Fix a Conversion Flow That Leaks

There is one flow in your product that costs you more than all the others combined. People arrive at it with intent — they clicked the ad, they picked the plan, they started the signup — and then they leave. Traffic is not the problem, because they got there. The product is not the problem, because they never reached it. Something in the space between arriving and finishing is quietly taking a fraction of every visitor, every day, and unlike a bug it never shows up in an error log.

The instinct is to redesign it. Someone suggests a shorter form, someone else wants a new headline, a third person is sure it is the price, and whichever opinion has the most seniority behind it becomes the change. Two weeks later the number is roughly what it was, or slightly worse, and nobody can say why — because four things changed at once and none of them were measured against a prediction.

This guide runs the other way round. It fixes one flow, in a fixed order, where each step’s output is the next step’s input: a number tells you where the flow leaks, research tells you why people leave at that point, and only then do you touch anything — message first, then offer, then proof, then friction — with each change shipped as a test whose metric was committed before you looked at the result. Each phase is driven by a skill: Lean Analytics finds the leak, CRO Methodology researches it and later designs the test, StoryBrand fixes the promise, $100M Offers fixes what is being promised, Influence places the proof, and The Design of Everyday Things removes what remains in the way.

Cutting friction only pays once somebody wants the thing. Run the order backwards and you get a faster path to a decision nobody is making.

One scoping rule before we start. The unit of work here is a flow with one action at the end — a landing page whose job is a demo request, a signup whose job is a created account, a checkout whose job is a paid order, an onboarding whose job is a first real use. If the page you are looking at has three competing calls to action, you do not have a flow yet, you have a menu, and the first fix is to decide what it is for. Everything below assumes that decision is made.

Phase 1 — Find the leak with numbers, not opinions

Start by refusing to guess. The Lean Analytics skill exists to answer two questions before anyone proposes a change: which step actually loses people, and what single number are we trying to move. Its core discipline is the One Metric That Matters — not a dashboard, one number, chosen for the stage you are at and the decision you are about to make — and its sharpest tool is its intolerance for vanity metrics. Pageviews on the checkout page are a vanity metric. Step-to-step completion rate for the same session cohort is not.

The output of this phase is a map of the flow with a real number on every transition: how many enter, how many reach each step, how many finish, and where the biggest absolute drop sits. Absolute matters more than percentage here — a step that loses 60% of the 200 people who reach it costs you less than a step that loses 25% of 4,000. Segment it at least once, because aggregate rates hide the interesting failure: mobile versus desktop, new versus returning, paid versus organic. A flow that converts fine on desktop and collapses on mobile is not a messaging problem.

If the honest answer is that you have no instrumentation, this phase is where you add it, and that is not a delay — it is the phase. A flow you cannot measure cannot be optimized, only redecorated. Get event tracking on each step transition, wait for enough volume to be meaningful, and resist the temptation to start changing things while the data collects. The skill will also make you write down the current baseline, which matters more than it sounds: without a recorded before, every later claim of improvement is a memory.

By the end of phase one you should be able to finish this sentence with a number in it: we lose most people at ____, and the metric we are moving is ____. Until you can, everything downstream is decoration.

Phase 2 — Learn why people leave, in their words

A number tells you where, never why, and the gap between those two is where most optimization work goes to die. This is the CRO Methodology skill’s first job. Drawn from Karl Blanks and Ben Jesson’s Making Websites Win, it treats a conversion problem as a diagnosis before prescription discipline: the leak is a symptom, the objection is the cause, and you do not get to invent the objection.

The method is to gather voice-of-customer evidence at or near the leak and read it for objections in the customer’s own language. Exit surveys on the leaking step (“what stopped you from finishing today?”), session recordings of abandoned sessions, support tickets and chat logs mentioning the flow, sales-call notes, and reviews of you and your competitors. What you are looking for is the recurring sentence — the thing five different people said five different ways. That sentence is your objection, and its counter is your fix.

The skill’s second contribution here is the friction and motivation audit of the leaking step itself: what is being asked of the visitor at that moment, what they get in return, what they have to believe to continue, and what could go wrong for them if they do. That last one is the anxiety axis and it is chronically underweighted — people abandon checkouts over “will this auto-renew and can I get out” far more often than over one extra form field.

Phase two ends with a written list of ranked objections in customer language, not a list of proposed changes. Resist the urge to jump to fixes here; the next four phases each attack a different class of objection, and knowing which class yours falls into is what tells you where to spend the effort.

Phase 3 — Make the promise the visitor’s, not yours

Now the fixes begin, and they begin with the message, because it is the cheapest thing to change and the most likely thing to be wrong. The StoryBrand skill’s core move is the one most product copy gets backwards: the customer is the hero and you are the guide. Your flow’s copy should describe the visitor’s desired outcome and what stands between them and it, not your product’s cleverness and your team’s journey.

Apply it to the leaking step specifically, not the whole site. The test is a five-second one: if someone lands on this step cold, can they say what they get, what they have to do, and why it is worth doing? Most leaking steps fail on the first — they describe the mechanism (“connect your data source”) instead of the outcome (“see which pages lose money, in about five minutes”). The skill’s one-liner structure — character, problem, plan, success — is a useful forcing function for the step’s headline and its button label, which should say what happens next rather than “Submit” or “Continue”.

There is a second, quieter failure this phase catches: a promise that changes between steps. An ad promising a free trial that lands on a page asking for a card, a plan page saying “cancel anytime” and a checkout that never mentions it again. Every handoff in the flow is a place where the visitor re-evaluates, and an unexplained change of terms at a handoff reads as a bait and switch even when it is an oversight.

Phase 4 — Make the offer worth acting on now

If the message is clear and people still leave, the problem may not be how you said it — it may be what you are asking them to accept. The $100M Offers skill works the Value Equation: perceived value rises with the dream outcome and the likelihood of achieving it, and falls with the time it takes and the effort and sacrifice required. Most weak offers are weak on the bottom half of that equation, and most teams try to fix them by discounting the top.

At the conversion point specifically, four levers are available without touching your price. Shorten perceived time-to-value (“your first report in under ten minutes”, not “get started”). Reduce effort and sacrifice (“import from your existing tool, no setup”). Raise likelihood of success with a guarantee that names the actual risk the visitor is carrying. And add a bonus that removes an adjacent obstacle rather than padding the box — for a B2B tool, the migration done for you beats a free ebook every time.

The honest caveat: sometimes the offer cannot change. Price is contractual, the guarantee is set by legal, the packaging is fixed for this quarter. That is a real constraint and it narrows this phase to presentation — the same offer described in terms of what the buyer gets rather than what they pay, the annual saving stated as a number rather than a percentage, the guarantee moved from the footer to beside the button. Presentation of a fixed offer is a smaller lever than a better offer, but it is not zero.

Phase 5 — Put honest proof where the doubt is

By this point the visitor understands the promise and finds the offer reasonable. What stops them now is a private question they are not going to ask you: is this real, and will I regret it? The Influence skill supplies the answer with Cialdini’s principles — social proof, authority, liking, commitment and consistency, reciprocity, scarcity, unity — used as a placement problem rather than a decoration problem.

Placement is the whole trick. A testimonial wall on the homepage does nothing for someone hesitating at the payment step; the proof has to sit at the point of doubt, and it has to speak to that doubt. If the research in phase two said people fear the migration, the proof beside the button is a customer saying the migration took an afternoon — not a logo grid, not a star rating. Match each ranked objection to the specific form of evidence that answers it, and put it where the objection occurs.

The skill is equally clear about the limit, and this matters more in a checkout than anywhere else on your site. Manufactured scarcity, fake countdown timers, invented “12 people are viewing this” counters, and testimonials with stock photos are not persuasion — they are a short-term lift bought with long-term trust, and they are increasingly illegal in consumer contexts. The version that works is scarcity that is true, urgency with a real reason, and social proof from real named people. If you have little proof yet, the correct move is a plan to acquire it, not to fabricate it.

Phase 6 — Remove what stands between deciding and doing

Only now, with a visitor who wants the thing, does friction removal pay. The Design of Everyday Things skill governs this phase because the failures here are not aesthetic — they are gulfs of execution and evaluation. The gulf of execution is the distance between what the visitor wants to do and what the interface lets them do; the gulf of evaluation is the distance between what the system did and what the visitor can tell it did.

In a leaking flow these show up as a small, boring, expensive list: a required field with no explanation of why it is required, an error message that says “invalid input” without saying which input or what would be valid, a card form that rejects spaces in the number, a submit button that gives no feedback so it gets clicked three times, a step with no visible progress so the visitor cannot tell whether they are two fields or twenty from finishing. Each one is worth a fraction of a percent, and there are usually a dozen of them.

Two specific applications deserve their own pass because they carry disproportionate weight. Error recovery: errors should be prevented by constraints where possible (input masks, sensible defaults, forgiving parsing), and where they happen, the message should name the problem, name the fix, and preserve everything the user already typed. Mobile reality: run the flow on a real phone on a real connection, because the desktop version of a form is not the same artifact as the thumb-driven one, and phase one’s segmentation probably already told you that.

Phase 7 — Prove the fix worked

You now have a stack of changes. Shipping them together is how you learn nothing. The last phase returns to CRO Methodology for test design, and its central rule is that the metric is committed before the result is seen. Write the hypothesis as a sentence — because research says X, changing Y should move Z by roughly N — then fix the primary metric, one guardrail metric, the sample size, and the stop date, and do not look before you get there.

The guardrail is the part teams skip and regret. A change that lifts checkout completion while raising refunds has not worked; a signup change that lifts registrations while dropping activation has moved a number, not the business. Pick the downstream metric your change could plausibly damage and commit to watching it alongside the one you are trying to move.

If your traffic cannot reach significance — and for most flows below a few thousand entries a week, it cannot — the answer is not to run an underpowered test and believe the result. It is to switch evidence types honestly: pre-committed before-and-after windows of equal length, qualitative validation with five to eight users against a stated prediction, and a bias toward bold changes over small ones, because only a large effect is detectable at low volume. State which mode you are in, and stop calling it an A/B test when it is not.

Your checklist

Work down this list in order. Each item assumes the one above it is done.

• Leak located. You can name the step that loses the most people in absolute terms, segmented at least by device and source, with a recorded baseline.
• One metric named. A single number defines success for this flow, and everyone working on it agrees what it is.
• Objections researched. You have a ranked list of reasons people leave, quoted in customer language, from at least two evidence sources.
• Promise fixed. The leaking step states the visitor’s outcome in five seconds, and the promise does not change between steps.
• Offer strengthened. The Value Equation has been worked at the conversion point, or presentation has been fixed where the offer is locked.
• Proof placed. Every top objection has honest evidence sitting where that objection occurs, and no manufactured urgency survives.
• Friction removed. Errors name the fix, feedback follows every action, progress is visible, and the flow has been completed on a real phone.
• Tests committed. Each shipped change has a written hypothesis, a primary metric, a guardrail, a sample size, and a stop date fixed in advance.

Common mistakes

Redesigning the whole page. A redesign changes twenty things and teaches you nothing about which mattered. Worse, it usually reverts accumulated small wins nobody documented. Change what the research pointed at.

Cutting friction first. It is the most satisfying phase and the least effective one when run early. A three-field form for something nobody wants converts about as badly as a nine-field one.

Copying a competitor’s flow. Their flow was shaped by their traffic, their price, their objections and their brand — and you are seeing the current version, not the tests that produced it. It is a source of hypotheses, never a source of answers.

Optimizing a step that is not the leak. Teams work on the step they can see rather than the step that costs them, which is usually one they never look at because so few people reach it.

Peeking at running tests. Checking a test daily and stopping when it looks good is a reliable way to ship noise. That is what the pre-committed stop date is protecting you from.

Fixing the flow and ignoring the traffic. If a channel sends people who were never going to buy, the flow is not what is broken. Phase one’s segmentation is what tells you the difference.

Frequently asked questions

How is this different from a general website audit?

Scope. A site audit looks at everything — every page’s message, speed, structure and search visibility — and returns a broad list. This guide takes one flow with one action at the end and works it to a measured result. Use Improve an Existing Website when the whole site needs a pass. Use this when you already know which flow is costing you and want it fixed properly rather than surveyed.

Do I need real traffic for this to be worth running?

You need enough to see where people drop, which is far less than you need to A/B test. Even a few hundred sessions through a flow will show you the step that loses the most people, and phases two through six are qualitative — objections, message, offer, proof, friction — so they work at any volume. What low traffic changes is the last phase: you evaluate with pre-committed before-and-after windows and user sessions instead of split tests, and you make bigger changes because only large effects are detectable.

Why does message come before offer, and offer before proof?

Because each answers a different question and they are asked in that sequence. Message answers “is this for me and what do I get” — if that fails, nothing later is even read. Offer answers “is what I get worth what it costs me” — a clear promise for a bad deal still loses. Proof answers “is this real” — which is only a question once someone wants the deal. Friction answers “can I actually do it”, which only matters for someone who has decided. Reordering means fixing answers to questions the visitor never reached.

What if the research says people leave because of the price?

Take it seriously but read it carefully, because “too expensive” is the most common thing people say and the least reliable thing they mean. It usually means the value was not established, the risk was not removed, or the comparison was against the wrong alternative. Phase four is where you test that: strengthen the value side of the equation, add a guarantee that names the real risk, and see whether the objection survives. If it does after that work, you have a genuine pricing question, and Monetizing Innovation is the skill for it.

Can I run this on an in-product onboarding rather than a marketing page?

Yes — the unit of work is any flow with one action at the end, and an onboarding qualifies. What changes is the evidence: product analytics and session recordings rather than page funnels, and phase six carries more weight because the friction lives in the interface rather than the form. If the concern is the whole product’s engagement rather than one flow, Improve an Existing App is the better fit.

Start with the number

The temptation is to start with the fix, because the fix is the fun part and everyone has one in mind. Start with the number instead. An hour spent mapping the flow and reading forty exit surveys will tell you which of the next five phases actually applies to you, and will save you from the redesign that changes everything and moves nothing.

Install the library with npx skills add wondelai/skills --all --global and work the phases in order — or hand the whole sequence to the Conversion Optimization journey, which asks you the decision questions at each phase and records the answers in your project’s docs/ folder so the work survives between sessions.