More traffic is the fix most store owners reach for first. But if your store has a leak somewhere between the product page and the order confirmation, extra visitors just leak out faster. A conversion audit finds those leaks before you pay to fill the bucket.

This checklist is written for owners who don’t have an analyst or developer on hand. Work through it in order, write down what you find, and fix the biggest problems first.

Before you start: set a baseline

You can’t tell whether a change helped if you don’t know where you started. Before touching anything, collect four numbers for the last 30 to 90 days:

• Sessions (from Google Analytics 4 or whatever analytics you use)
• Orders (from WooCommerce → Orders or the Analytics section in WooCommerce)
• Conversion rate: orders divided by sessions
• Average order value: revenue divided by orders

Write these down with the date range. If you can, split them by device. Mobile and desktop often behave very differently, and a problem that only affects phones can hide inside a healthy-looking average.

A quick worked example

Say your store had 8,000 sessions and 96 orders last month. That’s a 1.2% conversion rate. Now split it:

Most of the traffic is on mobile, but mobile converts at well under half the desktop rate. That tells you where to spend your audit time. (These are hypothetical numbers; use your own.)

Section 1: Speed and stability

Slow pages lose people before they see a single product. Run your home page, a category page and a product page through Google PageSpeed Insights, which reports Core Web Vitals. Since March 2024, those metrics include Interaction to Next Paint (INP), which measures how quickly the page reacts when someone taps or clicks.

Checklist:

• [ ] Product and category pages load in a reasonable time on a mid-range phone over mobile data
• [ ] Images are compressed and sized for the space they fill
• [ ] Nothing jumps around as the page loads (layout shift from late-loading banners, fonts or ads)
• [ ] Buttons respond immediately to taps, especially Add to cart and variation selectors
• [ ] You’ve removed plugins you no longer use
• [ ] Your hosting plan matches your traffic, especially during promotions

Don’t chase a perfect score. Fix the obvious problems, like a 3MB hero image or a slider nobody interacts with, and move on.

Section 2: Navigation and search

Shoppers who can’t find a product can’t buy it.

• [ ] Main menu uses the words customers use, not internal category names
• [ ] Search is visible on mobile and returns sensible results for common product names and misspellings
• [ ] Category pages have filters that match how people shop (size, price, colour, material)
• [ ] Empty search results suggest alternatives instead of a blank page
• [ ] Breadcrumbs or clear back-navigation on product pages

Try this: ask a friend who has never used your store to find a specific product on their phone. Watch without helping. Where they hesitate is where your customers hesitate. Our guide to online store navigation for WooCommerce has more ideas.

Section 3: Product pages

This is where most buying decisions happen. Open your five best-selling products and five products that get traffic but rarely sell, and check each one against the list.

• [ ] Several clear photos, including scale and detail shots; zoom works on mobile
• [ ] Price, stock status and delivery time visible without scrolling on mobile
• [ ] Add to cart button stands out and is easy to tap
• [ ] Description answers the questions people email you about (sizes, materials, compatibility, care)
• [ ] Shipping cost or a free-shipping threshold is mentioned before checkout
• [ ] Returns policy is linked near the buy button
• [ ] Reviews are shown, including the less-than-perfect ones
• [ ] Variation selectors are clear, and unavailable options are marked

Compare your good sellers with your weak ones. The differences are often obvious once you look side by side: fewer photos, a thin description, a confusing variation picker. For a full breakdown of what belongs on the page, see our product page design anatomy.

Section 4: Cart

The cart is where people check the total. Surprises here cause exits.

• [ ] Shipping costs are estimated or clearly explained in the cart
• [ ] Coupon field doesn’t dominate the page (a large empty coupon box sends people off to search for codes)
• [ ] Easy to change quantity or remove items
• [ ] Clear “Proceed to checkout” button, visible on mobile without scrolling far
• [ ] Relevant cross-sells, if any, are genuinely related and don’t push the checkout button out of view
• [ ] A mini cart or cart notice confirms when something is added

Section 5: Checkout

Baymard Institute’s long-running research on cart abandonment puts the average documented rate at around 70%. Not all of that is fixable. Many people are just browsing or comparing. But checkout friction is a well-documented cause and one of the easiest to reduce.

• [ ] Guest checkout is allowed (WooCommerce → Settings → Accounts & Privacy)
• [ ] Only the fields you actually need are required
• [ ] The form works with mobile autofill and shows the right keyboard for email and phone fields
• [ ] Payment options fit your market, including a wallet option like Apple Pay or Google Pay if your payment gateway supports it
• [ ] Error messages are clear and appear next to the field with the problem
• [ ] Total cost, including tax and shipping, is visible before the final button
• [ ] No unexpected account creation step or forced newsletter signup

Place a real test order on your phone, from product page to confirmation email, every time you change something in the checkout. Our guide on customizing the WooCommerce checkout page covers the options if you need to remove fields or change the layout.

Section 6: Trust signals

First-time visitors don’t know you. Give them reasons to believe you’re real and fair.

• [ ] Contact details are easy to find: email, and ideally a physical address or phone number
• [ ] Shipping and returns policies are written in plain language
• [ ] An About page tells people who runs the store
• [ ] SSL is active across the whole site (padlock in the browser)
• [ ] Payment logos match the methods you actually accept
• [ ] Reviews or testimonials appear near purchase decisions, not just on a separate page

Section 7: Visitors who leave

Most visitors won’t buy on their first visit, whatever you do. The audit should also check whether you have any way to bring them back.

• [ ] An email signup offer that fits your store (not just “subscribe to our newsletter”)
• [ ] Abandoned cart emails set up and tested
• [ ] Exit-intent or time-based offers, if you use them, are targeted and not shown on every page
• [ ] Your welcome email goes out immediately after signup

This is where tools like iConvert Optimizer come in: exit-intent detection, abandoned cart recovery and product recommendations in one place. Many stores start with separate plugins for each, which is fine too. The important thing is that something is catching people on the way out.

Turning findings into a plan

By now you’ll have a list of problems. Don’t try to fix everything at once. Score each item on two scales from 1 to 3:

• Impact: how many visitors does it affect, and how close to the purchase is it?
• Effort: how long will it take you, and do you need outside help?

Then sort. High impact and low effort goes first. A checkout that forces account creation is high impact and usually a single setting. Redesigning your whole theme is high effort and can wait.

Make one or two changes at a time, note the date, and compare the next few weeks against your baseline. If traffic is high enough, run a proper A/B test; if it isn’t, a before-and-after comparison over a longer period is still better than guessing. Be aware that seasonality, promotions and ad spend changes will affect the numbers too.

Repeat the audit every quarter

A conversion audit isn’t a one-off. Plugins update, themes change, new products get added with thinner descriptions, and a setting someone changed during a sale never gets changed back. Put a recurring reminder in your calendar and run through this checklist every three months, and always before a big promotion period.

If you’d rather have exit-intent offers, cart recovery and recommendations handled from one dashboard, iConvert Optimizer is built for exactly that kind of WooCommerce store.

Flavius Noja

Flavius is an online marketing specialist with experience in the digital field. He is passionate about everything that means the online world, sports, but also crypto.