It’s time to get serious about Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)

Like ‘data-driven strategy’ or ‘synergy’.

They slap it on proposals, use it in meetings, and make it sound like some kind of digital wizardry. And then they go and tweak a button colour and call it a day. Or they remove a form field based on a ‘hunch’. CRO is not a hunch.

That’s not how we work.

CRO is not throwing things at a website and seeing what sticks. CRO is not about opinions, feelings, or whatever worked for someone’s cousin’s e-commerce site one time in 2016.

So what is CRO?

It’s the science of making a website work better. More efficient. More profitable. More useful. But it’s science in the way that UX is science – part psychology, part human behaviour, part cold, hard numbers.

The problem is, that a lot of people are just guessing. They mistake opinions for insights. “I think this CTA should be bigger.” Why? “Because I feel like it would stand out more.” That’s not CRO. That’s design preference.

Real CRO is about data. It’s about observation. It’s about running controlled experiments. It’s taking the scientific method and applying it to a website. You form a hypothesis based on real user behaviour. Not a guess. Not a gut feeling. But something tangible – heatmaps, session recordings, analytics data. Then you test it. Properly. A/B tests, multivariate tests, and user testing.

You let the data tell you what works, not some bloke in a meeting who reckons he knows because he’s “been in digital” for fifteen years.

And here’s the thing: real CRO is slow. It takes time. It’s about incremental gains, not magic fixes. You’re chipping away at friction points, removing barriers, making micro-adjustments that, together, create a huge impact. One test at a time. No ‘overnight results’. No silver bullets. Just a methodical, structured approach to improving conversion rates based on evidence, not assumptions.

The Foundations of Proper CRO

If you’re doing it right, CRO is built on:

• User Research – Actually watching how people interact with a site. Not assuming you know how they should interact.
• Usability Testing – Getting real users to test your site, not just staring at heatmaps and nodding.
• Testing – Testing changes properly, with statistical significance. Not ‘we changed the button to green and sales went up’. Did they? Or was it payday? Or a sale? Or luck?
• Psychology & UX Best Practices – Understanding cognitive load, decision fatigue, visual hierarchy, and the way the brain works when faced with choices.
• Data, Data, and More Data – Google Analytics, heatmaps, session replays, conversion funnels – actual user behaviour. Not what someone ‘reckons’.

At Friday, we talk about UX best practices all the time. Because UX is at the heart of CRO. We wrote some time back about the difference between UX and CRO.

A website that’s difficult to use won’t convert. A checkout process with too many steps won’t convert. A landing page full of distractions won’t convert. CRO is about removing friction. Making things simple. Making things intuitive.

And that’s where most agencies go wrong. They think CRO is ‘making a site better’ based on a list of best practices someone found on a blog. But real CRO is about your users. Your traffic. Your customers. It’s about testing, measuring, iterating. Not blindly copying ‘industry best practices’ and hoping for the best.

The Truth About CRO (That Most Agencies Won’t Tell You)

1. It’s not a one-time thing. It’s an ongoing process. If you’re serious about it, you never stop testing and improving.
2. It doesn’t always work. Not every test will be a winner. But that’s the point – you’re learning, refining, improving.
3. It’s not just about making more sales. Sometimes, CRO is about getting better customers, not just more of them. Higher-value conversions. More engagement. Less churn.
4. It’s not about ‘hacks’. If you hear someone talking about ‘CRO hacks’, run. There are no hacks. Just hard work, real research, and testing.

So next time an agency tells you they do CRO, ask them how. If they start talking about button colours and gut feelings, they’re not doing CRO. They’re guessing. And guessing doesn’t grow businesses. Real CRO does.

Ready to use a serious Conversion Rate Optimisation agency? If you want to stop guessing and start improving, we can help. Get in touch with us and let’s talk about real, data-driven optimisation that actually works.