What I Change First When A Store Gets Traffic But Not Orders

Your sessions are steady and your orders are flat. The brief that lands on my desk is nearly always the same: improve ecommerce conversion rate, this quarter, without spending more on ads.

A list of twenty tips rarely gets that done. Those tips are usually sound. They arrive unordered, though, and a store owner with a fortnight to spend needs to know which one to do on Monday morning.

My name is on the audits here. I am John Butterworth, I have spent 11+ years in SEO and driven 3M+ organic sessions, and I run the retainer projects personally. What follows is the sequence I work in, and the reason each step sits where it does.

Six changes come first, all of them on a product page or in a checkout.

After those comes the question of reading your rate once something has changed, what Shopify did to your checkout in June, and how to work out whether your conversion rate is costing you money at all.

The Changes That Raise An Ecommerce Conversion Rate, In The Order I Make Them

Order matters more than the list. Each change below costs less and carries more certainty than the one after it, so a store that stops halfway has still done the profitable half.

Four of those six come straight from what shoppers say as they leave. The independent usability researchers at Baymard Institute keep a running meta-analysis of documented abandonment, updated on 22nd September 2025. 70.22% is the average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate, based on 50 different studies.

Its ranked reason list is what sets the order below.

Put The Delivery Cost And Date On The Product Page

Start here, because this one is close to free and it addresses the biggest single cause.

Both of the top two reasons get answered on the product page, and both usually stay hidden until checkout.

State the delivery cost and the delivery date next to the price. In Shopify you set rates under Settings, then Shipping and delivery. Surface them on the product template as an Online Store 2.0 section or a metafield, so checkout never has to break the news.

That distinction matters more than it looks. Being unable to work out the total is a different complaint from the total being high.

A shopper who knows the total before starting is confirming a decision at checkout, and one who does not is revising it.

Let People Buy Without Making An Account

This one is a single setting, and the reason list above puts it at close to one started checkout in five.

Why it works is simple enough. An account helps you, and it does nothing for someone who has already decided to buy, so asking for one mid-purchase is the most common self-inflicted wound I find on a store audit.

The clearest evidence for that is decades old and still holds. Jared M. Spool, the usability researcher who founded UIE, ran the study on a major retailer whose checkout forced registration. After the form was replaced with a plain Continue button, the number of customers purchasing went up by 45%, and for the first year the site saw an additional $300,000,000.

In the Shopify admin this sits under Settings, then Checkout, then Customer accounts. Set accounts to optional and guest checkout is live.

You still get to offer the account afterwards on the thank-you page, once the order is yours. Our walkthrough of where a store loses the sale covers the rest of that flow.

Cut The Mobile Checkout To The Fields You Need

A phone punishes every extra field. Each one is another keystroke on a phone keyboard and another chance to stop.

Walk your own checkout on a phone and remove anything you do not need to fulfil the order. An optional address line and a company name are the usual candidates. Both hide under Settings, then Checkout, then Form options.

While you are in there, check the payment options on show. Trust in the payment step is its own line in that table, and real options answer it better than a badge does.

Keep the phone number only where your courier genuinely needs it. Our guide to the product page and mobile experience goes deeper into what a phone screen has to settle.

Put Your Returns Terms Beside The Buy Button

Someone buying a thing they cannot hold is pricing the risk of being wrong, and your returns terms are that price.

Placement fixes this, so your policy can stay as it is. Put the window, who pays return postage, and the condition an item has to come back in right beside the buy button.

That placement matters because anything less prominent does a different job. Nobody makes a buying decision in your footer.

Reduce The Choice A Product Page Asks For

This one surprises people. Cutting choices tends to raise orders.

Store owners keep reporting the same thing. In an r/ecommerce thread on overlooked wins, u/LionAny6818 described running tests where cutting the size and shade options on a product page "increased conversions by 20%+".

Shopify gives that principle a specific shape. As u/kjsd77 put it in r/shopify: "Variants should not be used for complementary products on a single page."

If you have bundled unrelated products into one variant picker, split them into separate products.

Uninstall Every App You No Longer Use

Here is the cheapest change on the list, and the only one you can finish this afternoon.

Every installed app puts script on your pages, and it keeps doing so long after you stop using the feature. One store owner in r/shopify described the usual state of things: a store with "like 15 apps installed and half were leftover from stuff they don't even use anymore, just sitting there slowing down page speed".

Speed is worth more than that makes it sound. A study commissioned by Google and run by 55 and Deloitte, covering 37 brand sites and over 30 million sessions, found a 0.1s improvement in mobile speed lifted retail conversion rate by 8.4%. Those same shoppers went on to spend 9.2% more, and within that study the largest single step improvement was 9.1% on Product Details to Add to Basket.

That step is exactly where a slow product page costs you, because it is the moment a shopper commits.

Given that, start with the apps you have already abandoned. Uninstall from the Apps area of the admin, then check `theme.liquid` for script tags the uninstall left behind.

How To Read Your Rate After One Change

Now for the part the tips lists leave out. You cannot A/B test your way to a better ecommerce conversion rate at this size, because your store does not have the traffic.

That is worth saying plainly, because most attempts to improve ecommerce conversion rate that I inherit have stalled on exactly this.

The arithmetic comes from Ronny Kohavi, who co-wrote *Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments* and previously led experimentation at Amazon, Microsoft and Airbnb. At a 5% baseline conversion rate, detecting a 5% relative change takes about 240,000 users in total. Real average treatment effects are small. At Bing, across tens of thousands of experiments, the average effect was rarely above 0.3%.

Those thresholds come with a warning attached. His rule is to never set a minimum detectable effect above 5%, and his summary of the small-store case is blunter still: "If you only have around 10,000 users, you are nowhere unless your metric converts at around 50%."

Nor will a big swing rescue the maths on a smaller store.

Store owners arrive at the same place from the other end. In r/ecommerce, u/mguozhen told an owner with 300 monthly visits that their tests would need "roughly 6-8 months minimum to reach statistical significance on even a 2% conversion lift", and to think in iterations instead.

So do this instead. Write down your conversion rate and today's date before you touch anything.

Make one change and leave it for a full purchase cycle, which for most stores means a fortnight. Compare the same window against the same window afterwards.

Watch session recordings while you wait. One recording of somebody hunting for the delivery cost tells you more at this traffic level than the analytics will.

What Shopify's Summer Checkout Rebuild Does To Your Conversion Rate

On a Shopify store, part of that list arrived in June without anyone asking for it.

Open your live checkout on a phone and see what you already have before you budget a week of development.

Checkout took the focus when Shopify shipped its Spring 2026 Editions on 18th June 2026. That release carries a "higher-converting, redesigned checkout" with a tighter layout, an elevated pay button and less scrolling on mobile. Much of change number three is therefore done for you.

Two other items deserve a look. "Managed payment methods" dynamically order the options in checkout, displaying the "options most likely to convert", so hand-tuning that order has stopped being your job.

Shopify also added "faster, more accurate address suggestions" in the US and the Netherlands among five markets. That shortens the longest step in a mobile checkout without you removing a single field.

All of which matters most on a phone, and the split below shows why.

Notice what Shopify chose to spend its engineering on: less scrolling on mobile, a bigger pay button and shorter address entry.

Every one of those is a phone problem. A platform sitting on that much transaction data does not rebuild the desktop path first.

Fix the phone experience first. On the split above, mobile is where most of the money already is.

How To Tell Whether Your Conversion Rate Is The Problem

Some stores should leave every one of these changes alone, and ten minutes will tell you whether yours is one of them. The test is your own rate against the market.

Rule of thumb: if your rate beats the market and your orders still disappoint, you have a traffic problem wearing a conversion problem's clothes.

That same index records it plainly. Session conversion rates in June 2026 increased year on year from 1.85% to 2.03%, a rise of 9.74%. That is the whole market drifting upward while most individual stores changed nothing at all, which is worth remembering before you credit a change of your own with a move of that size.

A store sitting comfortably above that figure is capped by the number of people arriving. It helps to know that 42% of US online shoppers have abandoned a cart during a browsing session, so the share you can win back is smaller than the headline rate. Spending a fortnight on checkout fields will do little for a number that is already healthy.

Traffic is the job in that case. Our guide to what a good ecommerce conversion rate looks like handles the benchmark question in depth.

One other explanation deserves ruling out before you try to improve ecommerce conversion rate on the store itself. Your rate may have moved because your traffic did.

A blended rate is an average over whoever turned up. Change who turns up and the number moves on its own.

A blended rate averages over whoever happened to arrive, so it falls when the mix shifts even with every page untouched. Google's own status dashboard records that the May 2026 core update started on 21st May 2026 and ran for 11 days and 21 hours, and a re-sort on that scale changes who reaches you.

It was the second of the year. The March 2026 core update started on 27th March 2026 and ran for 12 days and 4 hours, and what a core update does is re-sort which pages Google shows for a given query, which is a change to your audience rather than to your website.

Your product pages can hold their rankings while the informational searches that used to reach you go elsewhere. That changes the mix of intent arriving at your store without anything on the store changing.

There is a third window worth marking. The June 2026 spam update started on 24th June 2026 and ran for 2 days and 1 hour, and a spam update can change which of your competitors are visible without touching your own rankings at all.

Check	Where to look	What it tells you
Your rate against 2.03%	Analytics, last full month	Above it, arrivals are your constraint
A move in late May 2026	Your rate week by week	It overlaps a core update, so the mix moved

Check whether your rate moved inside them before hunting for a cause on the site. Where it did, the work is a ranking question and not a checkout one.

Our full audit sequence sets out how we separate the two. The funnel walkthrough covers finding the step that loses you the customer.

Deciding Which Change Your Store Needs First

Every plan to improve ecommerce conversion rate above assumes an ordinary store with an ordinary problem. Yours may differ.

Those six changes suit most stores I see. Which one costs you the most money depends on your traffic, your basket and your category.

That is the job of the free 30-minute consultation.

The free 30-minute consultation is a call directly with me covering the store's current rankings, its biggest quick wins and a rough 90-day direction. You get me rather than a sales rep. Behind it sit 11+ years in SEO and 3M+ organic sessions driven.

Take the shortcut if you would rather have the sequence set for your store than work through it yourself. Book your free consultation and we will pin down which change your rate is losing most to.