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Optimizing your website can feel overwhelming. Ultimately, your website has a job — some aspects of which are directly tied to top-line and bottom-line KPIs.
What drives users to click one button but ignore another — could it be the wording, placement, color, or some factor you haven't yet considered? And why does it seem like visitors are less inclined to scroll these days? These are just a few of the many questions that arise during website design or regular maintenance and improvements. To address them effectively, it's essential to implement an ongoing conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategy.
In this blog, we’ll break down what CRO is, how it works in practice, and how to determine where to start.
CRO is the process of improving your website’s ability to turn visitors into customers, subscribers, or leads. Every website has key actions it wants users to take — buying a product, scheduling an appointment, signing up for a demo — but not all visitors follow through. CRO focuses on identifying roadblocks and making targeted improvements to increase conversions.
Easier said than done, of course. The goal is to understand the current journey your users are taking on your site toward conversion, break that journey down into distinct steps, and optimize each one. By refining the path from start to finish, you can better align the experience with your consumers' needs — whether it’s ease, information, or connection —ultimately increasing the likelihood that they’ll convert.
Optimizing the customer journey has many benefits, including:
CRO can take many forms, as there are countless enhancements that can improve a site visitor’s experience. These improvements can range from optimizing your site’s back-end functionality to redesigning the user experience to better align with what visitors need.
Optimizations need to be measurable. Here are some common optimizations:
Case Study: Working with a leading credit union, Paragon identified the CTA text “Learn more” was only clicked on by .02% of visitors. Changing the text to “Apply now” resulted in over 13% of visitors clicking on the CTA.
CRO tactics vary because each visitor's journey and obstacles are unique. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach — different users, like healthcare consumers and fashion shoppers, have distinct needs and decision-making processes (personas). With so many variables, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the options.
From small tweaks to major redesigns, CRO is a continuous process of testing, learning, and refining.
Leveraging data is crucial for CRO success, and the right tools and technologies can help you collect insights, test strategies, and implement improvements efficiently. Here are some key tools that can support your success:
By integrating these tools into your CRO strategy, you can combine quantitative and qualitative data, run targeted experiments, and improve the user experience at every stage of the conversion journey.
CRO isn’t about guesswork — it’s about data-driven experimentation. By understanding user behavior and making intentional improvements, businesses can drive meaningful growth.
In our next blog, we’ll walk through how to build a structured CRO plan that turns insights into action.
