I've reviewed hundreds of websites across dozens of industries. The patterns are clear: most businesses are losing sales to the same fixable website issues.
This isn't about cosmetic redesigns or the latest design trends. These are functional problems directly impacting your bottom line—issues your development team can address quickly with the right direction.
Form Friction: The Silent Conversion Killer
Every unnecessary field in your forms is actively preventing people from becoming customers. When we reduced form fields for a retail client from 9 to 4, lead volume increased by 38% overnight.
The worst offenders? "How did you hear about us?" and other premature questions that don't help you fulfill the customer's immediate request.
According to Angie Schottmuller, growth marketing advisor and former Forbes Top 10 Marketer: "Every form field you ask for reduces conversion rates by approximately 10%. The question isn't what fields you want—it's what fields you absolutely need right now to move the relationship forward."
Implementation:
Audit all forms and ruthlessly eliminate any field that isn't absolutely necessary for the next step in your sales process. If you need more information, collect it progressively after capturing the lead.
Pro Tip: Create two parallel forms: your current version and a radically simplified one with just name and email (or phone for call-based businesses). Split test them for one week. The conversion difference will likely surprise even seasoned marketers, and your sales team will gladly trade having slightly less information upfront for significantly more leads.
Site Speed: Every Second Costs You Money
Page speed isn't a technical vanity metric—it's a direct sales driver. Amazon famously calculated that a one-second delay in page loading time costs them $1.6 billion in annual sales.
For mid-sized businesses, each additional second of load time reduces conversions by approximately 7%. If your site generates $10,000 daily, that's $700 lost per second of delay.
The main culprits:
- Uncompressed images and videos
- Too many third-party scripts loading at once
- Render-blocking resources
- Server response delays
Web performance expert Harry Roberts of CSS Wizardry notes: "Site speed is the single most important UX metric that also directly correlates with business metrics. It affects everything from bounce rate to conversion rate to SEO rankings."
Implementation:
Focus on these high-impact fixes:
- Optimize and properly size all images with modern formats (WebP)
- Configure browser caching with appropriate expiration times
- Prioritize critical rendering path resources
- Defer non-essential JavaScript
- Implement content delivery networks for static assets
Pro Tip: Ignore synthetic speed scores and focus on Core Web Vitals with real user data. The metrics that matter most are Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Interaction to Next Paint (INP). Have your developer implement field data collection to identify the specific pages and elements causing delays for actual users. Prioritize fixing speed issues on conversion pages first—your blog can wait.
Mobile Payment Friction: Where Sales Go to Die
The mobile conversion gap is real and costly. While over 70% of traffic is mobile for most businesses, mobile conversion rates typically lag desktop by 2-3x. The biggest culprit is checkout flows designed for desktops and thoughtlessly adapted to mobile.
Baymard Institute's research found that 28% of shoppers abandon purchases because the checkout process is too long or complicated—a problem amplified on mobile devices.
"Mobile users are in a rushed, distracted state with limited screen real estate," says Peep Laja, founder of CXL. "Every unnecessary step in your mobile checkout process is a conversion killer. The goal should be to make purchasing as thoughtless as possible."
Implementation:
Focus on these mobile-specific improvements:
- Implement digital wallet options (Apple Pay, Google Pay, Shop Pay)
- Design form elements specifically for touch (adequate spacing, clear hit areas)
- Use appropriate input types to trigger the right mobile keyboards
- Minimize form fields specific to mobile flows
- Ensure error messages are clear and actionable
- Show explicit progress indicators for multi-step processes
Pro Tip: Record and watch real users attempting to complete purchases on various mobile devices. These session recordings reveal friction points that analytics alone will miss. Pay special attention to where users hesitate, make mistakes, or abandon. I've seen mobile conversion rates double after fixing specific points of difficulty identified in these recordings.
Exit Intent: Recovering Lost Sales
For most websites, 95% of visitors leave without converting. A strategic exit approach can recover 2-5% of those potential sales—turning abandonment into a second chance at conversion.
The key is understanding why people leave at different stages and creating targeted responses to those specific concerns.
Neil Patel, co-founder of NP Digital, states: "Exit intent technology isn't about interrupting the user. It's about providing value at precisely the moment when someone has decided your current offer isn't compelling enough. The right exit offer speaks directly to the hesitation that's causing them to leave."
Implementation:
Create a tiered exit intent strategy:
- Homepage/informational pages: Focus on lead capture with content offers
- Product pages: Address common objections or offer comparison guides
- Cart pages: Provide incentives like free shipping or small discounts
- Checkout process: Offer customer service assistance or save cart functionality
Pro Tip: Segment your exit offers based on user behavior and traffic source. New visitors from Google should see a different message than returning visitors who've viewed specific products. Traffic from ads should receive exit messaging aligned with the original ad promise. This behavioral segmentation typically increases exit intent conversion rates by 30-50% compared to generic popups.
Personalization: Stop Treating Everyone the Same
The era of one-size-fits-all websites is over. Even basic personalization increases conversion rates by 10-15%, while more sophisticated approaches can deliver gains of 30% or more.
According to Brennan Dunn, founder of RightMessage: "Most websites are like sales reps who give the same pitch to everyone, regardless of who they're talking to. Even simple personalization based on referral source, visit history, or industry can dramatically change how people respond to your site."
Implementation:
Start with these high-ROI personalizations:
- Return visitor recognition with customized messaging
- Location-based content adaptation (localization beyond just currency)
- Referral source customization (different headlines/CTAs for different traffic sources)
- Recently viewed items with smart recommendations
- Browse and cart abandonment follow-up (email and on-site)
Pro Tip: Before investing in complex personalization tools, start with UTM-based content swapping. Create alternate headlines, hero sections, and CTAs based on campaign source. Someone arriving from a Facebook ad about "saving time" should see messaging around efficiency, while someone from a Google search for "affordable solutions" should see content focused on value. This simple traffic-based personalization often delivers the highest ROI of any website improvement.
The Measurement Mandate
None of these fixes matter if you can't accurately track their impact. Before implementing changes, ensure you have proper attribution and conversion tracking in place.
Jon Loomer, digital marketing strategist, emphasizes: "The businesses winning in digital aren't guessing—they're measuring. Every change should have a clear hypothesis and a way to validate whether it improved performance."
At minimum, you should be tracking:
- Form completion rates (by form and traffic source)
- Page load times for critical pages (with real user data)
- Mobile vs. desktop conversion disparities
- Exit rates at each step of your funnel
- Revenue impact of personalization efforts
The Compounding Effect
What makes these fixes so powerful is that they compound. A 15% improvement in form completion plus a 10% improvement in site speed doesn't just add up to 25%—it creates a multiplier effect for a much larger total impact.
This is precisely why some businesses seem to convert online traffic so much more efficiently than competitors. They're not doing anything magical—they're just executing these fundamentals better and measuring the results.
Moving Beyond DIY
If implementing these changes seems overwhelming, you're not alone. Many marketing teams lack the technical resources or specialized knowledge to execute these improvements properly.
At flauntworthy, we've built our reputation on transforming websites from expense items into revenue-generating assets. Our approach combines data analysis, user testing, and technical optimization to identify and fix the specific issues holding back your website's performance.
Ready to transform your website into a sales machine?
Let's talk