What CRO strategies actually move the conversion needle?

[Yimeys]

I've been hearing people talk about CRO for years, but I've never really moved beyond the basics. Someone I met online who does something very similar to what I do has started focusing seriously on conversion rate optimization and has apparently seen some impressive results. That got me wondering whether I'm missing something.

I understand the general idea: set everything up properly, run A/B tests, and experiment with different copy, images, layouts, CTAs, and so on. But I'm more interested in how people approach CRO in practice. What tools do you use? Are there particular strategies or types of tests that consistently work well? How do you decide what to test in the first place?

I'd also be interested in any good courses, resources, or people worth following if I want to move beyond the basics and really understand CRO.

I'd love to hear what's worked for you, especially if you've achieved significant improvements rather than just small percentage gains.

 

[nienow]

The biggest thing I'd suggest is not starting with A/B tests. First, identify where people are actually getting stuck.

Start by looking at your analytics and funnel, then use tools like heatmaps and session recordings to understand what visitors are doing. Once you understand the problem, form a hypothesis and test it.

Otherwise, it's easy to spend months testing button colors and headline variations without learning much.

 

[sarabrett]

+1 to this. CRO is about much more than split testing, so I'd look at the entire journey. Where are people landing? What do they see first? What questions might they have? Where do they hesitate or leave? Unclear messaging, friction in forms, a lack of trust, or a weak value proposition can have a much bigger impact than changing an image.

I'd keep the tools simple at first: analytics, session recordings or heatmaps, and an A/B testing platform are plenty. The quality of your hypotheses matters more than having 15 different CRO tools.

 

[gbraun]

There's one point on which you should be careful, namely copying the results that other people have achieved. Your friend may have discovered something that worked extremely well with their audience but wouldn't necessarily work with yours. Instead of viewing their results as a ready-made plan, you should see them as being inspirational.

You should also keep a record of each test, specifically noting what you believed would happen, why you thought that, what changes you made, and what actually happened. Once you've carried out several tests, you begin to develop your own understanding of what your audience responds to.

By the way, what kind of website or business are you working on? The advice would then be much more specific.