10 Conversion Killers Hiding on Your Website Right Now

The short answer

Most conversion problems aren't strategic. They're a long form, a hidden price, a slow page, a broken phone link. Each one chips off a percentage point or two. Stack five of them on a single funnel and you've quietly lost half your conversions to issues nobody's looking at.

This post is the 10 I find most often, with the fix for each.

1. Slow page load (especially the first contentful paint)

Every additional second of load time costs conversion. The biggest offenders on most sites: unoptimized hero images (especially uncropped product photos shipped at desktop dimensions), render-blocking JavaScript, and third-party scripts loading synchronously.

The fix: pull Core Web Vitals from Search Console. Address the worst offenders. Compress hero images, defer non-critical JavaScript, audit your tag manager for scripts you don't actually use. The technical SEO audit checklist walks through this in detail.

2. Forms with too many fields

Every form field is a moment for a user to bail. Fields you don't strictly need are taxing your conversion rate for no benefit. The most common over-stuffed fields: company size, job title, phone number (when email is enough), and 'how did you hear about us.'

The fix: cut every field that isn't required for the next step. If sales needs the data, add a follow-up email or a second-touch form after the initial conversion. The first form's job is to start the relationship, not collect every fact.

3. Hidden pricing

If users have to fill out a form to find out how much something costs, a meaningful share of them will leave instead. This is true even when 'contact for pricing' is a deliberate sales-team strategy.

The fix: show a price, a price range, a starting-from price, or at least a tier structure. 'Plans start at $99/month' is far better than nothing. If you genuinely can't quote a number because every engagement is custom, give the price range of recent engagements ('typical projects run $5K to $25K'). Transparency builds trust and pre-qualifies leads.

4. Missing trust signals

Real users hesitate without trust signals. Reviews, testimonials, named clients, professional credentials, security badges where appropriate, named team members with photos. Sites without these convert lower, and the gap widens for higher-stakes purchases (anything healthcare, financial, legal, or above ~$500).

The fix: audit your highest-converting page. Confirm at minimum: real reviews or testimonials with full names, an About page with named team members and credentials, a privacy policy, and a clear contact path. Add anything missing.

5. Generic or unclear CTAs

'Submit', 'Click here', 'Learn more.' Every one of these is a conversion drag. They tell the user what action they take, but not what they get for taking it.

The fix: rewrite CTAs as specific outcomes. 'Get my free quote' beats 'Submit'. 'Start my 14-day trial' beats 'Sign up'. 'See pricing' beats 'Learn more'. The CTA should describe what's on the other side of the click, not the act of clicking.

6. Mobile-broken layout

Most teams test the desktop layout obsessively and assume the mobile version works because it looks fine in a browser devtools resize. It often doesn't. Tap targets are too close together. Text is too small. Navigation is hidden behind a menu users don't notice. Forms scroll awkwardly when the keyboard opens.

The fix: walk your site on a real phone. Try to do the thing you want users to do. Note every friction point. Fix in priority order. The fastest CRO wins on most small business sites come from this single exercise.

7. Surprise fees at checkout

An e-commerce-specific killer, but it shows up in service businesses too. Shipping costs, handling fees, taxes, mandatory add-ons, payment processing fees. Anything that increases the price between 'add to cart' and 'pay now' kills conversion.

The fix: show the all-in price as early as possible. If shipping varies by location, give a calculator or a flat-rate option upfront. If there are mandatory add-ons (extended warranties, processing fees, etc.), include them in the displayed price or remove them entirely. Surprise fees feel like betrayal at the moment of trust.

8. No clear next step (information overload)

Pages that try to convert visitors and educate them and showcase the brand and serve as the press kit and answer every objection in the universe end up converting nothing. Users who don't know what they're supposed to do next will choose 'leave.'

The fix: every page should have one primary action, restated at least twice (once in the hero, once at the end). Secondary information goes in supporting sections. If you can't name the primary action of a page in one sentence, the page needs to be cut down or split.

9. Phone link that doesn't work on mobile

On a phone-driven business (home services, healthcare), a broken click-to-call link is a direct revenue leak. The DTC equivalent is a broken support widget, a chat bubble that fails on mobile, or an email-capture flow that hangs on Safari. Same idea: a final touchpoint that breaks at the worst possible moment.

The fix: every phone number should be a proper tel: link, formatted with country code (tel:+1xxxxxxxxxx). For DTC sites, audit chat widgets, email captures, and any third-party support tool that lives in a corner of the page on a real device. While you're there, add tracking for whichever channel matters to your GA4 conversion tracking so you actually measure what's coming in.

10. Stale or contradictory copy

Last-updated 2019 dates. References to '2022 trends.' Pricing pages that contradict the homepage. Product pages with broken images where the team replaced inventory but never updated the marketing site. Each is a credibility hit. Stack three on the same site and even good prospects start questioning whether the business is still operating.

The fix: schedule a quarterly content audit. Read every high-traffic page as if you'd never seen the site before. Note anything that contradicts something else, anything dated, anything broken. Fix or kill. The Keep-Kill-Combine framework is the system I use for this.

Tools to find these on your own site

Most of these are findable with free tools and 30 minutes of focused attention.

• PageSpeed Insights for #1 (page load).
• Microsoft Clarity (free) for #2, #6, #8 (form abandonment, mobile UX, information overload). The session recordings show real user behavior on real devices.
• Your own phone for #6 and #9 (mobile layout and broken phone link). The cheapest CRO tool ever invented.
• Google Search Console for #1 (Core Web Vitals report).
• A peer or non-team-member for #4, #8, #10 (trust signals, clarity, stale copy). Pay them with coffee for fifteen minutes of honest critique.

Where this fits in a CRO program

These ten issues are the fast layer. Most are findable in a half-day audit and fixable within a sprint. Knock them out before you build anything resembling a structured A/B testing program. Testing on a site with broken basics is wasted budget.

Once the obvious leaks are sealed, the structured CRO work, hypothesis-driven testing, funnel optimization, segment-level personalization, becomes worth the time. The CRO beginner's guide covers that next layer.

Getting started

If you want to find your conversion killers this week, here's the order.

1. 1Walk your top conversion path on a real phone. Note every friction point. (Items 6 and 9.)
2. 2Pull Core Web Vitals from Search Console. Fix the worst pages. (Item 1.)
3. 3Audit your forms. Cut every field you can't justify in one sentence. (Item 2.)
4. 4Audit your CTAs. Rewrite generic ones as outcome-specific. (Item 5.)
5. 5Read your highest-traffic pages as if you've never seen the site. Flag stale, contradictory, or unclear content. (Items 8 and 10.)
6. 6If you have a checkout, audit for surprise fees. (Item 7.)
7. 7Confirm trust signals are present and current on key pages. (Item 4.)
8. 8If pricing is hidden and you can show some price, show some price. (Item 3.)
9. 9If you want help finding and fixing what you can't see, reach out. CRO is part of every full-stack marketing engagement I run.

Most sites I look at, especially the outdoor and DTC stores in my engagements, have at least four of these ten. Fixing them rarely takes a quarter and usually pays for the fix work many times over within the first month.

Frequently asked questions

Which conversion killer should I fix first?

Whichever one is biggest on your site. If your mobile layout is broken and you're 60% mobile traffic, that's the priority. If your forms are 12 fields long and you have a high-volume lead-gen site, start there. The right priority depends on your specific funnel, not on which item I listed first.

How much can I expect conversion to lift after fixing these?

Varies wildly. Single-fix lifts of 10-30% are common when the problem is significant (a broken phone link on a phone-driven business, surprise fees at checkout). Smaller, compounding gains of 2-8% per fix are typical when the issues are less severe. Stacking five fixes can double conversion on a site that started in poor shape.

Do I need expensive software to find these issues?

No. Microsoft Clarity is free. Search Console is free. PageSpeed Insights is free. Your phone is free (already paid for). The expensive software comes in once you're running structured A/B tests at volume, which is later in the program.

Should I A/B test the fixes or just ship them?

Ship the fixes. These ten issues are problems by definition, not hypotheses. You don't A/B test whether your phone link should work on mobile. You fix it. Save A/B testing for cases where reasonable people could disagree about the outcome (CTA copy variations, layout changes, pricing display).

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