Small Changes, Big Results: 17 Site Improvements That Work

Beyond site speed, solid UI, products that do what they say, and all the usual suspects — here are 17 high-impact CRO tests that stand out. If you’ve got a mobile app or SaaS product, many of these can be applied there, too.

Comparison Charts

As I’ll mention later in one of the tips, explaining things visually always goes further than just plain text. Most people don’t enjoy reading, so why force them to read when you’re trying to pitch someone to buy your product who already may have a low intent to purchase?

Part of building an empathetic brand experience is making sure that within the context your site visitor is in, they have all the necessary information to make an informed decision. It’s also on you to feed that information in a way that’s consumable and desirable. If you have paragraphs of text explaining what sets you apart, you’re not being empathetic to someone who just came to your site for the first time from an ad—they have no obligation to stay.

Comparison charts are one of my favorite empathy-first modules to incorporate. You can set them up in multiple different ways. Here are a few examples:

• Compare your product to your competitive category—like your brand’s ceremonial grade matcha to Coffee, Energy Drinks, etc.
• Compare your brands price or density to others (vs just comparing standard benefits/ingredients/features)—like on this David Protein PDP.
• Compare the convenience your product offers someone against them doing it the hard way—like on the homepage of MirrorMate.
• Animated comparison chart—like this one on Salud’s homepage. This combines another tip from later, talking about adding animation to the site.

Sales Associate Style Shop Section

Ever since I was a kid, I have been fascinated by the retail experience you get at Apple from their in-store associates. They don’t make commissions on products sold, like a store associate at other retail stores (which is why they’re so pushy), but they do still push customers to build themselves the perfect order. All of the positioning when an Apple Store employee is pushing something is rooted in its convenience and benefit to the customer, which is also the best way to sell online.

One of the easiest places to do this is in the Shop Section of your PDP—the area where people choose their variant (size, color, flavor, material) and the quantity. Most Shop modules are too plain and don’t provide enough information, requiring people to leave the PDP or even the brand’s website to get more information. That’s one problem to solve for.

The other is ensuring you’re pushing for bundles, promoting upsells, and marking what is the “Most Popular” or the “Customer Favorite” option. You’ve seen them before—the badges next to different variants. This PDP example does a good job showing all the ways to maximize that Shop module design. Adding badges like “Most Popular” or “New Customer Favorite” implies that multiple other people have made the purchase, tried it, and enjoyed it.

Use Custom/Branded Iconography

Whether you’re breaking down complex topics, explaining the features of your product/service, or simply using visuals to explain how your product works, leverage icons! If you don’t have the ability to have custom icons, then use a service like Flaticon to download icons and update the weighting/colors.

If you have the means, I recommend creating some custom iconography for your website. Not only does it add to the branded experience, making you feel more legit, but icons always look more trustworthy. To take it one step further, I would recommend animating the icons—yes, it does increase the conversion rate, surprisingly. Check out the custom icons and animated iconography on the MirrorMate website for inspiration.

Repositioned Copywriting

Most copywriting is focused on features—things that feel right to say when you’re talking about why the product is great in internal brand meetings. But that’s not necessarily what customers want to hear when making a purchase. They want to know how their life will improve and how your product fits into that.

A “Sugar-free, low-calorie rice cake” doesn’t sound as enticing as an “After-school snack that moms are proud to make,” right? The second one speaks to the persona likely making the purchase decision and creates a scenario in which the product is now relevant or easy to understand why it’s worth trying.

In a recent tweet, Dylan Ander of Heatmap.com even mentioned that when brands go for a “rebrand” of themselves, it’s mostly the UX and messaging/positioning of the copy that truly drives incremental gains. I agree—new/good design is excellent, but it’s hard to compete if you can’t make it easy to understand from a random person’s POV.

Bullet Points vs Fancy Copy

Similar to the above two points about icons and better positioning, I always recommend using bullet points for copy, instead of chunky paragraphs. There are some times on a Product Details Page(PDP) or an Our Story section where you need to have chunky blocks of text (this is where adding highlights or bolded text helps), but for most other cases, I am a heavy proponent of bullet points.

Why bullet points?

• They’re easier to read.
• They don’t look intimidating to someone.
• You get right to the point.
• People can skim and still get the gist.
• See how easy that was?

Cart Gamification

One of the most accessible places to drive a higher AOV (average order value) or UPT (units per transaction, aka items in cart) is by gamifying the checkout experience, starting with the cart.

• Have an empty cart? Show social proof (customer quote or show # of reviews), category blocks to drive people to collections pages, or feature a new customer offer/bundle.
• Have a consumable item in the cart? Make it easy to show someone they can subscribe and save $ by enabling a subscription.
• Have more than one product to sell on your site? Use the cart to upsell complementary products based on what items are in the cart. Sometimes, that’s adjacent collections, and sometimes, it’s just other popular flavors/variants.
• Set a free shipping threshold. This always drives up the AOV, as long as you’re within a reasonable range of the basket size you can build with your product lineup.
• Add free gift options at different cart thresholds. Once you get past free shipping, you can encourage people to add products to the cart so they unlock gifts. You can see this done on the True Classic website.
• Aren’t bullet points so great?

Empathetic Customer Journeys

As I mentioned earlier, building empathetic customer journeys, in my opinion, is one of the biggest levers you have when optimizing your website. I always sum it up like this—if you can help someone who’s ON the fence, get OVER the fence, with a purchase decision… that’s the biggest unlock.

Social Proof in all forms

Most websites don’t feature much social proof outside of customer reviews. Many times, these aren’t properly displayed or organized for easy consumption by a new customer’s POV. There are a few primary forms of social proof worth incorporating across different places in your website and even email flows:

• Customer reviews—highlighting them by benefit or reason of purchase.
• Influencer/Celebrity/SME (subject matter expert) content—this is generally very similar to any sort of creator content, but with the idea that this is someone with authority/influence/credentials to recommend the product. These can be people like Melissa Wood and Lauryn Evarts, or they can be SoulCycle instructors.
• Press quotes—Just as it sounds, featuring quotes from press outlets and publications on your site that talk about your product. Bonus points if you can specifically include the sentence or part of the review that speaks directly to the benefits you know drive the highest conversion.

Answer the five main LP questions

I talk about these five questions all the time, and truly, they should be answered everywhere—the website, landing pages, ad creative, advertorials, email flows, TV campaigns, etc. Here are the five questions:

1. What are you selling?
2. Why should I care?
3. How fast can I get it?
4. How will it make my life better?
5. How does this compare to other products on the market?

Add a promise or satisfaction guarantee

This is something I didn’t initially predict would move the needle that much, but it did… a lot! Adding something simple near your Add to Cart (ATC) button that includes some sort of a satisfaction guarantee increased ATC-rate by a lot.

It doesn’t have to be anything too fancy. Magic Spoon does a great job of it on their site, saying, “Try risk-free, 100% happiness guaranteed.” Their on-site refund policy states that if anyone is unhappy within 6 months of purchase, they can make a return. You’re likely already offering some sort of a return or refund policy, just make it visible and obvious on your PDP or landing page to instil customer confidence.

The Sound Bite Strategy

One of my favorite ways to write copy for a website is by understanding how people explain a brand or product to their friends. When you’re telling your friend about something you’re excited about, it tends to sound like a perfect sales pitch. They can turn into headlines, ad copy, or static ads.

On the David Protein site, a section reads, “75% of David’s calories come from protein. This is ~50% higher than any other bar.” It’s to the point, easy to understand, concise, and doesn’t feel salesy, but it makes me want to learn more.

Update your homepage banner

One of the most visited pieces of real estate on your site, is the above the fold site experience on your homepage. Unfortunately, most brands never take advantage of updating the messaging, graphics or format of it. You should make sure your homepage hero includes:

• A headline that makes it easy to understand your brand or what you’re selling and why.
• Visuals (photos and/or videos) that demonstrate the product in action. This should be a way that makes the product look desirable, delicious, sophisticated, and aspirational — don’t just put a product image with a white background.
• Social proof—at the very least, include review stars and a review count. If you can, include a small customer testimonial or a press quote (like the Jolie homepage example above).
• Sell the promise—make it easy (with bullet points) to understand, as a site visitor, what the product can do for them. You have to earn the scroll past the hero section, and enticing someone with what you have to offer is the best way to do it. You can’t expect someone to come to your homepage and then be motivated on their own to go browse the website.

Make the details easy to access

If you’ve run a beauty, food, supplement, or personal care product website before, you know that one of the most clicked elements of the website is the ingredients panel or nutrition label. What is included, what isn’t included, what allergens are present, how many servings are included, how many days the product will last, expiration dates (if applicable), how to store, how much sugar is in it, whether is it gluten-free, etc.

Despite how your internal company meetings might feel, these details are extremely important to people, and making it easy for people to understand all this information drives up your conversion rate and confidence.

Reposition Pricing

One of my favorite hacks for consumable products is to show the price per serving or price per use. A $29 daily immunity supplement can be written as “Less than $1 per day” to drive a higher conversion rate and let someone justify the purchase in their head. This also contributes to the sound-bite strategy I mentioned above.

Focus on Bundling

Bedding brands do this best. When most people come to a brand’s website, they don’t think they’re going to buy bundles. It’s up to the brand to properly position the bundles in a way that makes them a desirable purchase. You can do this with good imagery (showing how all the products work/look together), merchandising, pricing/offers, and empathetic website UX design.

Similarly, I recommend testing out Build Your Own Bundle pages on your site. Not only do they perform exceptionally well to existing customers (especially during sale periods), but they also perform high for new customers (especially when the brand is well known). They allow customers to feel like they’re choosing precisely what they want while also getting a discount.

Add claims if you have them

If you’re a brand that can make product claims, especially when your competitors can’t, make them loud and proud. And if you’ve conducted successful clinical trials, list those results loudly on your website. You can also get certifications on your product by getting third-party testing from a service like Light Labs.

Add more lifestyle imagery

Too often, brands just focus on using product renders or assets from a single photo shoot. Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words, so you want to sell the lifestyle you’re inviting someone to be a part of when they buy your product. Luxury and alcohol brands do this best (because with alcohol ads, you can’t show any consumption; it has to rely on the lifestyle and scenery of the ad).

The best part about modern-day consumer shopping is you don’t have to be the one to shoot and curate all these photos. Even incorporating pictures taken by creators or customers add to the brand’s overall vibe and personality.