Audit Your Product Page in 30 Minutes: Ten Questions Before You Change Anything

About Alex: a pen name. There is no shop behind it, and no results are claimed. What follows is a method and my opinion, and I'll mark which is which.

In short

If people visit your product page and few of them order, I would not rewrite the page. I would score it with ten plain questions, find the three weakest answers, and change one thing. The ten questions are my own checklist, built from what a stranger needs in order to say yes; they are not a benchmark and not a platform rule.

What you get from reading it:

• A ten-question scoring sheet you can copy
• A way to read your page as a stranger on a phone
• A rule that turns the three lowest scores into one written test

A page that gets visits and few orders is a frustrating thing to own. Nothing is obviously broken. The photos are fine, the product works, and you have read the page so many times that you can no longer see it. So the usual reflex starts: change the title, the photos, the price and the description on the same evening, and hope.

I'd rather you did not, for the reason the Why Your Shop Isn't Growing guide gives: if you change four things and the numbers move, you won't know which one did it. That guide ends with a single test. This one sits in front of it. It answers the question that guide leaves open: which single change?

An audit is a way to choose, not a way to fix. You are not trying to make every line perfect. You are trying to find the part of the page where, in my judgement, a stranger is most likely to give up, so that your one test goes there.

Who this is for. You have a page that strangers reach, and a way to see roughly how many arrive and how many order. If you have no page yet, write it from scratch first. If your page is fine and what you doubt is the price, that is a different question.

What it costs. Nothing, and no software. Thirty minutes, a phone, a pen, and ideally one other person for ten of those minutes.

Where the facts come from. None of this uses facts about a particular marketplace, platform or Pinterest. It is method and opinion. Where I say "I would", it is judgement; I have not run this on a live shop and I have no results to quote.

The ten checks in three stages

Ten questions are easier to remember when they are grouped by what a visitor is doing at that moment. The groups are my own way of cutting the list.

Order matters. A visitor who cannot tell what the page sells may never reach your delivery details, so a weak stage-one answer may deserve attention before a weak stage-three one. That is why the rule below breaks ties in favour of the earlier question. (It's a judgement, not a measurement.)

Step 1: Score the page with ten questions

You'll end up with a score from 0 to 20 and a visible pattern.

Score each question yes = 2, partly = 1, no = 0. "Partly" is allowed, and you will use it a lot. It means the answer is on the page but a stranger could miss it, or it is only half an answer.

A few notes on the tricky ones.

Check 5, proof. Honest proof can be thin. A page with no reviews yet and no claims about reviews can score yes. A page that says "loved by hundreds" when it isn't should score no, because a stranger can feel the stretch. Never invent proof to lift a score; that costs you more than it earns.

Check 6, objections. You can't know them from inside your head. Guess three questions a careful stranger might ask (size, compatibility, what happens if it doesn't suit), label them as guesses, and check whether the page answers each. Two of three answered is "partly".

Check 9, trust basics. I mean the dull things: who is behind this, how to contact them, and what the return or refund position is. What a platform requires or shows by default differs, and I haven't checked any of them, so look at your own page and see what a stranger would see.

Here is the sheet to copy. Print it, or paste it into a notes file.

PAGE AUDIT   page: ________
date: ________
Y = 2   P (partly) = 1   N = 0

FIRST FIVE SECONDS
1 What + for whom (first screen) __
2 First image answers a question __
3 Price + what is included       __
DOUBTS
4 Delivery / what happens next   __
5 Proof is honest                __
6 Likely objections answered     __
7 Matches the link or Pin        __
READY TO ACT
8 Works on a phone               __
9 Trust basics                   __
10 One clear next action         __

TOTAL ____ / 20

THREE LOWEST (ties: earlier first)
1st ___  2nd ___  3rd ___

Two cautions on reading the total.

• A total is not a grade for the product. I have no evidence that a page with 16 converts better than a page with 12, and I would not claim it. The total is only there to show whether you have one hole or many.
• Score yourself on the first pass, but then ask someone else to score it too, or at least wait a day. You wrote the page, so you will give yourself "yes" for things that live in your head.

Step 2: Read the page as a stranger on a phone

You'll end up with the sheet filled in from what a page shows, not from what you meant it to show.

This is the part of the audit I'd not skip. The ten questions are only as good as the reading behind them.

My method, which is an opinion and not a tested protocol:

1. Use a phone, not the laptop you edit on. Open the page the way a visitor would, by clicking the link or Pin that leads there, not by going to your editor.
2. Cover the page below the first screen. Look at only what appears without scrolling. Count to five, then look away.
3. Say out loud what you saw. What is it? Who is it for? What does it cost? If you hesitate on any of the three, that is checks 1 and 3 getting a "partly" or a "no".
4. Scroll once, slowly, as if you were deciding. Whenever a question forms in your head, write it down on the sheet margin. Those are your check 6 candidates.
5. Look for the action. Where would your thumb go to buy or to get the thing? If two things compete, check 10 is not a yes.
6. Check for broken things. Text too small to read, an image that crops oddly, a table that runs off the edge, a button you have to hunt for.

If you can get one person who has not seen the page, give them the phone and ask them to say what they think while they look. Then stay quiet. The moment you explain, you have turned them from a stranger into a helper, and you've lost the very thing you wanted. Write down what they say, including "I don't get this".

I cannot tell you how many people you need. In my judgement one fresh reader is worth more than a second pass of your own.

One more point on check 7, because it is the one I would expect to be marked by feel. Open the Pin or link that sent people, read its promise in one line, and then read the first screen of the page. If the Pin promised one thing and the page opens on another, score it no, however good both are on their own. Step 4 of Why Your Shop Isn't Growing shows the same Pin-to-page comparison.

Step 3: Turn the three lowest scores into one test

You'll end up with one change written down and two parked.

Add the scores. List the three lowest. If scores tie, take the earlier question first: a visitor meets check 1 before check 6, so a hole at the front costs more than one at the back (a judgement, not a measurement). If you have more than three at the same low score, still take only the first three in order.

Then the rule I'd follow:

1. Take the lowest-ranked check as the change. That is your one change.
2. Write the other two down as later tests, in order. Do not fold them in.
3. One narrow exception. If one sentence on the page fixes two of the three at once (for example, a single line under the headline that says what is included and how it arrives), you may count that as one change, but only if both fixes sit in the same line you are already editing. If it takes two edits in two places, it is two changes.

The rule was checked with a short Python script on three score sets: Noor's page, Noor's page after one change, and a tie case. It returned the three questions shown in each case. That checks the arithmetic of the rule only; it says nothing about whether the rule picks the best change in a real shop, and I have no evidence that it does. If your three lowest checks all scored yes, there is nothing on this sheet to change; go to the shop numbers.

If all ten checks score yes and the page still doesn't sell, the audit has told you something useful: the page is probably not the leak. Go back to the shop-level numbers in the Why Your Shop Isn't Growing guide and look at traffic, price and profit per order instead.

A worked example: Noor's page (imaginary)

Noor is an imaginary seller. The shop, the page, the visits and the scores below are all invented to show the method. They are not results from any real shop.

Noor sells a printable weekly meal-plan set. Her Pin promises "A one-page weekly meal plan for busy families". Her page's first screen shows a pretty mockup image and the title "Weekly Set 04 - Cozy Collection".

She reads the page on her phone, then asks her sister to look at it for the first time and talk aloud. Here is her sheet. The "why" column is her own note.

Total: 9 out of 20. The three lowest are checks 1, 4 and 6, all at zero, so the earlier-first rule orders them 1, 4, 6. Check 1 is her change. Checks 4 and 6 go on the parked list. Her sister's spoken reaction ("Is this a recipe thing?") is why she trusts her own zero on check 1.

The first screen, before and after. Everything below is invented.

BEFORE (imaginary page)
Title: Weekly Set 04 - Cozy Collection
Image: mockup, no text

AFTER (imaginary change)
Title: One-Page Weekly Meal Planner
  for Busy Families (Printable)
Line under it: Plan seven dinners and
  one shopping list on a single page.
Image: unchanged

She changes the headline and one line under it, and nothing else. Why one change only? Because she wants to know whether the fix worked. Then she writes the test using the plan from the Why Your Shop Isn't Growing guide:

LEAK: (from the shop numbers)
Page: visits but few orders.
HYPOTHESIS: If I say what it is and
  who it's for in the title and one
  line, more visits will end in an
  order, because a stranger can
  tell at once.
WHAT I CHANGE: Title and line under
  it only.
HOW I MEASURE: Orders out of visits,
  same dashboard, same window length.
START / END: ____ to ____
  (fixed before I start)
RESULT THAT WOULD CHANGE MY MIND:
  ____ (a bar set before I look)
PARKED: Check 4 (delivery), check 6
  (size and editing answers)

The re-scored sheet would show check 1 moving from 0 to 2 and, because the title now says "One-Page", check 7 from 1 to 2: a total of 12 out of 20, with checks 4 and 6 still the lowest. That is the sheet, not a result. Whether orders per visit changed is a different question, and the test is what answers it.

How to hand the result to the one-change test

You'll end up with the audit feeding the test and nothing else.

The Why Your Shop Isn't Growing guide asks you to name a leak, change one thing, write the measure as "out of how many visits", fix the dates first, and set a result that would change your mind. This audit supplies the "what I change" and the "because" lines. It does not replace the rest.

Three things carry over:

• Fix the dates and the bar before you edit. Otherwise the result can be bent to match what you hoped for.
• Mind the number of visits. If your page gets very few visits in the window, that guide explains why a rate from a small sample is mostly noise. In that case, treat the first test as a fix you make and watch, not as proof, and mark any result inconclusive if it is.
• Keep the parked list. Checks 4 and 6 in Noor's example are the next tests. Run them one at a time, after the first window closes.

Common ways to get this wrong

Frequently asked questions

Does a low total mean my product is bad? No. It means the page leaves questions open. The product is a separate matter and this audit does not look at it.

Should I rewrite the whole page? I would not, unless you can name why. A full rewrite changes everything at once and teaches you nothing about which part mattered.

My page scores 18 and still doesn't sell. Why? The page may not be the leak. Look at traffic fit (are the right people arriving?), price and profit per order. The shop-level guide walks through those.

Is ten the right number of questions? It's the number I chose so that each question can be answered in a minute or two; it is not tested. Add an eleventh for something particular to your product if you must, and keep the scoring rule as it is.

Can I use this on a platform page I can't edit much? On many platform pages you may still be able to change the first image, the title and the first lines (check yours). If a check is outside your control, score it anyway, then pick the lowest check you can change.

Your next step

Do the audit once, on one page, this week. Then choose by what your sheet shows. None of this is required, and no tool is needed for any of it.

• If check 1, 2 or 3 is your lowest: the first screen is the problem. If the page is missing blocks altogether, Write Your First Product Page: Seven Blocks is the build-from-scratch guide.
• If check 7 is your lowest and your traffic comes from Pinterest: compare the Pin's promise with the first screen, as in Step 2 above.
• If the page scores well and the doubt is how much a sale leaves you: Price Your Digital Product So It Leaves Profit is the better read.
• If you have your lowest check and one written test: go back to Step 5 of Why Your Shop Isn't Growing and run it.

Sources and checks

How we checked. No external sources were fetched for this article. The ten questions, the three stages, the scoring rule, and every suggestion about reading a page are method and opinion. Nothing here states a fact about a marketplace, a platform, Pinterest or buyer behaviour.

What was run. The scoring rule (yes 2, partly 1, no 0; three lowest; ties to the earlier question) was run in Python on three score sets: Noor's page (9 out of 20, lowest 1, 4, 6), Noor's page after one change (12 out of 20, lowest 4, 6, 2) and a tie case (lowest 9, 10, 1). The output matched the figures in the text.

Unverified. That the ten questions cover what makes strangers buy; that the earlier-first tie-break picks a better change than another order; that a second reader agrees with your scores; that the method lifts orders. Noor, her page, her sister and every number attached to them are invented.

Checks still to run. V01 to V03 in the front matter. Until real sellers have scored a page and run a test, this article stays in review.

What this guide does not claim. That any score predicts sales, that a total of 20 means a page is good, that the checks are exhaustive, or that following it will raise orders.