UX Optimisation: Finding and Fixing Friction on Your Website

UX optimisation is the process of finding the places where visitors struggle on your website — getting lost, hesitating, abandoning a form — and removing the cause. It works best as a loop rather than a one-off project: collect evidence, diagnose the problem, make a focused change and check whether it helped. You do not need a redesign to start; most friction can be fixed page by page.

What "friction" looks like

Friction is anything that makes a visitor work harder than they expected to. On business websites it usually falls into five groups:

Type of friction	Typical symptoms
Navigation	Visitors bounce between pages, use the back button repeatedly, or search for things that are in the menu
Content	They scroll past the key section, leave without reaching the call to action, or ask questions the page should answer
Forms	They start a form but do not submit it, or abandon at a specific field
Trust	They reach the contact page but leave, or call to ask basic questions about legitimacy
Technical	Slow loading, broken buttons on certain devices, elements that jump as the page loads

Naming the type matters because each has a different kind of fix.

Step 1: Find the friction

Use several sources of evidence. Any single one can mislead you.

Analytics

In GA4, look at the path from landing page to conversion. Where do sessions end? Which pages get traffic but almost no clicks onward? Compare mobile and desktop separately; problems often only appear on one. Our guide to GA4 reporting for business owners explains which reports to use.

Session recordings and heatmaps

Tools such as Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar show where people click, how far they scroll and where they hesitate. Look for patterns, not individual sessions: repeated clicks on something that is not a link ("rage clicks"), scroll depth stopping above the call to action, or taps on images people expect to enlarge. Check your privacy notice covers these tools and that recordings mask form inputs.

What customers tell you

Your sales team, receptionists and the people answering WhatsApp hear about friction every day. Ask them for the five questions they answer most often. If the answers are on the website, visitors are not finding them; if they are not, that is a content gap.

Usability testing

Watch a few people who match your audience try to complete a real task — "find out whether this clinic accepts your insurance and book an appointment" — while thinking aloud. Do not help them. Even a small number of sessions tends to surface the most serious problems, because people stumble in the same places.

Step 2: Diagnose the cause

Evidence tells you where; diagnosis tells you why. For each problem, write a sentence in this form:

Visitors on [page] are [behaviour] because [likely cause], shown by [evidence].

For example (hypothetical): "Mobile visitors on the corporate packages page are leaving without enquiring because the price ranges sit in a table that cannot be read without zooming, shown by recordings and a high exit rate on mobile only."

If you cannot complete the sentence, gather more evidence before changing anything.

Step 3: Prioritise

You will find more problems than you can fix at once. Score each from one to three on:

• Impact: how many visitors it affects and how close it is to a conversion
• Confidence: how strong the evidence is
• Effort: how easy it is to fix (three means easiest)

Add the scores and start at the top. Problems on high-traffic pages near the point of conversion — forms, pricing, contact, checkout — usually come first.

Step 4: Fix with focused changes

Some common fixes by friction type:

• Navigation: use the words customers use for menu labels, group services the way customers think about them, and add a clear route from each article to the related service.
• Content: move answers to frequent questions higher, break long sections into scannable chunks, and add an FAQ where questions genuinely repeat.
• Forms: remove non-essential fields, label every field clearly, show errors inline, and offer WhatsApp or call as alternatives.
• Trust: put reviews, licences and real photos near the decision point; show a physical address and response times.
• Technical: fix broken elements on the affected devices and address slow pages — see our guide to website speed optimisation.

For online stores, many of the same principles apply to product listings; our article on product page optimisation covers the specifics.

Step 5: Verify the result

Record the date of each change and compare the relevant metric for a comparable period before and after, allowing for seasonality — traffic patterns during Ramadan or the summer months can differ from the rest of the year. On sites with enough traffic, a controlled A/B test gives clearer answers. Where traffic is low, look for a consistent direction across several signals rather than a precise figure.

If a change did not help, revert it and revisit the diagnosis. The structured version of this loop is set out in our guide to the conversion rate optimisation process.

Key takeaways

• Friction falls into navigation, content, form, trust and technical problems.
• Combine analytics, recordings, customer feedback and usability testing to find it.
• Diagnose the cause before changing anything, and prioritise by impact, confidence and effort.
• Make focused fixes and verify them against a fair before-and-after comparison.

Wot Digital's conversion rate optimisation services can run this process with you, from research to testing. If the evidence points to a rebuild, our sister company WOT Innovation handles website design and development.