CRO Audits, Checklists and Mistakes: The Working Guide

A conversion audit is the periodic, structured version of everything this site teaches: measure the funnel against its baseline, inspect each stage with the evidence appropriate to it (rates, recordings, visitor voice), write findings as named causes with their evidence attached, and convert the findings into a prioritised, costed fix list that the prioritisation method can rank. The audit's product is not a report; it is the list, plus the log entries that will verify its repairs. This bench holds the methods by size (the hour, the day), the walkthrough method, the output format, and the mistakes - the audit's own failure modes and the common CRO errors it exists to catch.

The common corruption: the audit that concludes, by remarkable coincidence, that everything should be rebuilt. Rebuilds are occasionally right, but an audit that cannot point to stage-level evidence for its findings is a preference document. The discipline that keeps audits honest is the finding format used across this bench: stage, rate, cause, evidence, proposed repair, read rule. A finding that cannot be written in that format is not ready to cost anyone money, and a redesign proposal must clear it twenty times over, once per claim it makes.

Three sizes cover a small business. The one-hour audit is a structured first pass: funnel rates, the top pages read cold, the mechanical checks (the add step, the forms, the phone test). The full-day audit adds recordings, visitor voice and a written findings file. The quarterly review is not an audit but the audit's governor: it reads the change log, compares baselines, and sets the next quarter's list. Each has its own guide on this bench. Running the day when the hour would do wastes the business's scarcest resource; running the hour when the problem needs the day produces confident shallowness.

Half this bench is a catalogue of errors, because in conversion work the errors repeat more faithfully than the successes: copying big brands whose constraints are not yours, dark patterns that borrow revenue from trust, audits run during a sale and judged against a quiet month, tests declared on noise, numbers quoted from nowhere. Each mistake guide names the error, shows its mechanism - why it tempts and what it costs - and gives the correction as a rule the log can enforce. Read the catalogue once a year; it gets shorter as your own log grows, because your business stops paying tuition for the same lesson.

The checklists in this bench and across the site (the pre-traffic landing checklist is the model) share a design: short enough to actually run, ordered by the visitor's experience, with each item phrased as a checkable fact rather than a vibe ('the total on the cart equals the total at checkout start', not 'pricing is clear'). Write your own site's checklists from your log: every incident that ever cost orders becomes one line, checked forever after. A checklist built from your own history is worth more than any generic hundred-point list, because every line on it is a scar, and scars are remembered.

An outside audit can be worth its fee for one reason: fresh eyes with a method. This bench's last guide covers hiring - what to ask, what a real audit deliverable looks like, and the red flags (guaranteed uplifts, findings without evidence, the audit that is a sales document for a rebuild). Whether the auditor is you, a freelancer or an agency, the standard is the same: findings in the format, repairs in the order, verification in the log. Method is the whole product; everything else is presentation.

Keep each audit's products together in one place, the funnel file: the rates it worked from, its findings with their evidence, the fix list it issued, and the verdicts later collected. The file's organisation matters because audits are read backwards more than forwards - a finding challenged in a meeting, a repair's read falling due, next year's auditor (often you, with a year's distance) asking what last year's evidence actually showed. A business whose audits are findable owns its history; a business whose audits live in an ex-employee's inbox or a departed agency's portal starts each year from anecdote. Choose the boring durable home - the same drive as the change log - and file on the day, not at the quarter's end.