The Conversion Rate Optimisation Audit, Step by Step

A conversion rate optimisation audit is the highest leverage 90 minute exercise a founder can run on their own business. It will surface revenue you are leaving on the table today, point at where to spend the next quarter's CRO budget, and almost always pay for itself before the audit is finished.

This post is the practical version. Eight audit areas, each one explained in plain English, then a sub guide for D2C ecommerce brands and a separate sub guide for B2B brands selling through distributors. Take the audit at face value and run it on your own site this weekend.

If you want the founder friendly definition of CRO and where it sits inside the wider marketing stack, start with What Is Conversion Rate Optimisation, Really. If you want the service offer, the full menu is on the CRO service page.

How to use this audit

Block out two hours. Open your site, your analytics platform, your session recording tool and a notebook. For each of the eight areas, score yourself out of ten and write the single biggest finding. At the end you will have a one page audit summary that sets your CRO priorities for the next quarter.

If you are running this as a team exercise, get a sales person, a customer service lead and a developer in the room. They will catch things the marketing team will miss. We have run this exact format with everyone from £500,000 turnover D2C founders to £200 million B2B leadership teams. The output is the same shape: a small number of obvious wins, ranked by effort versus return.

Audit area 1: site speed and core web vitals

The fastest way to lose conversion is to be slow. Every additional second of load time reduces ecommerce conversion by between 4 and 11 percent depending on category. B2B lead forms see similar drop off.

What to inspect.

Run PageSpeed Insights on your home page, top category page, top product or service page, key blog post and primary conversion form. Capture Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift and Interaction to Next Paint scores on both mobile and desktop. Note any score below "good".

Then look at perceived speed. Open the site on a mid range Android phone with throttled 4G. The lab numbers tell you what the test thinks. The phone tells you what the customer feels.

D2C ecommerce sub guide. Image weight is almost always the culprit on Shopify, BigCommerce or WooCommerce sites. Convert hero images to WebP, lazy load anything below the fold, and audit any third party app for render blocking scripts. Trinity Audio, marketing pixels and chat widgets are the usual suspects. Cutting render blocking JavaScript by 30 percent is a regular early CRO win.

B2B sub guide. Heavy hero videos, gated PDF previews and account based marketing scripts often slow the home page. Replace autoplay video with a lightweight poster image and a click to play. Move marketing pixels to load asynchronously. If your site is built on a heavy CMS like Sitecore or AEM, a static front end with progressive hydration is often the right architectural answer.

Audit area 2: mobile experience

Mobile is the majority of traffic for most categories now. Mobile is also where most CRO audits find the largest leaks, because so much desktop first design carries over uncritically.

What to inspect.

Open the site on the phone you actually use. Walk through home, category, product, cart, checkout (or home, services, lead form, thank you for B2B). Note every friction. Tap targets too small. Modals that cover the call to action. Forms that scroll under the keyboard. Sticky headers that swallow the screen.

Then look at the mobile conversion gap in your analytics. The gap between mobile and desktop conversion rate should be under 30 percent on a healthy site. If it is over 50 percent, the mobile experience is bleeding money.

D2C ecommerce sub guide. Mobile product galleries, mobile size selectors and mobile add to cart placement are the three highest leverage surfaces. Make the gallery swipeable, the size selector tap friendly, and the add to cart sticky on scroll. Most Shopify themes ship with poor defaults here.

B2B sub guide. The most common mobile leak in B2B is forms. Long forms, autocomplete fights, autofill mismatches with CRM field requirements and validation errors that scroll out of view. Cut the lead form to the minimum required fields, enable mobile autofill correctly, and surface validation errors next to the offending field rather than at the top of the form.

Audit area 3: clarity of wedge and value proposition

If a stranger lands on your home page or top service page and cannot answer "what is this and why should I care" inside five seconds, the brand strategy is hiding from the visitor.

What to inspect.

Show the home page above the fold to five strangers. Give them five seconds. Then ask them what the brand does, who it is for, and why it is different. If three of the five fluff one of those questions, the wedge needs to come further forward.

Then check the next three highest traffic pages for the same clarity test. Wedge, audience, differentiation, all visible without scroll.

D2C ecommerce sub guide. A category page that looks the same as five competitors will lose. The category page hero, the filter language, and the product card design should all carry one identifiable distinctive element. We have helped clients claim a category in their visitor's memory by changing the copy of a single hero block.

B2B sub guide. The wedge appears on the home page, the about page, and every service page. Most B2B sites bury it under a navigation full of feature names. Move the wedge to the H1. Move the proof under it. Move the call to action above the fold on mobile.

Audit area 4: trust signals

Trust is what makes a transaction possible. The lower the trust, the higher the friction, the lower the conversion. Trust signals are the cheapest gain in any audit.

What to inspect.

Count the trust signals on your home page, top product or service page, and conversion page. Trust signals include star ratings, review counts, named customer logos, named press logos, security badges, returns and guarantee statements, named team photos, awards, certifications and visible founder presence.

Then walk through whether each signal is true, current, and verifiable. Out of date logos and stale claims do more damage than no signals at all.

D2C ecommerce sub guide. Reviews are the trust currency. If you do not have an integrated review platform like Yotpo, Okendo, Reviews.io or Trustpilot, install one this week. Surface star ratings on category pages, product pages and the cart. Photograph the founder and the team and put the photographs in the about and post purchase email.

B2B sub guide. Named customer logos beat unnamed testimonials, every time. Case studies with named customers, named contacts and quantified results outperform generic case studies by a margin we see on every audit. Industry accreditations belong in the footer and on every service page, not buried in a separate compliance section.

Audit area 5: customer voice and friction

Your customers will tell you exactly where the conversion friction is, in their own words, if you let them. Most brands do not let them.

What to inspect.

Read 50 of your most recent customer reviews, support tickets and abandoned cart survey responses. Highlight every word and phrase about price, delivery, sizing, fit, returns, product information, payment, registration, complexity, comparison and trust. Group by theme. Count.

Then map the top five themes back to the surfaces of the site they relate to. Most "operational" complaints are actually surface level CRO problems hiding in the wrong department.

D2C ecommerce sub guide. Run an exit survey on the cart and on the product detail page. Use a tool like Hotjar or KnoCommerce. Three questions, one of which is "what nearly stopped you completing this order today". The answers will rewrite next quarter's roadmap.

B2B sub guide. Read the sales call transcripts (use Gong, Granola or Fireflies if you have them). Pull the verbatim objections that come up in the first three minutes of discovery calls. These are the objections your service pages should answer before the prospect ever picks up the phone. The most common pattern we see is that the website is selling a different product to the one the prospect wants to buy.

Audit area 6: forms and checkout

Forms and checkouts are where conversion actually happens. They are also where most sites are over engineered.

What to inspect.

For ecommerce, walk the full checkout on mobile and desktop. Count the steps. Count the form fields. Note every distraction (cross sells, banners, exit modals, surveys). Note every error state you can trigger. Time the journey from product detail page to thank you page on a stopwatch. Compare to your top two competitors.

For B2B, do the same with your primary lead form, demo request, trade application or sign up flow. Count fields. Note required fields that should not be required. Test autofill. Test validation. Submit a deliberate failure and watch how the form behaves.

D2C ecommerce sub guide. Offer guest checkout. Offer Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal. Show shipping cost and tax before the customer reaches checkout. Pre apply discount codes from referring URLs. Reduce form fields to the minimum the platform allows. Add returns and shipping reassurance text near the pay button. Each of those is a small change with measurable lift.

B2B sub guide. Cut the lead form to the absolute minimum, every time. Most B2B forms can lose 30 to 50 percent of their fields without losing lead quality. Use progressive profiling to capture additional information after the first conversion. For trade and distributor application forms, replace open ended questions with structured options wherever possible to reduce abandonment. Send the thank you confirmation to a properly written page, not a generic success modal; the thank you page is a conversion surface in its own right.

Audit area 7: product or service page depth

The product detail page in ecommerce, and the service page in B2B, is where most of the buying decision happens. Most sites under invest here.

What to inspect.

For each top product or service page, check that it answers the buyer's question stack in order. What is it. Who is it for. What problem does it solve. What proof is there. How does it compare. How does it work. What does it cost. How do I get it. What if it goes wrong.

If any of those answers is missing, the page is leaking.

D2C ecommerce sub guide. Add a sticky add to cart on mobile. Add a returns and shipping panel on the page itself, not behind a modal. Surface the top three reviews above the fold on mobile. Add a "frequently bought with" section that suggests genuinely complementary products, not random upsells. Use video where the product benefits from it. Surface user generated content if you have it; it converts almost universally.

B2B sub guide. Restructure each service page around the buyer's questions in the order they ask them. Add a named human, with a photograph and a direct line, somewhere on the page. Add a downloadable one pager that the buyer can email internally to other decision makers (B2B is multi stakeholder by default and most sites ignore that). Add the FAQ. Add the case studies. Add the proof.

Audit area 8: post conversion experience

CRO does not stop at the conversion. The post conversion journey shapes lifetime value, repeat rate and referral rate, all of which feed back into customer acquisition cost.

What to inspect.

After a purchase or a lead, what happens. Walk through the thank you page, the confirmation email, the shipping or follow up communication, the first 30 days. Note every moment that feels like a missed opportunity to deepen the relationship.

D2C ecommerce sub guide. The thank you page is real estate. Use it. Add a referral code, a pre arrival education sequence, a returns reassurance message. The first three transactional emails (order, dispatch, delivery) are the highest open rate emails the customer will ever receive. Most brands send them flat. Add personality. Add the founder voice. Add the next product nudge. Add a survey that feeds future CRO work.

B2B sub guide. The thank you page should pre frame the first sales call. Tell the prospect what to expect, who they will meet, what to bring. Send a calendar invite with a personal video from the named contact. The first 30 days of the post lead journey is where deals are won or lost; build it deliberately, not by accident.

Compile your one page audit summary

For each of the eight areas you should now have a score and a finding. Drop them into this format.

AreaScore / 10Biggest findingEstimated impactSite speedMobile experienceClarity of wedgeTrust signalsCustomer voiceForms and checkoutPage depthPost conversion

Total your scores. Anything under 60 out of 80 is a programme that has serious leakage and a six to twelve month opportunity to recapture meaningful revenue. Anything between 60 and 70 is a good site that can still gain a third on conversion through structured work. Above 70 and the gains are smaller but the absolute value is usually still worth chasing because the site is already at scale.

Common audit findings we see again and again

Across the audits we run for clients, three findings appear in eight cases out of ten.

The product or service page is too shallow. Buyer questions go unanswered. Adding the missing answers, with proof, is usually the single highest impact change.

The mobile checkout has unnecessary friction. Multi step flows, hidden costs, missing express payment. Cleaning the checkout reliably moves conversion by 10 to 25 percent.

The customer voice has been ignored. The brand has 200 reviews and 500 support tickets full of friction signals, and the marketing team has read none of them. Reading them, then making the changes, is the single highest leverage half day a CRO programme can spend.

We have written about why these patterns repeat in Why CRO programmes fail. The short version is that audits get bought and never implemented. Implementation, not insight, is the bottleneck.

Where to take this next

If your audit surfaces obvious leaks and you have the team to fix them, get to work. If the audit surfaces leaks but the team is at capacity, that is the moment to bring in outside help. The Teylu CRO programme is designed to plug into in house teams without duplicating the work; we cover the model on the CRO service page.

If the audit reveals that the wedge itself is unclear (which happens regularly), CRO will not fix that on its own. Read The Ultimate Guide to Building a Brand Strategy in 2026 and start the brand work in parallel. Brand and CRO compound when they run together. They conflict when they run apart.

For more on the commercial maths, see CRO in fashion ecommerce: the 10.8 to 1 ROI multiplier most brands ignore.

FAQ

How long does a CRO audit take?

The DIY version above takes roughly two hours of focused work to score the eight areas. A professional audit takes between two and six weeks depending on traffic volume, sample sizes and complexity, and ends with a prioritised roadmap.

What does a professional CRO audit cost?

A standalone CRO audit from a credible agency usually costs between £6,000 and £20,000. Audits should always come with an implementation pathway, otherwise they are insight without action.

Can I run a CRO audit without analytics access?

Partially. The qualitative side (site walkthrough, customer voice, mobile experience) does not require analytics. The quantitative side (drop off rates, friction quantification, prioritisation) does. Get analytics access before you start if at all possible.

Should I audit before I redesign?

Yes. Most redesigns destroy as much conversion as they create because they are launched without baseline measurement and without learning from existing customer behaviour. Audit first, redesign with hypotheses, measure post launch.

What is the most common single audit finding?

Forms and checkout. Almost every site we audit has at least one fixable friction in the conversion flow that is worth more than 5 percent of conversion rate. Most sites have several.

Does a CRO audit help with SEO?

Yes, indirectly. Site speed, mobile experience and content depth are all factors Google rewards. A CRO audit that surfaces those issues will improve organic visibility as a side effect of fixing the conversion leaks.

Can a small brand benefit from CRO?

Yes. Small brands cannot afford to leak conversion. The audit itself is free if you run it yourself. The fixes are within reach for any brand willing to make them. Most early stage brands gain more from a thoughtful audit than from doubling their paid budget.

Read next

What Is Conversion Rate Optimisation, Really Conversion rate optimisation services from Teylu Why CRO programmes fail CRO in fashion ecommerce: the 10.8 to 1 ROI multiplier most brands ignore The Ultimate Guide to Building a Brand Strategy in 2026