Find the moments where interested people give up

Friction is anything standing between deciding to act and acting. It rarely stops a determined customer, and very few customers are determined. Most are mildly interested, busy, and one small irritation away from leaving.

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Run a friction audit by completing the full journey yourself on a phone, on mobile data, as a stranger: find the page in search, understand the offer, find the price signal, and get in touch. Write down every moment of hesitation. Those moments, in order, are your fix list, and the early ones cost the most because everyone meets them.

Why you cannot see your own friction

You know where the contact page is. You know what the service is called. You have a fast connection and a large screen and no doubt about whether the business is legitimate. Every obstacle a stranger meets has already been removed from your path by familiarity.

The audit is therefore an exercise in deliberately handicapping yourself: small screen, slow connection, no prior knowledge, no patience. That is the visit that decides your revenue.

Set the audit up properly

Ten minutes of preparation makes the results considerably more honest.

  • Use a phone, not a laptop, and switch off wifi so you are on mobile data.
  • Start from a search result or an incognito window, not from a bookmark.
  • Land on a service page rather than the homepage, since that is what search sends people to.
  • Have a timer running, and note the clock at each step.
  • Do not fix anything while auditing. Write it down and continue.

Walk the journey in five steps

Follow the same sequence a real customer follows, and record what happens at each stage rather than what you expect to happen.

First, can you find yourself at all for the thing you sell. Second, does the page you land on explain itself in seconds. Third, can you tell whether it applies to you and roughly what it costs. Fourth, can you find evidence that the business is real and capable. Fifth, can you get in touch without effort.

Where friction usually hides

The same obstacles appear again and again across otherwise different businesses, which makes them worth checking directly even if your walkthrough did not surface them.

  • A cookie banner or pop-up covering the message before it is read.
  • The phone number not being tappable, or being absent from the page entirely.
  • Contact hidden behind a menu icon with no other route to it.
  • A form that scrolls under the keyboard, or rejects valid input.
  • No indication of cost anywhere, so the visitor cannot tell if you are for them.
  • Pages that end with nothing to do next.
  • Slow loading over mobile data, especially heavy images.

Turn the notes into an ordered fix list

Not all friction is equal. Sort your notes by how many visitors meet the obstacle, not by how annoying it felt. An unclear message is met by everybody. A broken filter on a niche page is met by a handful.

Then fix in that order, one at a time, noting the date of each change. Changing six things in one afternoon feels productive and leaves you unable to say which one mattered.

Repeat it with somebody who is not you

Once you have fixed the obvious things, hand your phone to somebody who does not know the business and ask them to get in touch with you as a customer would. Then say nothing at all and watch.

The silence is the hard part and the valuable part. Where they pause, where they scroll back, where they ask you a question: each of those is friction you can no longer see for yourself.

How Licheo handles friction

The conversion agent works on the path rather than only the pages: how a visitor gets from arriving to acting, with the fewest steps that still make sense.

Before anything is published a person completes the whole journey on a phone, because a path that reads well in a design file and fails under a thumb is a path that loses customers quietly.

Part of a larger guide

This page is one part of More revenue, same traffic. The other parts:

Questions people ask

What is website friction?
Anything that stands between deciding to act and acting: a long form, a hidden phone number, a slow page, an unclear next step. It rarely stops a determined buyer, but most buyers are only mildly determined.
How do I find friction on my own site?
Complete the whole journey on a phone, on mobile data, starting from search rather than a bookmark, and write down every hesitation. Then hand the phone to somebody who does not know your business and watch without helping.
Which friction should I fix first?
Whatever the most visitors meet. An unclear message or a hidden contact option affects everybody who arrives; a niche page problem affects a few. Order the list by reach, not by how irritating each one felt to you.
Do pop-ups cause friction?
They do when they interrupt before the visitor has understood the page, and especially when they are hard to close with a thumb. If you use one, let people read first, and make closing it effortless.
How often should I run this?
Twice a year, and after any significant change. Friction accumulates quietly as pages are added by different people, scripts pile up, and forms grow new fields that somebody needed once.

Remove what stands in the way

We walk the whole path as a customer would, then the agents rebuild the parts where people were quietly giving up.

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