Bench 20: Audits, checklists and mistakes
The bench's own paperwork: how to run a conversion audit on a small store, the checklists worth keeping, and the mistakes and myths that waste the most effort.
The bench guide
Working guides on this bench
Audits, checklists and mistakes Audit Mistakes: False Findings and Vanity Work Audits have their own failure catalogue: auditing during a promotion and judging against quiet months, findings that are really preferences, severity inflation, and the recommendation that cannot be verified. This guide names them so your audit can refuse them in advance. Audits, checklists and mistakes Audit Output: Turning Findings Into a Fix List People Follow An audit fails at the handover: findings die in a forty-page document nobody reopens. The output that works is a ranked list - each item with its cause, evidence, cost, owner and read rule - plus the deferred list with its reasons. This guide sets the format. Audits, checklists and mistakes Audit Timing: Seasons, Sales and When Not to Judge Funnels have seasons, and an audit or a read that ignores them manufactures findings. This guide sets the timing rules: audit in representative weeks, verify repairs within the same season's shape, and keep a calendar of your business's known distortions beside the baseline. Audits, checklists and mistakes Common CRO Mistakes on Small Stores, and the Corrections The recurring errors, collected from across this site and given one home: testing at unreadable traffic, copying big brands, chasing the blended rate, redesigning in panics, quoting borrowed benchmarks, and optimising pages while the offer leaks. Each with its correction as a rule. Audits, checklists and mistakes Copying Big Brands: Why Their Pages Are Not Your Evidence A market leader's page is the output of their brand strength, their traffic volume and their constraints - none of which you share. This guide separates what can legitimately be learned from admired pages (mechanisms, completeness, craft) from what cannot (their results, their compromises, their account walls). Audits, checklists and mistakes Dark Patterns: The Shortcuts That Cost More Than They Pay Dark patterns - fake urgency, hidden costs, obstructed exits, pre-ticked boxes, guilt copy - convert by deception, and the bill arrives as refunds, chargebacks, regulator attention and a market that learns not to believe you. This guide names the patterns and prices them honestly. Audits, checklists and mistakes The Full-Day Audit: Evidence, Recordings and the Funnel File The deep audit spends a day building the funnel file: segmented rates, a recording sample per weak stage, visitor voice from surveys and tickets, and findings written to the standard the fix list can act on. This is the method, in order, with the time boxes. Audits, checklists and mistakes The Heuristic Walkthrough: Reading Pages Like a Stranger A heuristic walkthrough judges pages against established usability principles - visibility of status, match with the visitor's language, error forgiveness - instead of against taste. This guide runs the method for conversion pages: the principles that matter, the scoring, and the limits of judgement-based evidence. Audits, checklists and mistakes The One-Hour Conversion Audit: A Structured First Pass Sixty minutes, five passes: the funnel numbers, the arrival promise, the product shortlist test, the mechanical checkout test, and the phone read. The hour audit finds defects and names the stage that deserves the full-day audit - it does not pretend to finish the diagnosis. Audits, checklists and mistakes The Quarterly Review: Baseline, Log and the Next Quarter's List Ninety minutes, four documents: the refreshed baseline, the change log read whole, the audit list's verdicts, and the next quarter's priorities drafted from all three. The quarterly review is where conversion work compounds - or, skipped, where it quietly evaporates. Audits, checklists and mistakes When to Hire Help: Freelancers, Agencies and the Questions to Ask Outside help is worth buying for method, evidence and hours you do not have - never for guarantees. This guide covers when hiring makes sense for a small business, what a real deliverable looks like, the questions that separate operators from salespeople, and the red flags that end conversations.