Client Onboarding Guide

How a CRO engagement starts

Most CRO clients begin with our 90-Day Performance Gateway, during this period we typically:

• Audit your current site, tracking, UX and performance.
• Agree baselines for Revenue Per Visitor (RPV) and Purchase Conversion Rate.
• Deliver speed*, UX and funnel improvements and begin A/B testing.
• Measure results in your own GA4 account against the agreed baseline.

You pay £0 in performance fees until GA4 confirms that we have hit the agreed uplift.

Agreeing the baseline and success target

Before any performance fees can ever be charged, we must both agree what success means for your WooCommerce website, together we will:

• Agree the baseline Revenue Per Visitor (RPV) (net revenue divided by sessions).
• Agree the baseline Purchase Conversion Rate (purchases divided by sessions or eligible sessions).
• Record these agreed baselines in writing.

There are two ways we do this, depending on your data:

• Standard (12-month GA4 history). Where you have at least 12 months of stable GA4 data, we use year-on-year comparisons for the same months (to account for seasonality) and agree a fair baseline.
• Pegged Baseline (synthetic baseline). Where data is messy, new or incomplete, we agree a fixed peg (for example, a % Conversion Rate and a specific RPV). This peg is written down and becomes the baseline for our guarantee.

In both cases, we only move forward once you are comfortable that the baseline is fair and clearly documented, this clearly defines success in a measurable way.

Success threshold and uplift

Our standard Success Threshold is:

At least a 12% uplift in RPV or Conversion Rate (usually measured year-on-year in GA4 for the same calendar period, or versus the agreed Pegged Baseline).

To calculate the value created by our work, we use your RPV numbers:

Incremental Revenue = Traffic × (New RPV − Baseline RPV)

Incremental Revenue is the additional value created per visitor after optimisation, not your total revenue and not the revenue from traffic or ad spend you already buy (for exampple, so we don't profit from a big marketing campaign).

When performance fees start and how billing works

• During the 90-Day Performance Gateway we work at our risk: you don’t pay performance fees until we hit the Success Threshold.
• We monitor your GA4 data in rolling 30-day windows.
• As soon as a 30-day window shows a 12% or higher uplift in RPV or Conversion Rate (against the agreed baseline), we have met the agreed success threshold.
• At that point we move to a paid plan and that successful 30-day window becomes your first billable period in line with your contract.
• Invoices are issued monthly in arrears and clearly break down the Base Retainer and Performance Fee, based on Incremental Revenue.
• The gateway is not a guaranteed 90-day free period.

Your plan and fee cap are set by your annual online turnover band, as shown on our Our Model page, and by whether you chose the Hybrid Partnership model (base plus percentage of Incremental Revenue, capped) or a Fixed-Fee (only on request) option for stability.

What is included in the CRO scope

Unless otherwise stated in your agreement or SLA, our CRO programme typically includes the work required to deliver uplift:

• Stage 1 – Speed and technical optimisations – Core Web Vitals, caching and script optimisation, image optimisation, performance tuning and reliable GA4 setup.*
• Stage 2 – UX and funnel enhancements – UX and UI audit, product, cart and checkout improvements, trust signals, navigation and mobile usability fixes.
• Stage 3 – Experimentation and A/B testing – hypotheses, building and running tests, monitoring results and rolling out winners.
• Analytics and reporting – CRO focused GA4 configuration, basic behavioural insight and regular performance reporting as agreed.

All implementation work for CRO improvements is included in the CRO fees (base retainer plus performance component), subject to the caps and guardrails in your contract.

What is outside CRO scope (billable development)

To avoid grey areas, anything outside the CRO scope is treated as separate development work and billed at our agreed hourly rate (typically £65 per hour plus VAT, or as specified in your SLA) on a time and materials basis. We do not offer fixed prices for development; estimates are planning guides only.

Common examples include:

• Fixing legacy issues in themes, plugins, custom code or databases that we did not build.
• Rebuilding or replacing unsupported, deprecated or poorly built components, for example a slow or broken product filter.
• New sections, templates, bespoke modules or major design re skins not agreed as part of the CRO roadmap.
• Large data migrations, re platforming, new integrations or complex third party system work.
• Marketing work such as email campaigns, SEO projects, paid media and content creation.
• Issues we could not reasonably foresee that may affect the CRO programme.

Put simply, CRO work (speed, UX, experimentation and associated implementation) is included in the CRO model. General development work outside that scope is billed separately, with clear estimates and approvals.

* If a site has serious technical problems, we may need to stabilise it first. We already improve performance as part of CRO, but if a website has major underlying issues such as plugin bloat, unstable templates, recurring errors or anything else that prevents proper optimisation, we will flag this early. In these cases some essential fixes may be needed before CRO work can run properly so results are reliable and measurable.

Optional development support

As part of our work, you have access to our in-house development team, with over 14 years of experience in WooCommerce and WordPress builds. They support the technical side of our CRO programme, and they’re also available if you would like us to handle general development work or resolve issues that sit outside the CRO scope. This support is entirely optional, but can be helpful if something on your site needs attention while we’re working together.

Our guarantee on work we build

We stand behind our own development work, and guarantee it fully, for new features or deliverables we design and build for you:

• If a deliverable fails to meet the written acceptance criteria within 30 days of acceptance (a Defect in our Terms), we will investigate and correct it at no additional charge.
• After that period, fixes, changes and enhancements are treated as billable development work and charged at the agreed hourly rate.

How we handle legacy and inherited issues

Many clients come to us with an existing WooCommerce build, in those cases we inherit:

• Existing themes and child themes.
• Historic plugin and integration choices.
• Database structures and content models.
• Prior custom code and tracking implementations.

We are happy to take these on, but we must be clear that we cannot guarantee legacy work we did not build, if a legacy element fails or needs replacing, the work required to fix or rebuild it is:

• Flagged to you with a clear explanation of the risk or impact.
• Estimated and agreed in writing before we proceed.
• Billed at our standard development rate, or as specified in your SLA or Order.

Common examples include:

• A third party plugin becoming deprecated, unsupported or materially incompatible.
• A slow or unstable product filter that needs a complete rebuild to meet performance (CWV) standards.
• Broken or incomplete historic tracking that must be redesigned for GA4.
• Theme or layout bugs that pre date our involvement.

We always work to minimise cost and disruption. We have spent years solving complex technical issues, and with new AI tools the time required for these fixes is often much lower than it used to be. Where a fix sits outside the CRO programme, it is treated as a separate development project, but we will always approach it with an ROI mindset and keep the work as lean and efficient as possible.

CRO work versus general development

To keep things simple:

• CRO work is speed, UX, experimentation, and the implementation of agreed CRO hypotheses and wins, delivered under the CRO programme and covered by the CRO fee structure.
• General development is everything else, such as new features, legacy fixes, integrations, re platforming and design rebuilds, billed separately with estimates and approvals.

If you are ever unsure which side a request falls on, we will explain it in plain language before starting.

StrategyFive managed hosting

Many CRO clients choose to move their WooCommerce store onto our managed hosting platform. When we host your site we can:

• Provide a modern, performance tuned VPS stack designed for WooCommerce.
• Handle server level caching, security hardening, monitoring and backups.
• Offer clear uptime targets and clear response times for incidents as set out in your SLA.
• Control the full stack from server to theme, which makes performance and technical work more predictable.

Client managed hosting

If you prefer to stay on your current hosting, you can. This includes dedicated servers, managed platforms, or internal infrastructure. In that case:

• We will review your hosting setup and highlight any risks or performance limits.
• We will work within your existing stack and coordinate with your internal or third party hosting team where needed.
• We cannot give the same server level uptime or performance guarantees as we do on our own platform, because we do not fully control the infrastructure.
• Your hosting must be fast and stable enough to support the CRO programme. If the environment is fundamentally unable to handle WooCommerce performance requirements, we will explain this clearly and agree a solution before work continues.

Hosting costs are already integrated into the CRO fees. If you choose to stay on your own hosting, the proportion of that budget is simply redirected into additional CRO work or development time. You do not lose out, and we will always be transparent about what we can and cannot control. Our goal is to get the best possible performance from whichever platform you choose.

Access we typically require

To run a CRO programme effectively, we will usually need:

• Access to your GA4 property, by adding our team to your GA4 account, and where agreed access to your Google Tag Manager and any other analytics tools we use together (for example Microsoft Clarity).
• Full administrator access to your WordPress and WooCommerce website, or to your preferred staging environment.
• Depending on your hosting setup, access to your hosting control panel or SFTP, or coordination with your internal hosting team or domain provider so we can support performance, deployments and DNS changes when required.

Calls, reporting and change requests

As standard we aim to provide:

• Regular status updates on progress, typically weekly by email.
• Monthly performance summaries and an optional review call if you would like one.
• Clear written estimates for any out of scope work before it begins.
• Documented test plans and outcomes for key experiments.
• Access to a shared client dashboard that tracks and monitors the performance of the CRO programme over time.