Traffic is steady, ad spend is working, and revenue still isn’t moving the way it should. Almost every time we audit a store like that, the problem isn’t demand — it’s a handful of small leaks between the click and the completed order. None of them show up on a traffic report. All of them show up in your conversion rate, quietly, week after week, while the marketing gets blamed for underperforming.
Speed and first impression
A slow store taxes every session before a visitor has even seen a product. If your homepage or product page takes more than two to three seconds to become usable on mobile, you’re paying for clicks that leave before they load — and that cost never shows up as a line item anywhere.
- Unoptimised images — full-resolution photos served instead of compressed, correctly-sized versions, adding seconds to every page load.
- App bloat — a dozen apps injecting scripts on every page, most of them for features nobody uses, each one slowing the store down a little more.
- No clear above-the-fold offer — a hero banner that looks nice but doesn’t say what the product does or why to buy now, so the visitor has to scroll to find a reason to stay.
Product pages that don’t close the sale
The product page carries the entire purchase decision. If it doesn’t answer the visitor’s real questions in the first screen or two, they bounce to search for the answer somewhere else — often a competitor who answered it for them.
- Weak or generic images — no lifestyle shots, size reference, or ingredients/spec close-ups, leaving the buyer to guess at fit, scale, or contents.
- Missing social proof — reviews buried below the fold instead of visible near the buy button, right where hesitation actually happens.
- Vague shipping and returns info — forcing buyers to search a policy page instead of seeing it right where they’re deciding, which reads as risk rather than reassurance.
A product page’s job isn’t to look premium. It’s to remove every reason left to hesitate before the buy button.
Cart and checkout friction
This is where the most expensive leaks live — a visitor has already decided to buy, and something in the process talks them out of it at the exact moment they were about to pay.
- Forced account creation — no guest checkout option for buyers who just want to pay and go, so a chunk of them abandon rather than sign up.
- Surprise costs at the last step — shipping or fees that only appear at checkout instead of earlier in the flow, breaking the trust built on the product page.
- Too few payment and express-pay options — no Shop Pay, PayPal, or Apple Pay for buyers who won’t type a card number on mobile, costing you the fastest-converting segment of traffic.
Tracking and trust signals
Two leaks don’t cost a sale directly, but they cost you the ability to fix everything else — and they compound quietly for as long as they go unnoticed.
- Broken or partial tracking — pixel and analytics events firing inconsistently, so you’re optimising ads and testing pages on bad data without knowing it.
- No visible trust markers — missing security badges, real contact info, or a clear returns policy near checkout, which quietly raises abandonment on unfamiliar brands.
Prioritise fixes, don’t redesign everything at once
Not every leak deserves equal attention first. We start with the checkout and cart, since that’s where a visitor is closest to converting and every fix there recovers revenue immediately. Then we move up the funnel — product pages, then speed, then trust and tracking — auditing each step against real session data rather than guesswork, so the fixes match where people are actually dropping off.
None of these ten leaks are dramatic on their own. Stacked together, they’re usually the entire gap between a store that’s “fine” and one that converts at twice the rate on the same traffic. The fix isn’t a redesign — it’s auditing the store against this list, fixing what’s leaking, and then testing continuously as traffic, products, and checkout behaviour change over time.