Your complete conversion rate optimisation checklist

The fastest way to lift conversions is to fix measurement first, then remove checkout friction, then improve page speed. Start there. Crazy Egg’s CRO checklist and the Notion e-commerce CRO template (which aggregates 280+ optimisation ideas) give you a ready-made audit you can copy and work through in a single sprint. Here is the compact workflow to follow right now:

• Fix GA4 tracking — confirm conversion events are firing and funnel steps are mapped.
• Check checkout transparency — show VAT-inclusive prices, shipping costs and delivery times before the payment screen.
• Run a Core Web Vitals check — a failing Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) score costs you mobile conversions every hour.
• Install a heatmap on your highest-traffic landing page — Hotjar or Crazy Egg will show you where attention drops within 48 hours.
• Set up a cart-abandonment email — a timed recovery sequence is one of the highest-ROI quick wins in e-commerce.
• Download the printable checklist — the Notion template linked above lets your team assign owners and track progress across sprints.

Behaviour.digital’s UK benchmark data puts the Great Britain average e-commerce conversion rate at 3.4%, with a median of 2.35%.

Key takeaways

A conversion rate optimisation checklist works best when you follow the sequence: fix measurement, remove checkout friction, improve page speed, then run structured experiments.

Table of Contents

What does a conversion rate optimisation checklist cover?

A conversion rate optimisation checklist (CRO checklist) is a structured audit tool that walks you through every layer of your website — analytics, UX, checkout, performance and experimentation — so you can find and fix the leaks that stop visitors from converting. The industry term is conversion rate optimisation (CRO), and a well-built checklist is how you turn a vague ambition to “increase conversions” into a prioritised task list with owners and deadlines.

The sections below follow the sequence we recommend: measure first, research second, fix pages third, then experiment, personalise and optimise technically. Each section ends with a checklist you can copy into Notion or print.

How to set goals, KPIs and analytics so your tests mean something

Every CRO strategy collapses without reliable data. Before you change a single button colour, confirm your measurement layer is solid.

Define your conversion events

Identify your primary conversion (purchase, lead form, booking) and at least three micro-conversions: add-to-cart, email sign-up, product page scroll depth, and video play are the most diagnostic. Micro-conversions let you spot problems before they show up in revenue figures, and they give you enough volume to run meaningful tests on lower-traffic pages.

GA4 and GTM setup checklist

• Confirm GA4 is installed via Google Tag Manager (GTM), not a legacy Universal Analytics tag.
• Verify that purchase, lead and key engagement events are firing in GA4’s DebugView before going live.
• Set up cross-domain tracking if your checkout lives on a subdomain or third-party payment page.
• Check attribution windows: GA4 defaults to a 30-day last-click model, which may undercount assisted channels.
• Create an Explorations funnel report mapping the steps from landing page to conversion, segmented by traffic source, device and campaign.

IRP Commerce’s June 2026 data records an average UK e-commerce conversion rate of 2.03%, up from 1.85% in June 2025. Use that as a directional benchmark, but always compare against your own category baseline. Whito’s UK research recommends triggering a full audit whenever your CVR falls materially below 1.5%.

Pro Tip: Stage all new GTM tags in a test environment and use GA4’s DebugView alongside a real device to confirm events fire correctly before publishing. A broken conversion tag invalidates every test you run on top of it.

For a broader introduction to analytics, our guide on why web analytics matter for business owners covers the fundamentals without the jargon.

How to gather the research that actually drives better tests

Changing pages based on gut feeling is expensive. Research-led CRO means you know why something is broken before you decide how to fix it.

The research methods to run first

1. Heatmaps (Hotjar, Crazy Egg, Lucky Orange) — record click, move and scroll data on your top five pages. Look for rage-clicks, ignored CTAs and scroll-depth cliffs.
2. Session recordings — filter for sessions where users reached the cart but did not complete checkout. Watch 20–30 recordings before drawing conclusions.
3. Funnel analytics in GA4 — identify the step with the highest drop-off rate. That step is your first test candidate.
4. On-site surveys — a single-question exit survey (“What stopped you completing your purchase today?”) surfaces objections that no heatmap can show.
5. Customer interviews — five to eight interviews with recent buyers reveal the language they use to describe your product, which feeds directly into headline copy.
6. Scroll-depth reports — confirm whether users are reaching your primary CTA at all before you redesign it.

Filtering sessions for diagnostic patterns

Raw session data is noisy. Filter by traffic source (paid vs organic), device (mobile vs desktop) and session length (under 10 seconds vs over 60 seconds) to isolate the cohorts with the worst conversion behaviour. A mobile user arriving from a paid ad who bounces in eight seconds is a different problem from a desktop user who spends three minutes on a product page and then leaves.

Lucky Orange’s CRO checklist covers checkout flow validation and social proof placement in detail — worth reviewing alongside your session recordings to know what to look for. Qualitative tools like session recordings expose behavioural signals that aggregated analytics simply cannot surface on their own.

Pro Tip: For qualitative work, aim for at least 100 sessions per page variant before drawing conclusions from heatmaps. Fewer sessions produce patterns that look meaningful but are statistical noise.

What should every landing page include to convert visitors?

A page audit is not about aesthetics. It is about whether every element earns its place by moving a visitor closer to converting.

Hero area and value proposition

Your hero section has roughly three seconds to answer: “What is this, who is it for, and why should I care?” One clear headline, one supporting subhead and one primary CTA button. Social proof (a review count, a trust badge, a named client logo) placed within the hero area consistently outperforms the same element placed lower on the page.

• Headline: matches the ad or search query that brought the visitor. Mismatched messaging is one of the most common and most fixable conversion leaks.
• Value proposition: one sentence, benefit-led, specific. “Free next-day delivery on orders over £30” beats “Quality products at great prices” every time.
• CTA button: single action, high-contrast colour, above the fold on mobile.

Headlines, scannability and copy

Visitors scan before they read. Use subheads every 150–200 words, short paragraphs and bullet points to make the page skimmable. Storytelling in product copy — a brief narrative about the problem the product solves — tends to hold attention longer than a feature list. Search Engine Watch notes that narrative-driven content drives higher engagement than purely informational copy, a principle that applies directly to product descriptions and landing page body text.

Trust signals and accessibility

• Display star ratings and review counts near the primary CTA, not just at the bottom of the page.
• Show delivery timescales and return policy in the hero or just below it.
• Add ARIA labels to all interactive elements and confirm keyboard navigation works end-to-end.
• Test colour contrast ratios against WCAG 2.1 AA standards (minimum 4.5:1 for body text).

Pro Tip: Run your top landing page through Google’s PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse accessibility audit before any design changes. You will often find quick wins that cost nothing to fix.

For deeper guidance on landing page structure, our article on the role of landing pages in driving conversions walks through the key elements in detail. For CTA best practice, this partner guide on CTA importance covers the mechanics of what makes a call to action work.

How to reduce friction in your product pages, cart and checkout

Cart abandonment is where most e-commerce revenue disappears. The fixes here tend to have the fastest measurable impact of anything in this checklist.

Product page checklist

• Show at least four high-quality images per product, including one lifestyle shot and one showing scale.
• Display VAT-inclusive pricing clearly. UK shoppers expect to see the price they will pay, not a pre-tax figure.
• Show estimated delivery date (not just “3–5 working days”) and return policy on the product page itself.
• Include product recommendations (“customers also bought”) below the fold to increase average order value.
• Make variant selection (size, colour) clear and flag out-of-stock variants immediately rather than letting users discover the problem at checkout.

Cart and checkout audit

1. Offer guest checkout. Forcing account creation before purchase is one of the most well-documented causes of checkout abandonment.
2. Reduce form fields to the minimum: name, email, delivery address, payment. Every additional field reduces completion rate.
3. Use inline validation so errors appear as users type, not after they submit.
4. Show the full order total (including VAT and shipping) before the payment screen.
5. Offer Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) options and one-tap wallet payments (Apple Pay, Google Pay) — particularly important for mobile users.
6. Display security badges and payment provider logos near the payment button.

Cart recovery tactics

A timed email sequence (first email at one hour, second at 24 hours, third at 72 hours with a small incentive) is the highest-ROI cart recovery method for most UK e-commerce stores. On-site, a timed popup or exit-intent offer can recover a portion of abandoning visitors before they leave. Wisepops’ 24-point CRO checklist covers onsite messaging tactics including exit offers and urgency messaging in practical detail.

For mobile specifically, test your checkout on real devices. Viewport issues, small tap targets and poorly formatted address fields create a friction tax that desktop testing never reveals.

How to design and run A/B tests that produce reliable results

An A/B testing checklist is only useful if the tests it produces are trustworthy. Most failed CRO programmes fail because of measurement errors, not bad ideas.

Hypothesis and commercial framing

Write every hypothesis in this format: “Because [research finding], changing [element] to [variant] will increase [metric] by approximately [X%] for [audience segment].” The commercial impact estimate forces you to prioritise tests worth running.

Sample size and duration guidance

1. Use a sample-size calculator (AB Testguide or Evan Miller’s tool) before starting any test. Input your current conversion rate, minimum detectable effect (typically 10–20%) and desired statistical confidence (95%).
2. Run tests for a minimum of two full business cycles (usually two weeks) to account for day-of-week variation.
3. Do not stop a test early because it looks positive. Early stopping inflates false-positive rates significantly.
4. Aim for at least 100 conversions per variant before drawing conclusions.

Pro Tip: A null result is not a failed test. It tells you the change did not matter to users, which is valuable. Document every null result with the hypothesis and data so future tests build on it rather than repeat it.

Lucky Orange’s validation guidance recommends a QA checklist before every test goes live: confirm tracking fires on both control and variant, check rendering on iOS Safari and Android Chrome, and submit a test form submission to verify the conversion event records correctly.

Most UK e-commerce sites benefit most from server-side testing on checkout pages (where client-side scripts can interfere with payment flows) and client-side testing on landing pages and PDPs. For practical CRO tactics that complement your testing programme, this partner resource on conversion rate optimisation tips is worth bookmarking.

How to use personalisation and onsite campaigns without annoying your visitors

Personalisation lifts conversions when it is relevant and timely. It damages trust when it feels intrusive or manipulative.

Segmentation examples that work

• Returning visitors: show a “welcome back” message with their last-viewed products.
• Cart abandoners (returning): surface a reminder of the items they left, with delivery reassurance.
• High-intent search arrivals: visitors arriving from branded or high-intent queries deserve a landing page that matches their specific intent, not a generic homepage.

Campaign types and appropriate use

• Timed popups: trigger after 30–45 seconds on page or after 50% scroll depth, not on page load.
• Exit-intent offers: a discount or free delivery offer triggered as the cursor moves toward the browser tab can recover 5–10% of abandoning visitors, though overuse trains visitors to expect discounts.
• Product recommendations: algorithm-driven recommendations (“frequently bought together”) work best on cart and post-purchase pages.
• Urgency messaging: “Only 3 left in stock” is legitimate when true. Fake countdown timers erode trust with UK shoppers, who are increasingly sceptical of manufactured scarcity.

Wisepops integrates directly with Shopify and allows segmented popup campaigns by referral source, cart value and visit count, making it straightforward to run targeted onsite campaigns without developer resource.

UK privacy law requires explicit consent for cookies used in personalisation. Under UK GDPR and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR), you must obtain opt-in consent before placing non-essential tracking cookies. Legitimate interest is not a valid basis for behavioural advertising cookies. Keep data capture during tests to the minimum necessary and document your lawful basis for each tracking tool you deploy.

Does your site pass the technical performance checklist?

Technical performance is often the highest-impact CRO lever for mobile users, and it is frequently the most neglected.

Core Web Vitals targets

Paid landing pages should hit “Good” thresholds across all three. A failing LCP on a PPC landing page means you are paying for clicks that bounce before the page loads.

Technical audit checklist

• Convert images to WebP or AVIF format and implement lazy loading for below-the-fold images.
• Set explicit width and height attributes on all images to prevent layout shift (CLS).
• Enable browser caching and use a CDN to reduce Time to First Byte (TTFB) for UK visitors.
• Minify CSS, JavaScript and HTML; defer non-critical scripts.
• Test on real mobile devices, not just Chrome DevTools emulation. Check one-tap payment flows (Apple Pay, Google Pay) work end-to-end on iOS and Android.
• Confirm viewport meta tag is set correctly and that no horizontal scrolling occurs on any screen width below 375px.

Tools to use: Google PageSpeed Insights, Chrome DevTools Lighthouse, WebPageTest, and GTmetrix for ongoing monitoring.

How to score and sequence your CRO improvements

Having a long list of potential improvements is not a plan. Scoring and sequencing turns a backlog into a 90-day roadmap.

ICE and PIE scoring frameworks

Both frameworks score each potential test on three dimensions, then rank by total score:

• ICE: Impact (how much will this move the needle?), Confidence (how sure are we it will work?), Ease (how quickly can we build and run it?). Score each 1–10, divide by 3.
• PIE: Potential (how much room for improvement?), Importance (how much traffic or revenue does this page handle?), Ease. Same scoring method.

PIE tends to favour high-traffic pages; ICE tends to surface quick wins. Use PIE for quarterly planning and ICE for sprint-level prioritisation.

A worked example

1. Measurement fix (broken GA4 purchase event): Impact 9, Confidence 10, Ease 8. ICE score: 9.0. Fix this week — without it, nothing else is measurable.
2. Checkout transparency (add VAT-inclusive total before payment screen): Impact 8, Confidence 8, Ease 7. ICE score: 7.7. Schedule for sprint one.
3. PDP imagery (add lifestyle photography and scale reference): Impact 7, Confidence 6, Ease 5. ICE score: 6.0. Plan for sprint two with a proper A/B test.

Sample 90-day roadmap structure

Keep an experiment log with columns for hypothesis, start date, sample size, result and next action. Whito’s UK benchmark guidance recommends reviewing your CVR against category baselines at the end of each 30-day phase to confirm the roadmap is moving in the right direction. For a broader view of how audits connect to ROI, our article on getting a return on your website investment is a useful companion read.

Where to get the downloadable checklist and which tools to use

The Notion e-commerce CRO template is the fastest way to operationalise this checklist. Duplicate it into your workspace, assign an owner to each task, and set a due date. The template’s 280+ ideas are organised by category, so you can filter to the sections most relevant to your current sprint.

How to run your first week

1. Duplicate the Notion template and share it with your marketing and development leads.
2. Complete the measurement checklist (Section 2 above) on day one.
3. Install Hotjar or Crazy Egg on your top three pages and let data collect for five to seven days.
4. Run the technical checklist using PageSpeed Insights on day two.
5. At the end of the week, score your backlog using ICE and assign the top three items to sprint one.

UK-available tools: quick reference

• GA4 + GTM — free; the foundation of every measurement setup.
• Hotjar — heatmaps, session recordings and surveys; free tier available, paid plans from £32/month.
• Crazy Egg — heatmaps and A/B testing; plans start at approximately £24/month.
• Lucky Orange — session recordings and live chat; free tier available.
• Wisepops — onsite campaigns and popups; Shopify-native integration.
• Notion — checklist and experiment log template; free tier covers most team needs.

How MB Web runs a CRO audit

Our audit process at MB Web follows six stages, each with a defined deliverable so clients always know where they are and what comes next.

The MB Web audit workflow

1. Discovery — we review your analytics setup, business goals and existing data to define the audit scope.
2. Measurement audit — we check GA4 configuration, GTM tags, conversion events and attribution. Broken tracking is fixed before any tests are designed.
3. Behavioural research — we install heatmaps and session recordings, run a technical performance audit and review any existing customer feedback.
4. Test plan — we score the backlog using ICE, produce a prioritised roadmap and write hypotheses for the first three tests.
5. Delivery — we implement fixes and build test variants, with QA on all target devices before launch.
6. Review — we analyse results, document learnings and update the roadmap for the next sprint.

Clients receive a prioritised roadmap, an experiment log and remediation tickets for the development team. Nothing is left as a vague recommendation.

A well-run CRO audit does not just find problems. It gives your team a shared language for prioritising them — and that shared language is often what separates sites that improve steadily from those that stay stuck.

Pro Tip: Start every audit with the measurement layer, not the design layer. Fix the data first, then decide what to test.

Our free website audit is a good starting point if you want an independent view of where your site stands before committing to a full CRO programme. We also have a detailed guide on why website audits matter if you want to understand what a thorough audit covers.

A note on where to start when resources are limited

Most UK marketing teams do not have the bandwidth to run a full CRO programme from day one. That is fine. The honest advice is to start with measurement, then checkout, then speed — in that order. If your GA4 is broken, nothing else you do is measurable. If your checkout hides shipping costs until the final screen, no amount of landing page work will compensate. And if your pages load slowly on mobile, you are losing visitors before they ever see your value proposition.

Micro-conversions are your friend when traffic volumes are low. Tracking add-to-cart rates and email sign-ups gives you enough data to make decisions on pages that might only see 50–100 purchases a month. Long-term, the sites that improve consistently are the ones that treat CRO as an ongoing programme rather than a one-off project. Quick wins fund the budget for longer experiments, and longer experiments produce the compounding gains.

MB Web’s CRO and web optimisation services

Running a CRO programme properly takes time, the right tools and someone who knows what to look for. MB Web offers CRO audits, A/B testing implementation, landing page optimisation and technical performance work for UK businesses. We are based in Lewes, East Sussex, and we work with local and national brands across Sussex, Surrey, Kent and the South East.

A typical engagement starts with a measurement audit and behavioural research phase (usually two to three weeks), followed by a prioritised roadmap and the first sprint of fixes and tests. We work on a project or retainer basis, and we will always tell you honestly what is worth doing and what is not. No inflated scopes, no unnecessary complexity.

If you want a team that will look at your site, tell you what is actually holding back conversions and help you fix it, get in touch with us or take a look at our website development services to see how we can help.

Sources

The following sources were used for benchmarks, tool references and checklist guidance in this article.

• The Ecommerce CRO Checklist: What to Test, What to Validate, and …
• Ecommerce Market Data and Ecommerce Benchmarks for June 2026
• UK website conversion rate benchmarks

UK benchmark reference

FAQ

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