Shopify CRO Quick Tip #2—Fix your bugs before you do other kinds of improvement

Hoping to improve the conversion rate of your Shopify store, you try to customize it, speed it up or even change your theme. These are the tools every merchant turns to when they want to better the experience for their visitors.

But the biggest improvements come from bug fixing.

My definition for a “bug” is broader than the one used in software development—to me, a bug is anything that doesn’t behave as I expect it to.

If you’ve set the store up yourself, installed apps and written info pages you definitely have bugs. You just don’t know about them as you’ve looked at your site for too long from the merchant point of view.

That’s why you should get into the shoes of your visitors in order to be able to spot them.

Go on a bug hunt!

As a merchant, you are better versed in the language of business than engineering. Nobody has taught you how software products are being shipped—first, they are developed, then pass through Quality Assurance, then some user testing, then shipped to market. And yes, your Shopify store is a software product.

Since you have access to your website (it isn’t shipped anywhere outside of reach) it is normal you can get by with skipping QA and user testing upfront—you can always go back and fix the bug. But are you going to know about the bug so that you fix it?

Would your visitors take time out of their busy and distracted lives to tell you about their broken expectations from your store? No. They just go back to Google’s search results and try another site. That’s why it is up to you to find what breaks before they do.

Go on a bug hunt!

If you’ve read this far, you’ll like my guide to discovering missed revenue opportunities on your Shopify store!