The Ultimate Ecommerce CRO Guide

by on August 26, 2025
Hand turning optimization knob up to 100 percent and dial indicating conversion rate metrics. CRO concept. Composite image between a hand photography and a 3D background.

Focusing on ecommerce conversion rate optimization (CRO) is one of the most valuable ways to spend your time.

Think about it. It costs far more to gain a customer in ecommerce than it does to retain one. In fact, according to businesswire, merchants lost on average $29 for every new customer acquired. To make up for that cost, businesses must focus their efforts on encouraging customers to return to their store. 

And in 2025, there are tons of tips and tools that merchants can rely on to do just that.

In this article, we’ll break down what ecommerce CRO is, showcase examples of metrics, and share the best CRO tools for ecommerce to increase conversion rates on WooCommerce websites.

What is Ecommerce CRO?

Ecommerce CRO is the process of consistently tweaking and enhancing your online store experience so more visitors complete a desired action. There are multiple actions that can count as conversions, but most obviously, the primary action many merchants are hoping to see is a final sale.

In simple terms, ecommerce CRO helps you turn browsers into buyers.

A great way to establish CRO for ecommerce sites is optimizing every part of the user journey, including landing pages, product pages, checkout flow, calls-to-action, search functionality, site speed, and more.

Examples of Conversion Metrics

A clear understanding of CRO for ecommerce sites has to start with conversations. Conversions can be defined as the successful completion of an action on a website, landing page, blog post, social post, email, etc. While sales are the most obvious conversion metric, other metrics can also be considered for CRO for ecommerce. With that being said, many businesses might differ on which metrics are their biggest priority. Below, you can see some examples of ecommerce conversion metrics:

  • Email Subscribers: While sales are the ultimate conversion, email subscribers have to be a close second in ecommerce CRO. Once you’ve collected your visitors’ information, it’s significantly easier to retarget them and send them promotions that will incentivize them to purchase your product. 
  • Average Time Spent on Site: According to Content Square, the average time spent on ecommerce sites today is only 47 seconds.  A high average time on site usually correlates to a well-designed site that offers engaging content and a user-friendly experience. And of course, the more time people spend on your site, the more likely they are to convert. 
  • Click-through Rate (CTR): Click-through rate measures the number of people who click on an ad or link compared to the total number of people who view it. If you’re sending out mail campaigns or targeted ads, CTRs are extremely important to track because they can showcase how effective your messaging is at eliciting a click.
  • Cart Abandonment Rate: This article will discuss cart abandonment rate extensively, as it’s a crucial metric for evaluating conversions. According to the Baymard Institute, the average cart abandonment rate is 69.99%. 
  • Return Customer Rate: Of course, your ecommerce business’s success depends on how many returning customers you can retain. Focusing on product quality, shipping times, and customer support is an excellent way to ensure visitors continue converting on your site.  
  • Average Order Value (AOV): AOV is a well-known ecommerce metric that showcases the average total of every order placed over a defined period of time. For most ecommerce businesses, it’s a metric that depicts how well you connect with customers across all your products. 

Top Tips for Ecommerce CRO

There are many ways for brands to improve CRO for ecommerce sites and increase their website conversions. Below, we’ll focus on some easy-to-implement tips that don’t require much data.

Websites that effectively apply CRO for ecommerce continuously analyze their checkout experience and determine their benchmark stats so they can implement changes and quickly determine if specific tactics are worth permanently implementing.

Ensure Your Site is as Fast as Possible

It’s well known and reported that site speed can drastically improve conversion rates.  In fact, according to Shopify, even a one-second improvement in website speed can boost mobile user conversions by up to 27%.

However, the work required to ensure site speed can be tedious and technical. Instead, it can be helpful to rely on third-party tools and web hosting experts to ensure your site is as quick as possible, no matter how much traffic you receive. This is where a tool like Pressable can be a major advantage.

Offer Easy and Flexible Payment Options

Tedious checkout and payment collection processes are an easy way to tank your conversions and increase your cart abandonment rates. And if your team is spending a significant amount of money on advertising, you want to ensure those ads lead to direct sales.

There are many tools (which we’ll explore later) that can help you ensure your checkout process has the fewest steps. For example, you can incorporate tools like Stripe or Klarna onto your site or offer an ApplyPay purchase option. 

Showcase Trust Signals

Ensuring your site is secure is a great way to build trust and increase conversions with your site visitors. Security is especially important for ecommerce sites because they require users to share so much personal information, like banking details and contact information.

There are multiple ways to build trust. Some of the best ways include showcasing ratings and reviews, ensuring your website is up to date and easy to use, and most importantly, the security measures you put in place to ensure their data is protected.

Another way to enhance your site’s security is by using a WordPress plugin like Jetpack. Jetpack provides its users easy‑to‑use, comprehensive WordPress site security, including real‑time backups, a web application firewall, malware scanning, and spam protection.

Include The Ability to Filter and Sort Products

WooCommerce found that 75% of users leave a site if they do not find what they want in 15 seconds. So, if you have a ton of product listings, you must find a way to make sure they are easy to sort and filter.

Think of your filters and sorting functions like search functionality, as well as a way to guide visitors deeper into your product catalog.

The key here is to incorporate both filters and sorting so your visitors can easily discover the products that specifically meet their exact needs. Regardless, this HAS to be done well. If your filters are even slightly off or confusing to use, you can quickly tank your conversion rate. Unfortunately, most sites aren’t executing this ecommerce CRO strategy very well. According to a study by the Baymard Institute, only 16% of major ecommerce sites provide a good filtering experience. 

When you’re searching for tools to help with product filters, it’s imperative to find a tool that doesn’t impact your site speed. One well-regarded tool for WooCommerce sites is FiboSearch, and their pro version offers 10x faster speed than other WooCommerce filter plugins. 

Optimize Your WooCommerce Checkout Experience

According to Statista, 18% of customers will abandon their cart if a checkout page is too long or confusing. Ensuring your checkout experience enables your site visitors to purchase products quickly and easily lays the foundation for consistent long-term relationships and, ultimately, is crucial to your online store’s success. 

As a WooCommerce user, you have the opportunity to customize your checkout experience, which is why many people choose their services over Shopify. Some checkout features include reducing the number of fields, providing convenient payment options, subscribing customers to marketing communications, and pre-filling saved customer information. To learn how to incorporate many of the advancements above, check out the WooCommerce blog.

Get Creative With Your Abandoned Cart Outreach

Thankfully, there are tons of ways site owners can try to reduce their WooCommerce cart abandonment.

Some of the most commonly discussed marketing tactics include utilizing exit-intent pop-ups, sending personalized follow-up emails, creating retargeting ads, and employing social proof. Many of the tips we’ve discussed today can also help you decrease your abandonment rate.

When examining your cart abandonment rate and devising strategies to improve your metrics, remember to analyze user behavior and collect customer feedback about your shopping and checkout experience.

For WooCommerce-specific cart abandonment assistance, the Abandoned Cart Recovery Extension is an excellent solution. With this tool, users can create multiple follow-up emails and schedule them at specific intervals. They can also include coupons and other incentives to improve conversion rates. Finally, users can track recovery performance using the extension’s built-in analytics dashboard. 

The Best CRO Tools for Ecommerce to Add to Your WooCommerce Store

In our tips section above, we’ve already mentioned some top WooCommerce CRO tools like Pressable, Abandoned Cart Recovery, FiboSearch, Jetpack security, and Stripe. Below, we’re going to dive into five more of the best CRO tools for ecommerce that we think all WooCommerce stores should add to their site to analyze and increase conversion rates.

1. Klarna

Klarna is a complete checkout solution that helps merchants grow their business through flexible payment options and smart shopping solutions. It also allows users to determine how and when they want to pay for their purchases. Despite this, Klarna businesses are always paid in full and upfront, while their customers pay at a later date.

Brands using Klarna report seeing a 40% increase in their average order value, a 20% increase in conversions, and a 45% increase in purchase frequency.

2. FunnelKit

FunnelKit (formerly known as WooFunnels) is the most intuitive and affordable funnel builder for WordPress. It’s currently the highest-rated funnel builder on WordPress, with 888+ five-star reviews.

As far as its conversion optimization features go, FunnelKit offers its users the ability to create a streamlined checkout experience with flexible field editing. It can also create highly targeted order bumps and rule-based one-click upsell offers.

3. Microsoft Clarity

As you already know, one of the first steps to improving your conversion rate is analyzing your current shopping experience and identifying any areas where people seem to get stuck.

This is where a tool like Microsoft Clarity can help tremendously. Clarity is a free product that captures how people use your site. It does this through heatmaps and session recordings and provides detailed insights to showcase where your users are getting frustrated. 

It integrates with tons of popular tools like Google Analytics, Zapier, Google Ads, HubSpot, WordPress, WooCommerce, and more. It even works on Mobile apps.

4. WooCommerce Points and Rewards

According to NIQ, 84% of customers say they’re more likely to engage with a brand with a loyalty program. A loyalty program not only helps with conversions, but it also improves  Average Order Value (AOV) and Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

WooCommerce Points and Rewards is an extension that helps you reward your customers for purchases and other actions with points that can be redeemed for discounts. Users can set how many points visitors can earn for each dollar spent and how many points can be redeemed for a specific discount total. Points can even be awarded by product, category, or global level, and you can determine the maximum discount available when redeeming points.

5. WooCommerce Analytics

When considering conversion rate and overall store performance, it’s important to take the time to find the right analytics tool. Valuable features include integration capabilities, real-time analytics, customer support availability, pricing, and reporting capabilities.

One of the best CRO tools for ecommerce we can recommend is WooCommerce Analytics, a built-in feature on all WooCommerce sites. It’s packed with powerful features, like key reports (AOV, top selling products, gross revenue, return volumes, coupons used, shipping charges, taxes charged, and more), filtering and segmentation tools, CSV downloads, a customizable dashboard, and more.

It also provides real-time data analysis, especially when it comes to analyzing customer behavior, buying patterns, average order value, and lifetime value for your store.

How is AI Reshaping Ecommerce CRO?

AI is becoming a powerful ecommerce CRO accelerator, and more businesses are turning to AI to increase efficiencies, streamline reporting, save money, scale their efforts, and enhance their user experience.

Some great examples of how AI is being used in CRO for ecommerce include automating A/B testing efforts, creating smart and effective AI chatbots, utilizing hyper-personalization, simplifying their checkout processes, enabling address autofill, and more.

Of course, many of the tools discussed in this article to boost ecommerce CRO are always incorporating AI capabilities into their products.

Ensure Site Speed and Security With Pressable

If you’re using WordPress and WooCommerce to host your online site and store, and you’re still struggling with site speed and security issues, we highly recommend looking into Pressable.

For a WooCommerce store to thrive, it needs reliable hosting to handle its demands. Searching through all the hosting providers available can be daunting, with many prioritizing sales over service quality. At Pressable, we prioritize delivering a solution that delivers.

How do we do this?

  • We handle traffic spikes without compromising performance
  • We offer 24/7 support from our team of WooCommerce experts
  • Enjoy peace of mind with web application firewalls
  • You get what you pay for with no hidden fees
  • We protect your data with regular backups
  • We use our expertise as part of the Automattic family for compatibility and optimization with WordPress and WooCommerce

Experience the difference with Pressable’s managed WordPress hosting for WooCommerce stores.

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