadpages Review

This tool launched in 2012, and have quickly become a popular low cost option for creating landing pages.

Leadpages are great for beginners wanting to create pages quickly, without needing advanced features, although has the poorest flexibility to customize pages out of all the tools.

Leadpages Pricing: 

They offer 2 different plans with these prices as of October ’25:

• Standard: $49 per month (or $37 when paying annually)
• Pro: $99 per month (or $74 when paying annually)

Leadpages Pros:

• Excellent popup functionality with their Lead Boxes feature, great for lead capture
• Offer the lowest monthly plan for creating landing pages ($37)
• The only tool to offer built-in checkout features, including payments and subscriptions
• Good amount of templates that don’t need much customization
• They offer the biggest template marketplace if you want to buy versus create
• They have recently made some great improvements to their page editor

Leadpages Cons:

• Poorest page customization options out of all tools, restricted to a fixed grid layout
• They don’t offer the ability to start from a blank page, you must start from a template
• No separate mobile version to create, so you must add or hide elements for mobile
• Many of their templates look very average or have become too commonly used
• A/B testing and checkout features are only available in the ‘pro’ plan which is $74 per month

Rating on G2: 4.3/5
As of October ’25

So, What Is The Best Landing Page Builder?

When comparing Unbounce, Instapage and Leadpages, all three tools rate well. Each have different strengths and weaknesses which will be more important to different types of users.

To help you understand which is better for your needs, here are the main tool differences and who each is ideal for:

• Use Unbounce if you want the most flexibility for creating pages and the most customization options. Ideal for experienced online marketers with advanced needs for landing pages.
• Use Instapage if you want a great overall tool for creating landing pages and have a bigger budget. Ideal for teams of online marketers with moderate landing page needs.
• Use Leadpages if you are beginner or want simple landing pages, and don’t want many customization options. Ideal for entrepreneurs who want to create landing pages, and people with lower budgets.

So which tool you should chose really depends on what your needs are for creating landing pages.

I use Unbounce for creating my landing pages as I prefer greater editing options and flexibility. However, I’ll always recommended checking out Unbounce, Instapage and Leadpages, and see for yourself to what works for you, especially as they all now offer free trials.

Optimize Your Landing Pages To Convert More Users

Once you’ve built your landing pages using one of those tools, it’s essential to do conversion rate optimization (CRO) on them to increase the amount of users that convert into leads or sales.

Here are just a few of the most important things you should optimize for your landing pages:

• Improve your headlines to include benefits and your unique value proposition
• Include high-quality imagery and videos that help explain what you are offering
• Improve your call-to-action buttons to make them engaging and emphasize action
• Include social proof like reviews, testimonials, awards or media mentions
• Discover and address your users main issues, pain points, doubts and hesitations

For a detailed guide on increasing your landing page conversion rates, read my ultimate guide to CRO.

I’m also offering a free CRO teardown for any of your landing pages with a free CRO consultation.

Disclaimer: This comparison review contains links that earn referral fees for me. I would appreciate you using these links when you sign up for a trial with any of these tools.

Hotjar is a really powerful website analytics and feedback tool that reveals exactly what your visitors think of your website, including the most common issues they have, and what they like the most about it.

Although Hotjar is useful for improving website conversion rates and increasing sales, most people don’t really know how to get the most from it. Often they set it up quickly, and can be disappointed with what they find, or don’t know its true potential.

That’s why I’ve created this in-depth guide to help you maximize the true potential of this tool and boost sales on your website. 

This guide will help you understand the most important part of conversion rate optimization—conversion research—and how you can use it to improve any kind of site, from ecommerce to startup websites.

Why Use Hotjar to Improve Your Website’s CRO?

Hotjar is a web analytics and feedback tool that measures how visitors behave when they’re on your website and helps gain feedback from them.

It is used alongside traditional web analytics tools like Google Analytics to create a powerful tool to help you drive more sales.

These are the best features that Hotjar has to help improve your website conversion rate and sales:

• Session recordings: These are representations of real-life actions visitors take while they browse your website. The recordings capture mouse movement, scrolling, and clicks across multiple web pages and devices. This can be used to see where users may be having difficulty and their most common paths through your website.
• Surveys: This feature allows you to create on-site surveys to gain a better understanding of how visitors experience your website. Based on the answers in the surveys, you’ll be able to spot patterns and see where you might need to improve your site.
• Heat maps: This feature allows you to visualize user behavior by generating representations of where users click, move, and scroll on your website. It helps you to learn which elements get ignored and which features are most popular. This is useful for adding or removing features on your site that may be more or less valuable to users to increase conversion rates and sales.

They also have a ‘feedback’ tool that shows a feedback widget on your website, but that generally doesn’t get much usage by website visitors and gives limited feedback, with many user responses wanting feedback from your customer support.

How to Optimize Conversion Rates with Hotjar

Now that you have a broad overview of what Hotjar is and some of the key features it offers, let’s take a look at how exactly to use them.

Part 1: Collect website feedback and data using Hotjar

Time required for this part: You will need a few hours to setup surveys and then several days to get responses, and also you will need at least 7 days of data from heatmaps and session recordings to analyze (depending on how much traffic you have).

If you are a new user you will need to create a Hotjar account. They offer a free basic plan, so I suggest you try that first. Then you need to add the tracking code to your website – simply use the install guide Hotjar provides for each website platform to help you with this.

You can install Hotjar via Google Tag Manager, Shopify, WordPress, or any other major website creation tool.

1: Create a full-page survey for visitor feedback 

Hotjar’s survey tool is excellent for gaining insights from your website visitors, and discovering their biggest issues, doubts, frustrations or needs are for your website and what you are offering. 

Rather than just using their pop-over surveys (their name for polls) which are better suited for asking single questions, you need to use a full page survey with a link to get detailed feedback. To do this you need to choose the survey type called ‘Link’ (see image below).

You also need to use the option for ‘on-site invitation’ with a message that pops up asking users to give their feedback. I suggest offering an incentive to increase the amount of responses you get, like a discount to what you are offering. 

Then choose the ‘invitation targeting’ option and the for the ‘behaviour’ option choose to pop up the invite after they have been on your website for 90 seconds. Popups that show up earlier will be too early for visitors to give any meaningful feedback, and it may annoy them.

Creating about 5-10 questions is ideal. Any more and you will get lower completion rates. You will need at least 50 responses to analyze in the second phase of this guide for how to use Hotjar. 

I recommend using these questions for getting the most useful feedback for improving your website:

• What were your first impressions of this website?
  This simple question is important to ask because visitors often judge whole websites very quickly based on what they first see.
• Do you have any doubts or hesitations about our website or products?
  Asking this is good for understanding if there are any trust or credibility issues in particular.
• Is there anything stopping you from purchasing right now?
  This is one of the most important questions to gain insights from, and is good for using on pricing, product or service pages.
• What would increase the chances of you purchasing, other than lower prices?
  Asking this will help you understand if there is anything you could be offering or improving, and is very important for ecommerce sites.
• What are the key factors that influence your purchase decision?
  When you find out what these key factors are you can improve your website and offerings to better influence your visitors.

Avoid asking questions that only focus on your product/service and visitor demographics.

2: Create a similar survey to send to your customers

Now you need to a similar survey just for customers, as it is important to discover what nearly stopped them from purchasing, what issues they experience, and to gain improvement ideas.

Simply use the same set up for the visitor survey, but you don’t need to use the on-site invitation option.

Instead, you will need to create an email that invites customers to take this survey using the link, with a good incentive.

You just need to ask slightly different questions that relate to your customers instead of visitors

I suggest using these ones to get the most useful feedback and ideas to improve your website:

• Was there anything that nearly stopped you from purchasing?
  This is one of the most revealing questions you can ask, and the answers will help you improve your website to fix issues for potential customers.
• What did you think of your experience on our website?
  A good open ended question that can reveal insights about many things.
• Was it easy to order our product? How easy was the checkout process?
  This question is essential for finding insights about improving your checkout or signup pages — and quickly fixing these.
• Was there any missing information that would have been helpful to know before you purchased?
  Maybe you aren’t making key things very clear or prominent on your website. This question helps you discover what information needs adding.
• What were the key factors that influenced your purchase decision for this type of product?
  This question will help you understand what details your potential customers will want to see most prominently on your website.
• Did you consider using any other websites before purchasing from us? Did you prefer anything about them?
  This is question is great for gaining insights from competitor websites.

Asking about 10 questions is a good amount of questions. If you ask more than that, you will get lower response rates.

3: Wait 7 days to gather enough data from session recordings and heatmaps

You will then need to wait at least 7 days for Hotjar to gather heatmap data and session recordings on your website, but that ultimately depends on how much traffic you get per day. This is what you need to gather before you can review and look for insights:

• For heatmaps you need at least 500 sessions for each of your key pages (ideally on mobile and desktop).
• For session recordings you need at least 1000 sessions to be able to filter and find good insights.

If you have a very high traffic website, with over 10K users per day, you may get this within a few days.

Part 2: Look for insights from Hotjar findings

Time required for this part: This is the most important part, and you ideally need to spend at least 5 hours reviewing the results from your surveys, and the data from your heatmaps and session recordings.

In this essential part you gather insights and website improvement ideas. This is a key part of conversion research, and doing this leads to better understanding of your visitors and their issues and needs, and therefore better website improvement ideas.

If you don’t spend adequate time reviewing findings and creating insights then you won’t get very good website improvement ideas. Here are the main insights to look for when analyzing your findings.

1: Review heatmaps for user insights

First you need to gain good insights from a heat maps of each of your key pages. This will help you create ideas to improve them.

The goal is to generate at least 10 heat or scroll maps that you can use to increase your sales and make your website better.

Here are some key things to consider when reviewing heatmaps for each of your key pages:

• Are visitors clicking or looking at parts of a specific page that you would expect?
• Are any elements being ignored that are important to your goals and need promoting better?
• What links in the navigation are clicked most or least? This gives you a great idea of visitor intent and for optimizing menu contents.
• Is anything being clicked on more than your main CTA buttons? This may indicate confusion or non engaging CTA wording.
• Are visitors not scrolling  veryfar down your pages and often not seeing key content?

2: Review session recordings for issues and bugs

Next you need to start watching recordings of your visitors on your website. But to get the most insights from them you have to know what to look for – and not just watch them all as this can be very time consuming. Here are some best practices to help you:

• Review recordings from your most important pages first – your homepage, your product or service pages, and your signup/checkout flow. You can setup filters to only see these.
• Use the filter option to look for ‘rage clicks’ which are when a user repeatedly clicks on the same thing, which usually indicates confusion or that something is broken. See rage click example in the video below.

• Watch at least 10 videos for each key page to get a feel for how users interact with each of them.
• Look for which parts of the pages visitors seem to get stuck on or don’t seem to notice.
• Look for any small errors or usability issues that you may not have noticed before.
• Review recordings on mobile devices too – these are really important for gaining insights into your mobile visitors and their challenges.
• When reviewing each video, use the tag feature for recordings using words that help you summarize what happens (checkout issue, confused, purchaser etc).

Using these tips be sure to create at least 10 insights as you review your visitor session recordings.

3: Review survey responses for issues, doubts, frustrations and needs

After you have got enough responses to each of your surveys you need to start looking for insights from the feedback you have received. Here are the most important things to do to maximize your insights:

• Understand which parts of your website they think need improving the most.
• Understand purchase motivations of your visitors – do you give them enough information to purchase?
• Discover major issues of visitors using your website, and what they had most trouble finding or doing.
• Learn which competitors they like using, and reasons why. What is lacking on your website in comparison to them?
• For your multiple choice questions, see which responses are most common. The results graph lets you quickly see the most common responses.
• When reviewing your responses, use a spreadsheet to list each insight you find, how often each is mentioned, along with the page it relates to. See below for an example spreadsheet I created.

The goal is to create at least 10 website improvement insights based on feedback from your surveys.

Part 3: Create and launch high-impact improvement ideas

Time required for this part: You should spend at least 3 hours creating ideas based on insights, ideally brainstorming with other team members.

This is where things get exciting and you start to launch website improvements based on the insights you have gathered using Hotjar. But to ensure greatest chances of increasing your website sales, you need to know how to best turn the insights into ideas, and know what to launch first for biggest impact.

1: Turn your insights into improvement ideas

Now that you have created some excellent insights from your findings in part 2, next you need to turn them into website improvement ideas. To help you do this, you need to create a spreadsheet and add the following things for each idea:

• A short descriptive name for your improvement idea.
• A hypothesis for each idea (the reason why you think it will have a good impact).
• The insights used to create each idea (for example insights from Hotjar or web analytics).
• Estimate the likely impact the idea would have on increasing conversions and sales (ranked 1 to 10, with 10 being highest potential).
• List how much traffic each page gets relating to each idea – the more the better (ranked 1 to 10, with 10 being highest traffic).
• Estimate how easy the idea would be to launch in terms of design and development (rank 1 to 10, with 10 being easiest).

Here is a sample of the tool I use to list and prioritize website improvement ideas, which you can download for free in my toolbox:

2: Prioritize the improvement ideas based on highest impact

Rather than guess at what improvement or test idea to launch first on your website (which can lead to varying success), with the information you listed for each idea you can now prioritize and determine the ones that will have a better chance of increasing your website sales.

To do this prioritization, on your ideas spreadsheet simply sort the likely impact column to show highest rated ones first. Then look for the ideas towards the top that have the highest ease of launch rating – these are going to give you the quickest and biggest impact on improving your website. These are known as low hanging fruit, and typically will involve changing simple things on key pages like headlines, imagery and call-to-action buttons.

3: Start launching highest potential ideas first, and progress through all ideas

Once you have determined the improvement ideas that will likely have biggest impact and easiest to implement, start launching the ideas one at time. You will need to get your website designer and developer to help create the visuals and code. Don’t forget to get help from the marketing team to help you writing better headlines, wording and call-to-actions too.

For each improvement you launch, monitor the impact on your key metrics in your Google Analytics reports, both for the page you are trying to improve (e.g. lower exit rate and higher conversion rate) and for your website as a whole (e.g. increased website conversion rate and improved shopping cart abandonment rate).

Ideally you should A/B test a few variations for each improvement idea as this helps you experiment and find the best performing variation for your ideas. For low traffic pages this A/B testing may not be possible though – this guide will help you if you low traffic.

After you have launched about 5 improvements to your website, you should start to see some great impact on increased conversion rates and sales. Don’t stop there though, keep working through the list until you have launched all of the ideas you created.

Optimize Your Website with the Help of a CRO Expert

This guide will help you make the most out of the Hotjar tool to improve your website sales. 

Ideally, you should repeat this process at least once a year on your website, and definitely when you have just changed major elements on it. 

To get best results from using Hotjar and increasing your conversion rates, reach out to me today and get a free consultation and CRO teardown. I use Hotjar with all of my clients with high-impact results, and have 15 years experience in CRO.

Unless you are an A/B testing and CRO expert, did you realize that most of your A/B test results won’t get a winning result? You may have even experienced this disappointment yourself if you’ve tried A/B testing.

Some good news though. You can actually do something with these inconclusive A/B tests and turn them into better tests with a much greater chance of succeeding – therefore increasing your website sales or leads without needing more traffic.

Instead of simply throwing away losing A/B tests and hoping to get luckier with your next one, you have a fantastic learning opportunity to take advantage of – that most online businesses don’t know about or do well. But what should do first? And what mistakes should watch out for?

To help you ensure you succeed and maximize your learnings, I’ve put together a handy checklist for you. But before I reveal how to maximize your A/B test learnings and future results, let’s set the scene a bit…

First of all, just how many A/B tests fail to get a winning result?

A VWO study found only 1 out 7 A/B tests have winning results. That’s just 14%. Not exactly great, right?

This real lack of winning results can often cause frustration and slow progress with A/B testing efforts, and limit further interest and budget in doing CRO. Very frustrating! The good news is that you can actually gain real value from failed results, as I will now reveal in the learnings checklist.

The A/B Test Learnings Checklist

1: Did you create an insights-driven hypothesis for your A/B test?

A common reason for poor A/B test results is because the idea (the hypothesis for what was tested) was not very good. This is because businesses often just guess at what to test, with no insights being used to create each idea. And without a good hypothesis, you will find it hard to learn if the test fails.

The best indicator of a strong hypothesis is one that is created using insights from conversion research – web analytics, visitor recordings, user testing, surveys, and expert reviews.

To create a better insight-driven hypothesis, you should use this format:

We noticed in [type of conversion research] that [problem name] on [page or element]. Improving this by [improvement detail] will likely result in [positive impact on metrics].

So you can see what I mean, a real example of this would be:

We noticed in [Google Analytics] that [there was a high drop off] on [the product page]. Improving this by [increasing the prominence of the free shipping and returns] will likely result in [decrease in exits and an increase in sales].

So the first step is to check how good your A/B test hypothesis was – how many insights did you use when creating it? The more insights used, the better. Or was it just a guess or what your boss wanted?

If you think your hypothesis was poor or didn’t even have one, you really need to create a better one using conversion research – getting an expert CRO website review is a great place to start.

2: Did you wait 7 days before declaring a result and did anything major change while running it?

A simple yet common mistake with A/B testing is declaring a losing result too soon. This is particularly problematic if you have a lot of traffic and are keen to find a result quickly. Or worst still, the person doing the test is biased and waits until their least favorite variation starts to lose and then declares the test a loss.

To avoid this mistake, you need to wait at 7 days before declaring a result to allow fluctuations in variation results to level off and to also reduce the impact of differences in traffic by day.

And any time you change anything major on your website while a test is running you also need to wait at least an additional 7 days. This extra time is needed for your testing tool to evaluate the impact of this new change (this is also known as test pollution).

If you find this is the case with your failed test, then I suggest you re-run the test again for a longer period, and try not to change anything major on your website during the period you are running the test.

3: Were the differences between variations bold enough to be easily noticed by visitors?

Next you need to check the variations that were created for the test and see if they were really that different for visitors to notice in the first place. If your variations were subtle, like small changes in images or wording, visitors often won’t notice, or act any different, therefore you often won’t see a winning test result. I’ve seen hundreds of A/B tests created by businesses and you will be surprised at how often this mistake occurs.

If you think this may have occurred with your losing test result, re-rest it but this time make sure you think outside of the box and create at least one bolder variations. Involving other team members can help you brainstorm ideas – marketing experts are helpful here.                                               

4: Did you review click map and visitor recordings for insights about the page tested?

It’s essential to do visual analysis of how visitors interact on every page you want to improve and run an A/B test on. This helps you visually understand what elements are being engaged with the most or least. This visual analysis is particularly important to double check for pages and elements that relate to your failed A/B tests – you can learn a lot from this. Did your visitors even notice the element you were testing?

The first type of visual analysis are visitor clickmaps that show you heatmaps of what your visitors are clicking on, and how far your visitors scroll down your pages. Even more important are visitor session recordings where you can watch visitors exact mouse movements and journey through your website.

So if you hadn’t done this visual analysis for the page relating to the inconclusive test, go ahead and do this now using a tool like Hotjar.com. You may realize that few people are interacting with the element you are testing or that they are getting stuck or confused with something else on the page that you should run an A/B test on instead.

5: Have you performed user testing on the page being tested, including the new variation?

User testing is essential piece of successful CRO – getting feedback from your target audience is one of the best ways of generating ideas for improvements and A/B test ideas. This should also be performed in advance for your whole website and before any major changes launch.

Therefore, I suggest you run user tests on the page relating to your losing A/B test result to improve your learnings. In particular, I suggest using UserFeel.com to ask for feedback on each of the versions and elements you tested. Ask what they liked most or least, and ask what else they think is lacking or could be improved – this really is excellent for creating better follow up test ideas.

6: Did you segment your test results by key visitor groups to find potential winners?

A simple way to look for learnings and possibly uncover a winning test result is to segment your A/B test results for key visitor groups. For example you may find that your new users or mobile users segment actually generated a winning result which you should push live. This segmenting is possible in any good A/B testing tool like VWO or Convert.

To go one step further, you can actually analyze each of your test variations in Google Analytics to understand differences in user behavior for each test variation and look for more learnings. A web analyst is very helpful for this.

7: How good was the copy used in the test? Was it action or benefit based?

You may have had a great idea for an A/B test, but how good and engaging was the copy (the text) in the test? Did it really captivate your visitors? This is essential to spend time on as headlines and call-to-actions often have big impacts on conversion rate. So if you had changed any text in your test that didn’t win, really ask yourself how good the copy was. For better follow-up test wording, always try testing variations that mention benefits, solve common pain points, and use action related wording.

Most people aren’t great at copywriting, so I suggest you get help from someone in your marketing department or get help from a CRO expert like myself or a copywriting expert like Joanna Wiebe.

8: Did you consider previous steps in the journey – what might need optimizing first?

Another key learning is to understand the whole visitor journey for your A/B test idea that didn’t win, and not just look for learnings in isolation to the page being testing.

This is important because if you haven’t optimized your top entry pages first, you will have limited success on pages further down like the funnel like your checkout. So go ahead and find the most common previous page relating to your failed A/B test, and see if anything needs clarifying or improving that relates to the page you are trying to test. For example, if you were testing adding benefits in the checkout, did you test the prominence of these on previous pages too?

You should take this a step further and also look at your most common traffic sources to see if they caused any issues on the page you were testing, for example maybe the wording used in your Google Ads weren’t matching wording on your entry pages very well.

9: Did you review the test result with a wider audience and brainstorm for ideas?

To increase learnings from your A/B tests, when looking at results you should always get regular feedback and thoughts from key people in related teams like marketing and user experience, at least once per quarter. Creative and design orientated people are ideal for helping improve A/B testing ideas.

And this wider internal feedback is even more important when A/B tests don’t get a winning result. So I suggest you setup a meeting to review all your previous losing test results and brainstorm for better ideas – I’m sure you gain great insights from this wider team. Then to ensure this review happens in the future too, setup a regular quarterly A/B test results review meeting with these key people.

10: Could you move or increase the size of the tested element so its more prominent?

Another common reason for an inconclusive test A/B test result is because the element being tested is not very prominent and often doesn’t get noticed by visitors. This is particularly true for testing elements that are in sidebars or are very low down on pages because these don’t get seen very often.

Therefore, to try and turn an A/B test with no result into a winning test, consider moving the element being tested to a more prominent location on the page (or another page that gets more traffic) and then re-run the test. This works particularly well with key elements like call-to-action buttons, benefits, risk reducers and key navigation links.

This last step of iterating and retesting the same page or element is essential, as it helps you determine whether it will ever have a good impact on your conversion rates. If you still don’t get a good follow up test result that means you should instead move onto test ideas for another page or element that will hopefully be a better conversion influencer.

Get a Free A/B Testing Consultation

To gain even better results from your A/B tests, I can help you with a free A/B testing consultation, and give you a free CRO teardown to improve any page on your website.

I’m a CRO expert with over 15 years of experience, and have increased sales for 100’s of online businesses with my A/B testing services.

Get a free A/B testing consultation and CRO teardown

When was the last time you gave your website text some love and made some improvements – your headlines and call-to-actions in particular? Making your text much more engaging and captivating is one of the quickest and highest-impact ways to improve your website sales or leads.

Indeed, it doesn’t matter how good your website looks if your text doesn’t sizzle and captivate – your visitors won’t be excited to learn more and will bounce often – meaning many lost sales for you!

You don’t have to have a major in marketing to write more captivating text on your website either – I’ve created 20 expert tips to help you quickly become a copywriting pro, and convert many more of your visitors into sales.

1: Captivate visitors by mentioning their needs and pain points
Often the best way to improve the effectiveness of your text is to think in your visitor’s shoes and prominently mention words on key entry pages that relate to (and solves) their main needs, problems or frustrations. Here is a great example of a paint-point related headline on Unbounce.com:

Try asking intriguing questions in your text that your visitors can relate to (particularly in your headlines) and then mention why your offering is the best solution for them. Researching more about your main types of visitors and getting feedback from them is essential to do this well – here is a great guide on this.

2: Focus on benefits and results of your product/service – not just features
Your visitors of course need to know your product/service features, but many websites forgot to also translate them into benefits and potential results – which is what your visitors really ultimately care about.

Therefore its essential you prominently mention these on your product/services pages – for example, if you are selling services, you should mention the benefits (saving time, effort etc) and impact on revenue for your clients – not just the service features.

3: Use proven highly-engaging powerful words far more often
Give your website text a makeover by  using time-tested marketing power words. How many of these great examples below are you using on your website? Go ahead and check right now, particularly for your key entry pages, and start introducing more:

• Discover, Secret, Results, Imagine, Guaranteed, Instantly, Powerful, Easy, Simple, Exclusive

4: Do the ‘we we’ test to make your text more visitor-focused
To engage many more visitors, focus your words on their viewpoint, not on you or your business – so avoid using ‘we, I or us’ and your company name too often. Instead, use much more visitor-orientated and friendly words like ‘you’ and ‘yours’.

To help improve this, you should to the ‘we we’ test to check how many times you use each type of business or visitor word on your key pages. Make sure you use higher amounts of visitor-focused words – doing that will instantly upgrade the engagement of your text!

5: Write magnetic headlines to hook your visitors
Your headlines can make or break whether your visitors stay on your website or bounces prematurely. Try using several styles to see which converts best, including benefit driven ones, social proof or testimonial focused ones, or pain point related questions. This tool helps you analyze how good your headlines are.

“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar” David Ogilvy

Don’t forget to also test your headline size to make it stand out more, and the number of words used (short and sweet is better – ideally under 10 words). Here’s a great headline combining many best practices:

6: Know which boring and dull words to avoid like the plague
Some words are just a waste of space and opportunity on your web pages, and should be replaced with much better, more engaging words. Here are some of the most conversion-killing words I still see way too often that you should avoid:

• Submit (use a much more engaging word that implies the benefit of clicking)
• Click here (pointless self-referential words – wasted opportunity to write a better call-to-action)
• Cheap (makes your service/offering sound low quality – use ‘low cost’ or ‘affordable’ instead)
• Utilize, leverage, mission statement and other corporate words (too dull)

Here is a great guide on finding other friction words on your website to avoid using too.

7: Ruthlessly cut your text and make it concise
To increase the chances of visitors reading your text and seeing your key points, you need to start really cutting down the amount of words you use. Shorten your paragraphs and sentences, cut out fluff words, unnecessary extra detail words, and don’t ramble – be direct. If the words don’t help explain anything, or don’t add any real value to the sentence, then get rid of them.

8: Focus on improving your call-to-action button wording
The wording of your call-to-actions are critical – it’s essential you persuade more visitors to click on your buttons and key links. Always avoid using generic words like ‘learn more’, ‘submit’ or ‘subscribe’ – use much more compelling text instead. Benefit and power related words will work well, as will using action-driven words, which leads us nicely into the next tip.

9: Inspire action – use words to get your visitors to act quickly
Realize that your visitors are often in a rush and don’t have much time, so get them to act quickly on your website offerings. Action words are particularly important for using on your call-to-action buttons and links. Here are some good examples of action words to help you come up with ideas to test:

• Now, Today, Get started, Fast, Quickly, Discover, Create, Instantly, Try, Learn, In Seconds

10: Use sub-headers to make your text much easier to scan
Remember that visitors don’t read online the same way they do books or magazines – instead they scan text and will only read more if something catches their eye (unless its an article). Making use of many descriptive subheaders (like in this article) will make your text much easier to scan – they also help to break to categorize and break up long blocks of text.

11: Bullet points are essential for making key points easily seen
Another great way to make your content much more scanable for visitors is to use short bullet points instead of blocks of text. These are perfect for emphasizing your most important content on key entry pages, like your benefits and unique value proposition.

Using related icons makes bullet points even more eye-catching and engaging. Here are some great bullet points being used to highlight value proposition on CrazyEgg.com:

12: Tell an interesting story to help captivate
People love a great story – your visitors too. So try mentioning a quick engaging story from a view point of a potential customer – introduce an interesting character that helps portray a typical prospect, while explaining why your offering works so well for them.

This works particularly well on ‘About Us’ pages – try telling people how you got started with your business, and why you are passionate about what you do. People usually much prefer to buy from a local company with a good story than buying from Amazon. Here are some great ‘about us’ pages to learn from.

13: Let your personality shine through your text
Adding personality to your text really helps to engage visitors and help them remember you. Don’t be bland or too ‘official’ – using a friendly, conversational style of text works well for building personality. David Ogilvy used this principle well, and knew that building a “sharply defined personality” is the best way (and sometimes only way) to differentiate yourself from your competitors.

14: Avoid hard to read full-width text blocks
A simple tip here – avoid showing full-width blocks of text on your homepage and key entry page – these are particularly hard for people to read (think in terms of newspaper column widths instead). Use sidebars or imagery to reduce text width to make your long blocks more readable, or increase margin widths.

15: Use words to imply that visitors can trust using you
To increase the chances of visitors feeling more at ease about ordering from you, use words that imply greater amounts of trust and low risk. This is particularly important on your product/service pages and checkout/signup flow pages – here are some great trust word examples to try using:

• Guaranteed, Trusted, Certified, Secure, Safe, Privacy, No obligation, Cancel anytime, No risk

16: Use bolded text or colors to emphasize important words
This is essential for helping emphasizing your main website benefits and key points – try using bold and colors when writing all kinds of text, including longer blocks of texts and short bullet points. Avoid using ALL CAPS though – it’s okay for using in headlines, but often too harsh in regular text – like you are being shouted at! Here is a good example of using bold in a testimonial to mention key points:

17: Cut to the chase quickly – lead with strongest points first
Don’t mention your most important words in a sea of your content or in the middle of your sentences – you risk them not being read. Instead, always try to summarize and mention key things much sooner in your text, ideally in the first sentence.

18: Back up your claims and avoid using hype and superlatives
People are tired of being bombarded with amazing sounding results or claims everywhere they turn, and often website visitors are no different. Therefore avoid using strong superlatives on your website (like ‘world-class’ or ‘the best X’), and when you use them always back up your claims with stats, ratings, testimonials, case studies or awards you have won.

19: Avoid using uncommon acronyms or jargon – simplify it
Don’t presume that all your visitors will know your jargon or technical words, or the acronyms that you or your business uses – particularly if they aren’t that common. They can often alienate and turn away your visitors – instead always dumb them down so everyone knows what you mean.

20: Don’t let SEO ruin your copywriting efforts – write for people
Lastly, and very importantly – write for your visitors, not for Google! I see this all the time on websites still – keyword stuffed headlines or blocks of text that bore visitors and cause high bounce rates. If you write great content, not only will visitors love it, it will become popular and get many links – exactly what Google and other search engines love. Here is a great guide on how to write SEO-focused copy.

High-impact A/B test ideas for your text to get started

To ensure your copywriting improvements give you biggest lifts in sales, create multiple text versions and run A/B tests to find which versions engage and convert more visitors. If you don’t have enough traffic, this guide reveals other ways of A/B testing.

Here are some quick simple website ideas to test using your newly found copy-writing skills:

• Pick a key entry page and create an A/B test where you improve all text on it, including headlines and call-to-actions.
• Add some text of your benefits/risk reducers to the side-bar of your signup or checkflow pages
• Test different versions of your homepage and service page headlines.
• Test making your call-to-action buttons more action-orientated and engaging
• Do some A/B testing with your email subject lines too – don’t just test your web pages!

Looking for expert copywriting help to improve your website?

I’d love to help you – in my live website conversion review service, one of the many elements I help you quickly improve is your website text, particularly your headlines and call-to-actions. Learn more:
Quickly improve your text (and much more) with my website conversion review.

Google Analytics isn’t just for knowing how much traffic your website is getting, your top pages, and how your traffic sources are performing. Nope. There is an even better use for it!

It’s also really important to use it to help improve your website – so it converts many more visitors into sales. But unfortunately Google Analytics can be a little daunting at times, particularly with so many reports to analyze. Where should you start for best results?

To help you make sense of this, I’ve created a list of the best Google Analytics reports so you can quickly gain more insights into your website performance and what needs improving most. Let’s get started…

The best Google Analytics reports to improve your website

Check the landing pages report for pages with high bounce rates and low conversion rates
Your top landing pages (entry pages) are crucial to optimize because they are the first pages your visitors see on your website. If visitors don’t find what they are looking for or are confused, they will leave your website often within just 5 seconds!

To improve your website with this report, pull up your landing pages report for the last 30 days (found under ‘Behavior > Site Content > Landing pages’).  Then see which pages out of the top 10 have highest bounce rate (over 50% is high) and which have lower than website average goal conversion rate (both indicated below in yellow) – these are indicators of poorly performing pages on your website.

Then optimize these poor page performers first – improving headlines, benefits, imagery and call-to-action buttons are some of the best ways to do this. Optimizing these helps increase visitor engagement and increases the chances of them converting. You should also ensure you show your unique value proposition more prominently on them.

Analyze your Shopping Behaviour report for high-drop off rates
It doesn’t matter how good your website is if visitors struggle to get through your cart and checkout. To understand how well they complete that process, its vital to check your Shopping Behaviour report. On this report (found under ‘Ecommerce’ tab) you can see how many vget through each shopping stage, and which are most problematic. Most importantly you can see your cart abandonment rate (the percentage of people that leave your cart without continuing) and your checkout abandonment rate (those who leave your checkout with purchasing).

You need to pay great attention to any stage with a high drop off rate (more than 60%) and optimize those first. Improving these will greatly increase your conversion rate, and therefore your sales.

If you have a multi-page checkout, you should also check out the ‘Checkout Behaviour’ report as this gives you even more detail by showing you drop off rates of each page of your checkout, like your billing page.

Check your traffic overview report for poor performing traffic sources
Improving the quality and quantity of your traffic has huge impact on your website conversion rates, and its vital you gain insights into traffic performance and optimize the major sources.

To help you gain greater insights into this, pull up the ‘Channels’ report as Google calls it (found under ‘Acquisition > Channels) and check which of your top 10 traffic sources (channels) have high bounce rates (over 50%), or a goal conversion rate that is much lower than your website average. This is particularly important to do for any source that you are paying for like paid search or display advertising, as you will need to optimize these quickly to reduce your wasted spending.

You should also look for traffic sources that seem low or missing from the top 10 channels. For example, you may find your email traffic source isn’t as high as you had hoped for or isn’t converting well, so you should optimize your email marketing campaigns as soon as possible.

Note: You may even find your email marketing campaigns are not being attributed correctly to the email traffic channel, which can be fixed by using campaign tracking codes for your emails. I highly recommend doing this to monitor the success of your email marketing efforts.

Use the mobile overview report for tablet/mobile insights
Mobile traffic often now accounts for over 50% of total website traffic – and these visitors have very different needs due to smaller screen sizes, and often convert much lower than regular website traffic.

To understand your mobile traffic, and its performance, you need to check your ‘mobile overview’ report (found under Audience > Mobile > Overview). Here you need to see what the conversion rate for each is. If conversion rate is much lower for any, you need to check your website on that device for key issues and fix them immediately – in particular ensure you have a mobile optimized version of your website.

Note that mobile conversion rates are often lower than desktop conversion rates because these visitors are often just browsing when they are not at home and not ready to purchase.

To take this mobile analysis a step further you should also check the ‘Devices’ report and see if there are any types of devices that convert lower, for example maybe your website breaks slightly on older devices that have less width, like the iPhone SE 2019 model.

Check the exit pages report to find problematic pages
You also need to find out which pages are most often causing your visitors to leave (called an ‘exit’ page) – and improve and optimize those too.

To find these top exit pages, check your ‘exit pages’ report (found under ‘Behavior > Site Content > Exit Pages). In particular look for any pages that shouldn’t be in the top 10, and try to figure out why so many people exit your site on them. Also look for pages with especially high exit rate (over 50%), as this often indicates problems. I recommend that you also use Hotjar to gain insights into why visitors are leaving on these pages.

A few ways to improve these top exit pages is by using and optimizing call-to-action buttons at the end of them (the wording and style of them in particular), and try using exit intent popups to show a great incentive (discounts/free guides etc) before visitors leave your website.

Analyze the top pages report for key missing pages and high exit rates
Your top pages report can contain some real gems for insights – and not just what your top 10 pages currently are. You can find this report under Behavior > Site Content > All Pages.

First check if any of your top pages have high exit rates (over 50%) and optimize those as soon as possible. You should also to check if any pages relating to your key goals seem missing from this report or have low traffic. For example, perhaps few people are visiting your important ‘why us’ or benefits page – making links more prominent to these pages will hopefully drive more traffic to them and increase the sales or leads coming from them.

Check the browser report for poor conversion rate performers
Your webpages can sometimes look slightly different or even break in some browsers (often due to small differences in how browsers show CSS code). This can unknowingly cause you many lost sales or leads.

To make sure this isn’t negatively impacting your website, you need to regular check the ‘Browser & OS’ report (found under ‘Audience > Technology) and make sure your conversion rates aren’t much lower for any browsers. If you see ones on this report that are much lower, you should go ahead and check for technical problems like CSS rendering issues and fix them immediately.

Check your ecommerce product performance report for poor converting products

If you have an ecommerce website it’s essential to see if any of your products are converting worse than others. Once you know which ones are doing worse you can focus optimizing those first. For example maybe one of your top products isn’t converting very well which makes you realize there might be some key information missing on it. To find this open up your ‘Product Performance’ report under the ‘Ecommerce’ tab, and the look for the ‘Buy-to-Detail Rate’ which is really the conversion rate (it’s based on product views divided by purchases).

Need help analysing Google Analytics reports for insights?

If you don’t have time or the skills to gain insights from your Google Analytics reports check out my ‘Google Analytics Insights’ service.