Same traffic, 21% more orders

The situation

We were paying good money to get people to the site. Traffic was strong. But 96.6% of visitors left without buying.

That's a lot of wasted ad spend.

The conversion rate had been stuck at 3.4% for ages. Small tweaks here and there hadn't moved the needle. We needed a proper testing programme, not guesswork.

What I did

I built an ongoing CRO testing programme from scratch.

First, I set up VWO for A/B testing and Hotjar for heatmaps and session recordings. The combination let me see what people actually did on the site, not just what I assumed they did.

Then I created a testing backlog. Every hypothesis went in. Every team suggestion. Every customer complaint that might point to friction.

Over 18 months, I ran 50+ tests across both desktop and mobile. Some won. Some lost. A few surprised me completely.

The key was discipline. One test at a time. Proper sample sizes. Statistical significance before calling anything.

What made it work

The biggest wins came from content pages, not the checkout.

Most CRO programmes obsess over button colours and form fields. I found more value earlier in the process. The pages where people were still deciding whether to trust us.

Heatmaps showed where attention dropped off. Session recordings revealed confusion I'd never have spotted otherwise. One page had visitors scrolling past the call-to-action three times before finding it.

The compound effect matters too. No single test transformed the business. But 50+ small improvements stacked up. A 3% lift here. A 5% lift there. It adds up.

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.