The Archive
Research Notes
Short, practical observations. Observations, evidence, and a practical takeaways.
The 30 Minute Conversion Audit
Grab a coffee. Open your website. And work through these four questions. If you can't answer any of them clearly, that's where your conversion problems live. Don't try to fix everything at once. Pick the biggest gap and start there.
Read MoreHow To Test Changes Properly
Changing five things at once then trying to work out what worked is one of the easiest mistakes in conversion optimisation. The more variables you introduce, the harder it becomes to learn anything useful. Good tests are boring, focused and controlled.
Read MoreThe Conversion Science Priority Framework
Let's imagine your website isn't converting. What should you fix first? The button? The colours? The testimonials? The answer follows a clear pattern based on the research. Start with Clarity, then Trust, then Friction, then Offer, and finally CTA optimisation.
Read MoreUrgency Without Being Annoying
Urgency works — the research is fairly consistent on that. But the problem isn't urgency. The problem is fake urgency. And the internet is absolutely full of it. The moment people realise your urgency isn't real, trust disappears.
Read MoreCTAs Are Not Magic
Button text does matter. Just not nearly as much as people think. Changing the button doesn't solve any of the fundamental uncertainty problems visitors face. A CTA isn't there to persuade somebody. A CTA is there to guide somebody who's already decided.
Read MoreMake Choosing Easy
The highest converting offers weren't always the cheapest. They weren't always the most persuasive. And they definitely weren't always the most clever. They were often the easiest to choose. People don't just need options. They need guidance.
Read MorePricing, Offers & Decision Making
People don't necessarily want more options. They want easier decisions. The most effective pricing pages don't just present choices — they help people make them. The curse of too much choice creates paralysis, not excitement.
Read MoreForms: The Silent Conversion Killer
Every field asks the visitor for something — their time, their effort, their attention. The more you ask for, the harder the task becomes. Baymard's research found that many checkout forms ask for significantly more information than they actually need.
Read MoreThe Friction Audit
Most conversion problems aren't caused by a single catastrophic mistake. They're usually caused by lots of small things. A click here, a form field there, an unnecessary step somewhere else. None of them feel significant on their own. Together, they create enough friction to stop people moving forward.
Read MoreWhat Happens Next?
One of the biggest themes in the research was friction. Not the dramatic kind. The small kind. Every extra click, every extra field, every extra decision creates a little more friction. And friction gives people an opportunity to leave.
Read MoreWhy Testimonials Usually Fail
Most testimonials are completely useless. Not because testimonials don't work — they do. The problem is that most testimonials don't actually tell us anything. 'Great service' tells us nothing about what service, what happened, or what result was achieved.
Read MoreThe Proof Stack
Trust is built through evidence. And the strongest websites don't rely on a single piece of proof — they stack it. The more evidence somebody sees, the easier it becomes to move forward.
Read MoreWhy Should I Trust You?
Trust isn't built by saying you're trustworthy. Trust is built by providing evidence. One meta analysis covering more than 69,000 observations found a strong relationship between review quality and purchase intention. People trust businesses that other people trust.
Read MoreStop Talking About Yourself
Let's play a quick game. Which is more interesting: 'We've been providing innovative business solutions since 2008' or 'We help manufacturers reduce admin time by up to 40%'? The second one works because it answers the question visitors are actually asking: 'Can you help me?'
Read MoreIs This For Me?
Most businesses talk about themselves far too much. Their history, their values, their process, their mission. Before somebody cares about your business, they care about their problem. That's just how people work. People pay attention to information that feels useful to them.
Read MoreThe Clarity Audit
It's time to look at your own website. Not as the business owner. Not as the person who built it. As a complete stranger. Because strangers don't know your industry, your terminology, your process — they only know what they see. And they decide surprisingly quickly whether it's worth sticking around.
Read MoreWhat Is This?
When people have to work hard to understand a message, engagement drops. Clicks drop. Conversions drop. People leave. Not because they're rude. Because they're busy. Most visitors aren't carefully reading your website. They're scanning it, trying to work out whether they've landed in the right place.
Read MoreWhy Most Websites Don't Convert
After reading all this research, I started noticing a pattern. Different industries, different audiences, different products, different websites. Yet the same problems kept appearing. People were leaving because they couldn't answer a simple question. Or more accurately, one of four simple questions.
Read MoreThe Biggest Lie in Marketing
After reading far more scientific papers than any web designer probably should, one theme kept appearing. The websites that convert best tend to do one thing exceptionally well: they reduce uncertainty. People don't buy when they're persuaded. They buy when they're confident enough to move forward.
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