Churn sucks. When only 50% of users stay, but the other 50% drop, then you know something is wrong.

And you wonder what feature is missing.
How you can improve your tool.
Or if your idea just sucks.

Very quickly, you start focusing on the 50% that churn, instead of the good 50% that love and use the product.

What makes it worse: Running ads burns money. It’s already expensive to get people to sign up, and with a 50% churn rate, your expenses double.

BUT, good news: You can easily reduce your churn rate without ever touching your code base.

Today I will share three fixes on your website, your signup page and in your onboarding, that have been proven several times with my customers, and can be implemented in less than a week.

At the end of this article, I even share a custom AI prompt on how you can run an Audit on your website to find and fix reasons for churn yourself.

Let’s goooo!

1. The problem with your website

Your website has a big impact on your product’s churn rate.

The two most common mistakes we find in our Audits are:

1. The copy speaks to everyone, making it unclear who the tool is for
2. Overpromising the power of the tool “Fix X in seconds”

Let’s fix them one by one.

1.1 Turn your Website into a Magnet

Magnets either attract — or repel.

Your website needs to do both.

Let me explain, by using one of my customers as an example:

One of our customers, a Swedish fintech startup, came to us and reported lots of daily visitors (thanks to good SEO), but high churn. Some people even reported on Reddit, that “this tool is not for me”.

The problem was not that the product sucked, but the wrong people were trying to use it.

After simply fixing the copy on the main landing page, and tailoring it to their target audience (we had to make the headlines sharper, more targeted), 2 things happened:

1. Signups…. went down.
2. But churn halved! -50%!

Learning:

Make sure to clearly state who your tool, app or software is for. You can use a CRM for many reasons, but founders who look for a fundraising CRM will go directly to you, if you simply mention it. On the flip side, this also filters out everyone who is not looking for help with fundraising.

1.2 Underpromise, overdeliver

Most marketing copy does the opposite: They overpromise on features, and then underdeliver on value.
Don’t be that guy.

A simple trick to write better, more honest headlines: Measure exactly how long it takes to get to a point of value in your app. Use a stopwatch, and try it out.

Do you still think you can “Write your next post in seconds”? I guess not.

2. Asking for too much in the signup

Once someone clicks “Try it now,” your signup flow decides whether they’ll ever see value.
And yet most founders get it wrong.

They add friction. They ask for job titles, addresses, credit cards, or ten-step forms.

Here’s what works instead:

Fix 1: Study flows, don’t copy them.

Sites like Mobbin.com are goldmines.
Study five signups in your niche.
Notice what’s common.

Then steal patterns, don’t clone screens. Copying blindly is lazy.

Fix 2: Ruthlessly cut fields.

Do you really need job title on day one? No. Every field you cut increases completion. Unless you need intentional friction, strip it down: name, email, password. Done.

Fix 3: Delay the credit card wall.

If you don’t need billing upfront, don’t ask for it. Let people use the tool first. Nothing kills momentum like “Enter card details” before they’ve seen any value.

Another customer story: The 40% Drop-off

One SaaS I worked with had a beautiful signup—but five steps. Analytics showed 40% drop-off between steps two and three—where they asked for company size and billing details. Removing those fields showed a 15% increase in signup completion.

Takeaway: Signup is not admin. It’s the first user experience. If you lose them here, churn starts before they’ve even logged in.

3 No onboarding - no users

Good software shouldn’t need explanation. Yet, the best tools still have an onboarding flow.

The reason is simple: New users simply need to learn how the product works.

You need to show them the value of your product quickly, otherwise they will get frustrated, and churn, without ever really trying out the tool.

What does good onboarding look like? Depends.

Check Mobbin again for some examples.

The hard part about onboardings is to find the “minimum value”, the minimum a user needs to achieve to see the value of your product.

Examples:

1. Schedule your first post
2. Create your first automation
3. Create your first presentation

And then the onboarding simply shows them how to complete this task.

That’s it.

The Big Lie: “Churn will improve when we add more features”

It usually doesn’t. More features can actually make onboarding harder.

Churn isn’t caused by missing features—it’s caused by an expectation gap. The website overpromised, the signup flow frustrated, and onboarding failed to guide users.

Fix those three, and you reduce churn dramatically—without touching a single line of code.

Fix your website faster with this AI prompt

Copy this into your AI Chat of choice, to immediately analyze and audit your website and get suggestions on how to improve it, based on what we talked above:

1. Who you are

You are a senior user experience designer with over 20 years of experience conducting UX audits for websites and digital products. You specialize in identifying usability issues, heuristic mismatches, accessibility problems, and improvement opportunities across onboarding, navigation, layout, and interaction patterns.

2. What you should do

Please analyze the following website and conduct a structured UX audit based on industry best practices. Your goal is to highlight critical usability problems, evaluate heuristic adherence, suggest improvements, and prioritize the most impactful changes.

Your UX audit should be structured in the following sections:

1. Overview
   • Briefly summarize the website’s purpose, audience, and first impressions.
   • Mention any standout positives or negatives from the initial user experience.
2. Heuristic Evaluation
   • For example: Visibility of system status, Match with real-world conventions, Consistency, Error prevention, etc.
3. Navigation & Information Architecture
   • Comment on clarity, labeling, findability, and structure.
   • Are key user flows (e.g. sign-up, booking, checkout) intuitive and easy to follow?
4. UI Design & Visual Hierarchy
   • Assess layout clarity, typography, spacing, visual contrast, and responsiveness across devices.
   • Mention any visual clutter or aesthetic issues.
5. Accessibility
   • Identify potential accessibility concerns (e.g. poor color contrast, missing alt text, low text readability).
   • Suggest basic improvements following WCAG guidelines.
6. Conversion UX (if applicable)
   • Evaluate CTAs, forms, friction points in conversion flow.
   • Are trust signals clear? Is information overload or missing?
7. Performance & Mobile Experience
   • Simulate loading behavior and mobile responsiveness.
   • Highlight any obvious performance bottlenecks or mobile design flaws.
8. Quick Wins vs. Long-Term Improvements
   • List the most important changes in two tiers:
     • Quick Wins: Low-effort, high-impact changes
     • Long-Term Improvements: Structural or strategic changes that will improve UX significantly over time
9. Final UX Score (0–10)
   • Give the site a score based on your overall evaluation, and summarize how close it is to delivering a great user experience.

3. Context + Website URL to analyze

The website to audit is: [Insert your website URL here]

This is a general UX audit without access to internal analytics or user testing. Focus on what can be inferred visually and structurally. You can assume the site is for [briefly describe the target user or product purpose, if known].