Why I Use BrowserStack to Investigate Website Conversion Problems

Yesterday, I was testing a booking platform that was struggling with conversion rates. Customers were searching for products, selecting their items and reaching checkout, but a considerable number weren’t completing their purchases.

On my MacBook, everything seemed to work fine. The pages loaded correctly, the buttons were responsive and the checkout looked perfectly usable.

But there’s a problem with testing websites on your own computer: your customers aren’t necessarily using the same device, browser or operating system as you.

I started by looking at the analytics. Rather than focusing exclusively on overall conversion rates, I wanted to understand which devices people were using, which browsers they preferred and where they were dropping out of the booking process.

That’s when I opened BrowserStack.

Testing the same website on different devices

One of my favorite things about BrowserStack is how easily you can switch between devices and browsers.

I started with an iPhone using Safari, then moved to a Samsung Galaxy running Chrome. I also tested the website on Windows using an older browser version.

BrowserStack gives you access to real devices, so you’re not simply resizing a browser window and pretending it’s a phone.

You can select specific operating system versions, change screen resolutions, rotate devices and even simulate slower internet connections. It also provides developer tools, screenshots and session recordings to help investigate issues.

On one of the smaller screens, I noticed something interesting. The booking form worked, but the layout required considerably more scrolling than on desktop. Important information was taking up valuable screen space, and the button to continue wasn’t immediately visible.

Nothing was technically broken. Yet the experience was noticeably less convenient.

I couldn’t conclude that this explained the poor conversion rate, but it gave me something concrete to investigate rather than another assumption.

Your analytics should guide your testing

I think this is where website analytics and tools like BrowserStack become particularly powerful together.

If most of your customers use Android devices, why spend most of your testing time on an iPhone? If Safari users have a significantly lower checkout completion rate than Chrome users, isn’t that worth investigating?

Google Analytics 4 and Amplitude can help identify which devices, operating systems and browsers your visitors use. It can also help you compare conversion rates across those segments.

BrowserStack then lets you reproduce those environments and experience the website more closely to how your customers do.

Of course, you don’t need to test every device on the market. Start with the combinations that account for most of your traffic, then investigate the ones showing unusual behavior.

Yesterday’s exercise reminded me of something important: a website can work perfectly from a technical perspective and still offer a poor customer experience.

And sometimes, understanding why people aren’t converting starts with something as simple as looking at your website through their screen.

Do you need help understanding why conversion is underperforming on specific user-segments?

Send me an email: [email protected] and I’ll help you resolve it.