Conversion Rate Optimization

---
name: conversion-rate-optimization
description: Improve the proportion of visitors who take the desired action, through evidence about where they drop rather than opinions about design. Use when traffic is adequate and conversion is not.
---

# Conversion rate optimization

Improving conversion is cheaper than buying more traffic, and most of
the gain comes from removing friction rather than from persuasion. The
discipline is finding where people actually stop instead of debating
button colours.

## Method

1. **Map the funnel and find the largest drop.** Optimising a step that
   loses five percent while another loses sixty is wasted effort (see
   funnel-analysis).
2. **Watch real sessions before hypothesising.** Recordings and
   heatmaps show the confusion that analytics only counts.
3. **Remove friction first.** Fewer form fields, no forced account
   creation, and clear pricing usually beat any copy change (see
   form-handling).
4. **Make the next action obvious.** One primary action per screen, and
   competing calls to action reduce total conversion.
5. **Address objections at the point of hesitation.** Pricing questions,
   security, and cancellation terms answered where the doubt occurs
   rather than on a separate page.
6. **Test one change at a time with enough traffic.** Underpowered tests
   produce confident noise, and calling them early is the most common
   error (see ab-test-design).
7. **Verify the conversion is real.** A signup increase that produces no
   activation is optimisation of the wrong number (see user-activation).

## Boundaries

Optimisation improves an existing funnel; it cannot fix a product nobody
wants or traffic that was never qualified. Gains are incremental and
compound slowly. Persuasion techniques that mislead convert once and
generate refunds and complaints.