BigCommerce Conversion Rate Optimization Audit for Product Pages and Checkout
BigCommerce gives you a solid checkout out of the box, so the orders you lose usually leak earlier: on a product page that hides the shipping cost, a theme carrying scripts from apps you stopped using, or a buy button below the fold on a phone. Converto reads the live page and tells you which of those it found, in order of what it costs you.
Why this tends to convert:
Suggestions are data-informed, not guarantees.
In short
BigCommerce conversion rate optimization means getting more of the shoppers already on your store to place an order, by fixing the product, cart and checkout pages they pass through. Because BigCommerce ships a three-step Optimized One-Page Checkout by default, most of the remaining leaks sit in places the platform leaves to you: shipping costs that appear only at checkout, guest checkout settings, app scripts loaded on every page, and product pages whose buy button and terms sit below the first screen on a phone. Converto audits any BigCommerce URL in about a minute with no app to install, ranks the fixes and writes replacement copy.
Why it fits
BigCommerce merchants, the agencies that build their Stencil themes, and the marketers paying for traffic to their product pages.
Scored as a store page
Converto detects a product page or a cart and checkout page and weights the score for it. On a product page speed counts for 22 of 100 points and the call to action for 26. On a checkout page the call to action counts for 32 and layout for 28, and copy drops to 12.
Shows what your apps cost in speed
Every app you add can inject a script through the theme or Script Manager. The audit reports time to first byte, document time, page weight and the count of third-party scripts, so you can see which pages carry the load.
Finds costs that arrive too late
The audit reads where shipping, tax and fees are first mentioned on the page. A price with no stated shipping, or shipping first mentioned below the buy button, is reported with how far down the page it sits.
No app, no API key, no admin login
Converto reads the public URL the way a first-time shopper does. Nothing is installed in your control panel and nothing is added to the store it measures, so you can also audit a competitor store or a staging theme.
What BigCommerce already does for your conversion rate
Start with the good news, because it changes where you should look. BigCommerce's default checkout is the Optimized One-Page Checkout, and in its current form the help center describes just three main steps: Customer, Shipping and Payment. The billing address is no longer a separate step; it sits under Payment with a "Same as shipping address" box. Country defaults from the shopper's IP address, Google Address Autocomplete is available, and wallet buttons can be placed at the very top of checkout for guest shoppers. That is a better starting point than many stores build for themselves.
So a BigCommerce conversion audit is rarely about rebuilding the checkout. The orders you lose tend to leak in four places the platform leaves to the merchant: a checkout setting nobody revisited after launch, a product page that hides the full cost, a theme weighed down by apps, and a first screen on a phone that shows the product photo and nothing you can tap.
The BigCommerce settings and pages behind each finding
The left column is what Converto reports from the live page. The right column is where a BigCommerce merchant usually makes the change, using the names from BigCommerce's own help center.
| What the audit reports | Why it costs orders | Where you change it in BigCommerce |
|---|---|---|
| A price on the page with no shipping cost or terms stated, or shipping first mentioned below the buy button | Extra costs are the top reason shoppers give for leaving during checkout in Baymard's research, at 40 percent | A free shipping threshold or shipping line in the product template, and the promotional banners checkout can show |
| A password field on the checkout with no guest option | Being asked to create an account is the fourth reason in the same research, at 18 percent | Settings, then Checkout, under the customer account options: guest checkout, guest checkout with an account created after the order, or required sign-in |
| No guarantee, returns or secure-payment line near the order button | Not trusting the site with card details is cited by 19 percent | A short line under the button in the product template, and the checkout heading area that Page Builder can style |
| A form over 5 fields, or fields that open the wrong keyboard on a phone | Each field is another chance to stop; a long or complicated checkout is cited by 17 percent | Checkout options such as the order comments box, the coupon field shown or hidden behind a link, and any fields an app added to account or quote forms |
| Time to first byte over 800 ms, a document over 2.5 seconds or 500 KB, more than 15 third-party scripts | Shoppers on a phone wait for every one of them before the page settles | Script Manager and the apps that load on every page, chat and review widgets, and image sizes in the theme |
| A headline over 14 words, a first call to action below 35 percent of the page, more than 6 competing calls to action | The add to cart button is the action you paid the click for, and on a phone it falls below the first screen | The product page layout in your Stencil theme or Page Builder: gallery height, related product blocks and badges above the button |
| Tap targets under 44 by 44 pixels | Quantity selectors and variant swatches are the controls shoppers miss most on a phone | Theme styles for buttons, swatches and the quantity input |
Baymard's figures come from its cart abandonment research, which averages 70.22 percent abandonment across 50 studies and lists the reasons shoppers give once people who were only browsing are removed. They describe ecommerce in general, not BigCommerce stores specifically. Every deduction in a Converto report names the measurement it came from, so you can confirm it on the page before changing anything.
How do I improve my BigCommerce conversion rate?
Short answer: show the full cost on the product page, check that guest checkout is switched on under Settings and then Checkout, remove apps whose scripts load on every page, and make sure the add to cart button sits in the first screen on a phone. Then audit your three best-selling product pages and the page your ads land on, in that order.
The order follows the money. Product pages carry most of the traffic, so a leak there touches the most shoppers. The checkout carries the shoppers who already chose a product and a price, so it is the most expensive place to lose one, but on BigCommerce it is also the part the platform has already done the most work on. Fix the pages you own first.
What is a good conversion rate for a BigCommerce store?
There is no neutral, BigCommerce-specific benchmark we could verify. The figures that circulate come from agencies and app vendors, and they disagree: one fulfillment company quotes an agency as putting the BigCommerce average at 2.5 percent for 2025, while a CRO vendor cites 2.1 percent across all ecommerce sectors for 2022. Different years and different methods, so neither tells you much about your store. A more useful comparison is your own store split by device and by channel. A phone conversion rate far below desktop is the first thing to investigate, because it usually points at the first screen and the speed findings above.
Stencil theme or custom checkout
If you are tempted to fix conversion by replacing the checkout, read the trade-off BigCommerce itself spells out first. Stencil themes allow minor style changes to the checkout, and Page Builder handles the logo, fonts, colors and header image. Anything deeper means a custom checkout built on the Checkout SDK, and BigCommerce notes that custom checkouts no longer receive automatic updates and may affect PCI DSS compliance. For most stores that is a large cost for a problem that lives on the product page. Audit the pages before the shopper reaches checkout, fix what you find, and only then decide whether the checkout itself is the bottleneck.
Two checkout settings are worth checking on any store because they are a single change each. Guest checkout has three modes, and the middle one, letting a guest buy and creating the account after the order, keeps the account for repeat buyers without putting a password between the shopper and the pay button. BigCommerce also offers guests a second chance to create an account on the order confirmation page, which is the better moment to ask. And if you accept wallets, the "Top of checkout wallet buttons" setting moves them above the Customer step for guests, so a phone shopper can pay without typing an address at all.
Apps, Script Manager and the weight nobody removes
A BigCommerce store tends to collect apps the way a WordPress site collects plugins: reviews, upsells, chat, loyalty, popups, a second analytics tag from a test someone ran last year. Many of them add a script through Script Manager or the theme, and uninstalling an app does not always remove what it added. Converto counts the third-party scripts on the page it fetched and flags more than 15, alongside time to first byte and document weight. The report tells you whether the weight comes from your server or from other companies' scripts, which decides whether you call BigCommerce support, your theme developer, or nobody, because you can turn the app off yourself.
What Converto can and cannot reach on a BigCommerce store
Converto fetches the URL you paste as a first-time shopper with no cart and no login. That has real consequences, so here they are before you buy:
- Product, category, brand and landing pages are read in full. These are where paid and organic clicks land, and where most copy, cost, layout and speed findings come from.
- The cart and checkout URLs are read as an empty-cart visitor sees them, which is usually an empty cart. To audit the checkout form itself, use a page that renders it without a session, such as a staging store or a buy-now link page if you run one.
- Customer account pages and B2B Edition portals behind a login are not read.
The audit says nothing about your prices, your product photos as photography, your stock, or the quality of the traffic you send, and it cannot prove that a change caused a lift. It tells you that a known leak is present and how much of the score it costs. For the checkout step on any platform, see checkout page optimization, and for product pages in depth, ecommerce product page optimization.
BigCommerce CRO agency, testing app or an audit tool
There are three ways to pay for this work, and they answer different questions.
| Route | What you get | What it costs you | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| A BigCommerce CRO or development agency | Someone who audits, designs and builds the changes in your theme | A project fee or monthly retainer, and weeks of lead time | Stores where a lift clearly covers the fee, or that need theme work done for them |
| An A/B testing or personalization app | Split tests and personalized content on the storefront | A subscription, another script on every page, and the traffic to finish a test | Stores with enough orders to reach a result |
| Converto | A scored audit of any page with ranked fixes and replacement copy | A monthly plan, nothing installed | Knowing what to fix first, and re-checking a page after each change |
Testing needs volume most stores do not have. Detecting a 10 percent relative lift on a page converting at 2 percent takes about 81,000 visitors per variation at 95 percent confidence and 80 percent power; the arithmetic is in A/B test sample size. Below that, fixing known leaks beats testing. If you are deciding whether to hire outside help, CRO agency vs CRO tool sets out when each one pays, and if your paid search is about to go to an agency, check the product pages first so the retainer is not spent sending clicks to a page that leaks.
Moving from another platform
Stores that moved to BigCommerce from WooCommerce or Shopify often carry old habits into the new theme: the same long product description above the buy button, the same popup on entry, the same five review widgets. The checks are the same on every platform, which also makes Converto useful during a migration: audit the old product page and the new one side by side before you switch the domain. The WooCommerce version of these checks is on WooCommerce conversion rate optimization, and the Shopify one on Shopify landing page optimization.
Questions
BigCommerce stores questions
Show the full cost, including shipping, on the product page; check that guest checkout is on under Settings and then Checkout; remove apps whose scripts load on every page; and keep the add to cart button in the first screen on a phone. Then audit your best-selling product pages and your ad landing page in that order.
We could not verify a neutral BigCommerce-specific benchmark. Agency and vendor figures range from about 2.1 to 2.5 percent and use different years and methods. Compare your store with its own previous quarter, split by device and channel, and investigate first if phone converts far below desktop.
Yes. Under Settings and then Checkout, BigCommerce lets shoppers check out as guests, check out as guests with an account created after the order, or requires them to sign in. Guests can also create an account on the order confirmation page.
Stencil themes allow minor style changes, and Page Builder covers the logo, fonts, colors and header image. Deeper changes need a custom checkout built on the Checkout SDK, which BigCommerce says no longer receives automatic updates and may affect PCI DSS compliance.
No. Converto reads the public URL of the page, so there is no app, no API key and no control panel access, and it adds no script to your store. You make the changes yourself from the ranked fix list.
It audits what the checkout URL shows to a visitor with no cart, which is usually an empty cart. To audit the form, use a page that renders it without a session, such as a staging store. Product, category, brand and landing pages are read in full.
Converto plans start from $29 a month billed yearly. Each plan includes a monthly allowance of audits, and every audit covers copy, CTA, layout, speed and AI-readability with ranked fixes and ready-to-ship variants.
Paste your page and see what is leaking
Drop in any live URL and Converto audits the copy, layout, CTAs, speed, and AI-readability of the page you already have, then hands you ready-to-ship variants to lift signups and sales. Suggestions are data-informed, not guarantees.