When a site underperforms, the usual response is a redesign proposal: new brand, new templates, a quarter of work and a launch date. Sometimes that is right. More often, the problem sits on one or two pages, and it can be found in an afternoon by someone who reads the page the way a buyer does.
This is that afternoon, written down. Pick one page, work through it in the order a visitor experiences it, and leave with a short list of fixes you can ship and measure. No CRO retainer required.
Pick the one page that matters most
Choose the page with the most commercial intent and enough traffic to learn from. For most B2B companies that is the pricing page, the demo or contact page, or the landing page that paid campaigns send traffic to. Check in your analytics which page sits just before most conversions. Audit that one first.
Before you start, write down its current numbers: visits, conversions and conversion rate over a recent, normal period. That is your before-state.
1. The first screen: can a stranger tell what this is?
Open the page on your phone, look at it for five seconds, and close it. Then answer, or better, ask someone outside the company to answer:
- What does this company do?
- Who is it for?
- What should I do next?
If the headline is a slogan that could belong to any company, it fails. The strongest first screens name the buyer's situation, the outcome, and one clear next step, in plain words.
2. Proof: is every big claim backed up nearby?
List every claim on the page. Next to each one, note what supports it: a customer quote, a named logo you have permission to use, a concrete example, a screenshot of the product doing the thing. Claims without support make careful buyers suspicious, and B2B buyers are careful. Move proof next to the claim it supports rather than parking it all in a logo bar.
3. Objections: does the page answer what stops people?
Write down the five objections your sales team hears most: price, switching effort, fit, risk, "we already have someone for this". Check whether the page answers each one before the visitor has to ask. The answers do not need to be long. They need to be there.
4. The next step: is it clear, and is it cheap?
- One primary action. If the page asks visitors to book a demo, start a trial, download a guide and join a newsletter with equal weight, it asks for nothing.
- A label that says what happens. "Book a 20-minute walkthrough" tells the buyer more than "Submit".
- The fewest form fields you can live with. Every field is a small reason to leave. Ask for what sales genuinely needs to follow up, and enrich the rest later.
- What happens after. Tell people what to expect once they click: who will get in touch, and when.
5. Usability: check it against the classics
Jakob Nielsen's ten usability heuristics are decades old and still catch most interface problems. For a single page, the most useful questions are: does the page show where you are and what is happening after a click; does it use the buyer's words rather than your internal ones; does it prevent errors in the form instead of just reporting them; and is everything on the page earning its place, or is some of it clutter?
6. Speed and stability on a phone
Run the page through a Core Web Vitals test on mobile. Google's published "good" thresholds are a sensible bar: largest contentful paint at or under 2.5 seconds, interaction to next paint at or under 200 milliseconds, and cumulative layout shift at or under 0.1. Layout shift matters especially on conversion pages, because a button that moves as the page loads is a button people miss.
7. Tracking: does the conversion actually record?
Submit the form yourself and confirm the conversion shows up in analytics and in whatever system receives the lead. Broken tracking is surprisingly common after site changes, and it makes every other finding impossible to measure.
Prioritise and prove
You will end up with more findings than you can fix at once. Rank them by how directly they sit on the path to conversion and how cheap they are to change. Headline, call to action and form fixes usually come first.
Ship one meaningful change at a time where you can, or run a proper test if the page has the traffic for it. Compare the page against its own before-state over a comparable period. Without that, you will never know which fix did the work.
How the Website Crew runs this
The free audit runs this kind of review across your site automatically. The engine behind it covers 23 analysis types, including Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics, 13 SEO checks, Core Web Vitals against Google's thresholds, and an accessibility score from axe-core. That score is a fast signal weighted by severity, not a WCAG compliance certificate.
After that, the Website Crew re-audits monthly for performance, SEO and conversion drift, and turns findings into a list of website fixes, each with a target URL, rationale, evidence and risk rating. It writes the replacement copy and layout and opens them as a change you review. Low-risk fixes can ship automatically inside guardrails you set, while visual changes are staged. A redesign, merging code, publishing to your CMS and starting a conversion test all wait for your approval.
The crew is measured on resolved issues, Core Web Vitals movement and verified outcomes on the changes it made. See plans on pricing and the step-by-step jobs in the how-to hub.
Start with the five-second test
Send your most important page to someone who has never seen it, give them five seconds, and ask the three questions above. Their answer is the first line of your audit.
Want the full read across every page? Run the free audit.