The situation

We were spending decent money getting people to the site. The traffic was there. But most visitors left without buying anything.

The conversion rate had been stuck at 3.4% for as long as anyone could remember. People had tried the odd tweak — change a button colour here, move something there — but nothing really shifted it.

I wanted to find out why people weren't buying. Not guess. Actually find out.

What I did

Set up VWO for running tests and Hotjar so I could actually watch what people did. That second one changed everything. You can guess why people aren't buying all day long, but watching real sessions shows you things you'd never think of.

I kept a list of everything worth testing. Ideas from the team, things I noticed in session recordings, patterns in customer service complaints. Anything that might be getting in people's way.

Over 18 months I ran 50+ tests. Desktop and mobile. Some worked, most didn't. A few results genuinely surprised me.

The boring bit is discipline. You can't test everything at once. You need enough people to go through each version before you know if it actually worked. No shortcuts.

What made it work

The biggest wins were not where I expected.

Everyone obsesses over the checkout. Button colours. Form fields. But I found most of the opportunities earlier in the journey — on the pages where people were still making up their minds.

One page had visitors scrolling past the buy button three times before noticing it. Only knew that because I watched the recordings. Would never have guessed it.

No single test was a revelation. But 50 small improvements stack up. A 3% lift here, 5% there. After 18 months, the numbers looked very different.

Results

Conversion rate up from 3.4% to 4.1% across the site
21% more orders from the same traffic
50+ tests completed over 18 months
Zero extra ad spend required to get the lift
Ongoing programme that keeps finding opportunities

That 0.7 percentage point improvement sounds small. But applied to thousands of daily visitors, it meant thousands of extra orders per year.

Same traffic. Same products. Same prices. Just a better experience for visitors who were already interested.