Conversion Rate Optimisation Checklist 2026: 15 Points That Move the Number

Conversion rate optimisation is the practice of improving the percentage of visitors who take a desired action — filling in a form, making a purchase, booking a call. It does not require more traffic, more ad spend, or a complete website redesign.

It requires removing friction.

A site converting at 2% sends 98 out of every 100 visitors away without acting. Improving that to 4% doubles the output of your advertising budget without changing what you spend. That is not a theoretical scenario. It is what structured, methodical CRO work delivers on real business websites. The conversion design work we do for clients is built on the same 15 points in this checklist. We are publishing it because most conversion problems are predictable, and most businesses have not looked at all 15.

What conversion rate optimisation actually means

Your conversion rate is the number of conversions divided by the number of visitors, expressed as a percentage. If 1,000 people visit your site in a month and 30 submit a form, your conversion rate is 3%.

CRO is the work that moves that number. It is not guesswork. It is a structured process: measure what is happening, identify where visitors are dropping off, hypothesise why, test a change, measure again. Done properly, CRO compounds. A 0.5% improvement one month followed by another 0.5% the next does not feel dramatic. Over 12 months it is transformational.

The most important thing to understand about CRO is that it does not require more traffic. If your site is converting at 1.5% and the sector median is 4.8%, you are not a traffic problem. You are a friction problem. And friction problems are solvable.

Industry benchmarks: where do you stand?

Before you can judge whether your conversion rate needs work, you need a reference point. These figures come from Unbounce’s 2024 Conversion Benchmark Report, covering median conversion rates across landing pages in six sectors.

If you are significantly below your sector median, you have a structural problem — page speed, trust signals, form length, or CTA placement. If you are near the median, targeted improvements will move the number. If you are above it, you are in A/B testing territory: the gains are smaller and require more rigorous methodology to find.

The 15-point CRO checklist

Work through this list in order. The first items have the highest impact and lowest implementation cost. Later items require more effort but deliver compounding returns once the foundation is sound.

1. Page load speed. Check your Core Web Vitals in Google Search Console: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint (INP) under 200ms, Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) under 0.1. Every additional second of load time reduces conversions by approximately 7%. Mobile is the priority — most of your traffic arrives on phones, not desktops.
2. Above-the-fold CTA. Your primary call to action must be visible without scrolling on a mobile device. If a visitor has to search for what you want them to do, a significant percentage will not bother. This is one of the most common conversion failures we find in initial site audits.
3. Form length. HubSpot data shows forms over five fields lose 50% of completions. Each additional field reduces conversion by approximately 11%. For most lead-generation use cases, name, email, and one qualifying question are enough to start the conversation. The rest can be gathered on the first call.
4. Headline clarity. Your headline should communicate what you do in one sentence. “Award-winning digital solutions” tells a visitor nothing. “Google Ads management for Mallorca businesses” tells them exactly what you do, who you do it for, and immediately qualifies whether they are in the right place.
5. Social proof placement. Testimonials and reviews belong near your CTA, not buried on a separate page. A real name, a specific outcome, and a company name — positioned next to your contact form — reduce uncertainty at the moment of decision. Generic star ratings without context do very little.
6. Mobile UX. Test on actual devices, not just Chrome DevTools. Tap targets should be at least 44×44px. Text should be readable without pinch-to-zoom. Navigation should not require precise tapping on small elements. Mobile visitors will not persevere through poor UX — they will leave and try a competitor.
7. Trust signals. SSL certificate (visible padlock), a real phone number in the header, a physical address, and recent dated reviews. Each trust signal removes one reason not to convert. A business with no visible contact details or no reviews is asking for a level of trust it has not earned.
8. Image optimisation. Large unoptimised images are one of the most common causes of poor LCP scores. Compress images over 200KB, convert to WebP format where supported, and add descriptive alt text to every image. Alt text is both an accessibility requirement and a meaningful SEO signal for image-heavy pages.
9. Page structure. Use a clear H1→H2→H3 hierarchy. A visitor scanning your page should understand your core offer within ten seconds, without reading every word. If they cannot, you have a structure problem, not a copy problem. Restructuring often outperforms rewriting.
10. CTA copy. “Get a free quote” measurably outperforms “Submit”. “Book a 30-minute call” outperforms “Contact us”. Be specific about what happens after the click. Specificity reduces the anxiety of not knowing what comes next, which is one of the primary reasons visitors abandon forms.
11. Analytics and tracking. You cannot optimise what you cannot measure. Set up GA4 event tracking on every form submission, button click, and meaningful scroll depth before you start testing anything. Our tracking setup guide covers the full process in plain language.
12. Heat mapping and session recording. Tools like Microsoft Clarity (free) show where users click, where they stop scrolling, and where they abandon. This is where genuine CRO insight comes from — not assumptions or best practices, but recorded evidence of what real visitors actually do on your specific pages.
13. Internal linking. Link from high-traffic pages to your highest-converting pages. A visitor who arrived for one service should be able to discover related services without leaving the site. A single well-placed internal link from a relevant blog post can meaningfully increase conversions on a target page.
14. A/B testing discipline. Test one variable at a time. Changing the headline, CTA, and layout simultaneously means you cannot attribute any result to any specific change. Run tests until you reach statistical significance — generally at least 100 conversions per variant — not until you feel comfortable with the trend.
15. Exit intent and scroll triggers. A well-timed secondary CTA triggered when a visitor is about to leave recovers 3–8% of otherwise lost sessions. Use it sparingly — one secondary CTA per page maximum — and make the offer genuinely useful, not a repeated version of what is already on the page.

Quick wins vs. structural fixes

Not every CRO change requires a developer or a redesign. Some changes take 15 minutes and move the number immediately.

Quick wins (no developer required): Rewrite your form CTA button copy. Move a testimonial next to your contact form. Compress images over 200KB using a free tool like Squoosh. Add your phone number to the header. Remove non-essential fields from your inquiry form.

Structural fixes (developer required): Rebuild the page around a faster rendering framework. Redesign the mobile checkout or inquiry flow. Implement server-side rendering to improve LCP. Restructure your information architecture so the primary CTA is above the fold on mobile. These take longer and cost more, but deliver larger permanent lifts and cannot be achieved with copy changes alone.

The practical sequence: do the quick wins first. They cost almost nothing and often produce a measurable improvement within weeks. Use that data to make the business case for the structural work. Do not spend £10,000 redesigning a page before you know whether the headline is the actual problem.

A CRO case: Portals Properties

Portals Properties is a boutique real estate agency in Puerto Portals, Mallorca, specialising in property sales for UK buyers. When they came to us in Q4 2025, they were spending £6,200/month on Google Ads and generating around 28 qualified inquiries per month. Cost per qualified lead: £221.

The ads were structured reasonably well. The website was the problem.

Built in 2019. Core Web Vitals score: 42 on mobile. The property search required four clicks before a contact form appeared. The homepage hero was a stock image. The inquiry form had eleven fields, including three that asked the same question in different ways.

We rebuilt the site over eight weeks. The new site loads in under 1.5 seconds on mobile (Core Web Vitals: 91), surfaces a two-field inquiry form on every page, and replaces stock photography with the team’s own images. Every listing shows real sold prices and client testimonials, because Mallorca property buyers choose their agent as much as they choose the property.

After 14 weeks with the rebuilt site and our Google Ads management running together: qualified leads rose from 28 to 71 per month, cost per qualified lead dropped from £221 to £94. The advertising budget did not change. You can read the full rebuild story in our free website design post.

Every CRO checklist item above was applied to that rebuild. The LCP improvement alone recovered visitors who were abandoning before the page loaded. The form simplification (eleven fields down to two) recovered a large share of the visitors who were reaching the form but not completing it. The social proof placement reduced uncertainty for buyers who were comparison-shopping between agencies.

How to prioritise

Not all CRO work is equal. The standard prioritisation framework multiplies three factors: Potential impact (how many visitors does this page or step affect?), Confidence (how strong is the evidence that this change will help?), and Ease (how quickly can it be implemented and tested?).

In practice, the sequence is usually this: fix the page that drives the most traffic and conversions first. Start with changes you can make without a developer. Measure the result. Then move to structural changes once you have data that justifies the investment.

Most businesses have one or two pages that account for 70–80% of all conversions. Improving those pages by 1% has more impact than improving twenty secondary pages by 5% each. Find the highest-leverage page first and work down from there.

The goal is not perfection. It is a systematic process of small, measured improvements that compound over time. A 10% lift every quarter is a 46% annual improvement. That kind of gain does not come from one big redesign. It comes from the checklist above, applied methodically, month after month. See our client results or talk to us about running CRO on your site.

Need help with this?

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