What is a CRO audit, and what should it include?

What it's for

A conversion rate optimisation audit is a structured look at your website and your data. You should come out of it with a clear list: what's stopping visitors from buying or signing up, how big each problem is, and what to do about it. It's often the step before starting an A/B testing programme.

What a good audit covers

1. Your data

Before I trust a single number, I check the numbers are right. Are the key events firing? Does revenue in analytics match what your backend says? Is consent mode working? It's surprising how often audits skip this and then build every conclusion on broken tracking.

2. Your funnel

Where do people drop off, and which devices, channels or pages do worst? This tells you where the biggest losses are, so you spend your energy where it counts.

3. The experience

Walking through your key pages the way a customer would. Is it clear what you sell and why it's good? Can people see delivery times and costs? Is checkout easy on a phone? Experience helps you spot friction quickly, but treat these findings as ideas to check, not facts.

4. Your customers

The numbers show where people leave. Research shows why. Depending on the budget that means session recordings, heatmaps, short surveys on the site, reading reviews or talking to a handful of customers.

5. A roadmap with priorities

This is the part that matters most. Every finding gets a score for impact and effort (I use ICE or PIE) and a label: fix it straight away, or test it first.

What you should walk away with

• a short summary of the biggest problems, in plain language
• a prioritised list of fixes and test ideas, each with the evidence behind it
• a list of tracking issues to sort out before you test anything
• a session to go through it all together and ask questions

How to get ready

Give read access to your analytics and tag manager, list your most important pages and goals, and share what you already know: old tests, customer feedback, the problems everyone in the team already suspects.

Red flags I'd watch for

• Nobody checks the data. Recommendations built on tracking no one verified.
• A generic checklist. "Add trust badges, make the button bigger", with nothing from your own site to back it up.
• No priorities. Eighty issues in no particular order is a to do list, not a plan.
• Promised results. Nobody can honestly promise "30% more conversions" before testing anything.

Is it worth it?

If your traffic is steady but conversion isn't moving, or you're about to spend money on testing or a redesign, an audit usually pays for itself just by stopping you fixing the wrong things. It's useful with low traffic too. The roadmap then leans towards changes you can make straight away.

Curious what that would look like for your site? Have a look at my CRO audit.