Why CRO is hard for startups and low‑traffic websites (and how to overcome it)

Published: September 2024

We often get asked whether CRO works for startups and low‑traffic websites. The answer is yes, and we’ll show you how in this article.

An empty cafe with the owner at the entrance looking for customers. — Coffee’s hot, customers not—it’s hard to understand your visitors when you don’t have many of them.

Why conversion is hard for startups and low‑traffic websites

If you are a startup or have a low‑traffic website, you are in a chicken‑and‑egg situation:

To afford visitors, you need a good conversion rate.
However, improving your conversion rate is hard if you have no visitors.

So, how do you improve your conversion rate if you have low traffic? You need to solve two problems:

How can you understand your visitors? For example, how can you find out what’s stopping them from taking action? It’s not easy when there aren’t many of them to ask.
How can you measure what works? High‑traffic websites rely on A/B tests to measure whether their changes make a statistically significant difference. But reaching statistical significance becomes much harder—or impossible—when you don’t have enough traffic.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, take heart in the knowledge that every successful company has had to pass through this stage at one point.

Let’s tackle those two problems in turn.

The solution to Problem 1: The techniques you should use to understand your visitors if your website doesn’t get much traffic

Step 3 of our methodology is “Understanding your visitors (particularly the non-converting ones).” Some techniques we use rely upon a website getting lots of traffic. Some surveys, for example, typically get a completion rate of 3%.

If your traffic is low, we recommend that you make the most of the following techniques, which can be carried out even if your website gets just a few visitors per day.

User testing is the most fruitful technique. Ask a friend—or anyone you can get your hands on—to participate. Once your website is refined enough, aim to user test it on people who are from your target demographic and psychographic.
Watch session recordings of the visitors you have. Doing so will give you insight into how web visitors see your website. Plus, you’ll see your creation through fresh eyes.
Speak to salespeople (what we call “VOC Aggregators”)—people who have sold the same type of product (or similar products) face-to-face.
Analyze competitors’ websites. If you don’t have any obvious competitors, look at successful companies in adjacent fields. For example, if you sell B2B software, look at other B2B software vendors.
Add your phone number to the top of every page (and make it clickable).. Even if you have no plans to encourage phone calls on an ongoing basis, it can help to get at least a few of them. You may be able to charm your early callers into becoming long‑term user testers.
Offer incentives for visitors to complete surveys. The more you offer as an incentive, the higher the percentage of responses you will get.

The solution to Problem 2: How to measure what’s working

Step 8 of our methodology is “Carrying out experiments on your website.” Many people with low‑traffic websites believe that testing isn’t suitable for them because A/B tests often don’t reach significance.

But that isn’t the case. Done correctly, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be testing often on your website and realizing all the benefits that go with it. Here’s how to do it.

User testing

We highly recommend user‑testing your ideas. User tests are a great way to understand visitors and measure the performance of pages. User tests have many huge advantages over A/B‑tests:

They are quick to carry out. A user test can take less than ten minutes.
They allow you to gather qualitative insights. A two‑month A/B test may tell you which page performed better, but a ten‑minute user test tells you why.
They provide granular insights. An A/B‑test will only reveal which page is better—that’s just one fact about the whole page—but a user test will reveal which parts of the page work.

Usability‑testing tools can make you want to cry. — The best user tests make you want to cry. Because the truth hurts. For that reason, most marketers shy away from them. **The best marketers are those who rapidly accept the criticism**, use it to improve the page, and then user‑test again.

A/B testing

How many conversions do you need for A/B testing? It depends on the following factors:

Your current conversion rate. The fewer conversions you get, the longer it takes to detect a doubling.
The increase in conversion rate that you’re trying to detect. A 100% increase can be detected about four times as fast as a 50% increase.
How statistically confident you want to be. If you wanted to be 99.99% sure that your new page wasn’t winning just by chance, you’d have to wait a long time.

Using an A/B‑test‑duration calculator (like this one), you can estimate how long an A/B test would take. If the calculator shows that all your tests will take months to conclude, we recommend you only user‑test ideas and return to A/B‑testing once your business has grown.

If you’re able to run A/B tests on your low‑traffic website, here are several effective strategies:

Test the biggest, boldest ideas. When you have low traffic, it’s especially important to test big, bold ideas that are more likely to move the needle significantly. Test things that your visitors care about. Overcome their main objections. Highlight the things they love. Change the offer, or at least how it’s presented. Test things that might double the number of conversions, but are unlikely to make no difference.
Measure “micro-conversions.” Imagine conversion goals as a spectrum. On the right-hand side of the spectrum is what you ideally want—something like net profit or lifetime customer value. Such metrics tend to be untimely, meaning that you’d take months or years to measure their true value. On the left-hand side of the spectrum lie metrics like click-through rate or engagement rate. Such “intermediate” metrics are much larger in number and can be measured instantly, but you can’t be confident that they correlate with overall long-term success. The less traffic your website gets, the more you need to rely on “intermediate” metrics toward the left-hand side of the spectrum.
Test the elements that most prospects will see. Maybe this one is obvious, but test only those parts of your funnel that almost all of your customers see, like your PPC ads, main landing page, or checkout.
Combine similar pages into one test. If you have ten landing pages, and you want to test the call-to-action button, then apply the same change to all of those pages and include them in the same test. Some companies have many more landing pages than they need, maybe because they wanted to make each landing page bespoke to a particular keyword. We often consolidate such pages into one, and then optimize the heck out of it.
Reduce the statistical significance at which you’ll declare a winner. It has become the norm to declare a winning test at a statistical significance of 95%, but that’s not to say you can’t use a different figure. It would be a shame to conclude that “If I can’t have 95% confidence, I won’t run an A/B test at all.” That’s like saying, “I’m a perfectionist. If I can’t do it perfectly, I won’t do it at all.” Most marketing decisions are made without any measurement, so don’t rule out the possibility of ending a test at, say, 90% confidence—or even 85% confidence—especially if the alternative is just to launch the page and hope for the best. Sure, your chances of declaring false positives increase, but the benefits of being able to test more ideas usually hugely outweighs the slim risk of promoting a page that was actually losing.
Fixed-period testing. Many A/B testing tools now monitor your tests on an ongoing basis and tell you when there’s a winner. In addition, though, you may choose to specify a maximum duration for each test, after which you’ll make a decision regardless. If the control was winning at that point, you may choose to promote it. If the challenger was winning, and you’re confident that it was based on a research-driven hypothesis, then you may choose to promote it. If the challenger was based on a risky hypothesis, you may choose not to take the risk. Either way, this approach is more rigorous than how most early-stage companies make decisions.
Temporarily increase the amount of traffic to the page being tested, even if it means sacrificing some profitability. If the new page wins, the traffic may turn out to be more profitable than you had expected.

Low‑traffic techniques in action: Increasing leads by 58% for a SaaS company

Our Win Report, New lead funnel increases SaaS demos by 58%, is an example of CRO techniques applied to Sherpany’s niche audience.

Here’s what they thought about our methodology (and working with CRE):

“CRE are definitely a great return on investment. We’ve tripled the conversion rate on the website,” says Charlotte Linde, Senior Growth Manager of Sherpany.

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