About the Test Bench

Conversion.sale is an independent publication about one job: helping small online businesses turn more of the visitors they already get into customers, enquiries and subscribers.

Most conversion advice is published by people selling something else: an agency selling retainers, a tool selling seats, a platform selling plans. Their guides are brochures with tips in them. This desk has nothing to sell you. It reads the published research, the platform documentation and the practitioner literature, and explains - bench by bench, page type by page type - what the evidence supports, what is folklore, and what only your own measurements can decide.

What we are not

We are not an agency or a consultancy, we do not run stores for clients, and nothing here is a promise about your numbers. Where a guide suggests a change, it states the evidence level behind the suggestion on its test card, so a reader can weigh it before spending an afternoon on it.

The rule about numbers

Conversion content runs on borrowed statistics: an average from someone else's store, a case study with no baseline, a percentage with no source. This site does not publish numbers it cannot stand behind. Figures quoted here come from published research or platform documentation, are attributed to their source, and carry the date they were checked. Worked examples use round numbers and are labelled illustrations. When a guide cannot give you a number, it gives you the method to produce your own - which is the only number that was ever going to help you.

How guides are made

Each guide is written against the sources listed at its foot, carries the date its evidence was last checked, and opens with a test card summarising the page type, the goal, the evidence level and the first move. If the research or a platform changes, the affected guides change and the corrections page records it.

Preferred sources

If these guides are useful to you, you can add Conversion.sale to your preferred sources in Google so its pages are surfaced for you more often: add this site to preferred sources.