Gymshark: 7 conversion leaks found

We ran the LeakFix 9-check audit against gymshark.com on September 20, 2026, then read the live homepage and the Vital Regular Leggings product page by hand. Everything below was visible on the store that day. Stores change, so treat this as a snapshot with a date on it, not a permanent verdict.

Gymshark scored 88 of 100 on the automated checks. That is a high score and it is deserved: HTTPS is correct, the mobile viewport is set, server response came back in 66ms, and trust signals and urgency cues are both present. The leaks below are what is left after all of that, which is the point of a teardown on a store this good. If a brand at this scale still leaks in seven places, a store doing $20k a month leaks in more.

This is the one check Gymshark outright failed. The homepage loads 220 images and 173 of them carry no alt attribute. Alt text is what Google Image Search reads, and on a fashion store image search is a real acquisition channel. It is also what a screen reader announces, so a shopper using one hears nothing useful about the product they are looking at.

The fix is unglamorous and it is mostly a theme and merchandising job: write alt text that describes the garment, the colour and the view. This is the single highest-leverage item on the list because it is mechanical, it does not require a design decision, and nobody has to agree on taste to ship it.

The top of the homepage cycles five separate offers: 10% off for email signup, a Last Chance Sale up to 50% off, free standard shipping over $75, an extra 20% off for students, and $10 off for referring a friend. No shopper holds five rotating messages in their head. The one that actually changes basket behaviour, the $75 free-shipping threshold, is on screen for a fraction of the time a visitor is there.

The fix is to anchor one fixed message, the one closest to the purchase decision. For an apparel store that is almost always the free-shipping threshold. The other offers still exist, they just live in the cart, on a dedicated page, or in the email flow instead of competing for the same strip of pixels.

On the product page the size selector opens on "Select a size" with nothing chosen. Press Add to bag and you get "Please select a size". Every shopper therefore performs two actions where one would do, and on mobile the size row and the button are not always in view at the same time.

Gymshark has a reason to be careful here, since a wrong size becomes a return. But the store already knows what its best-selling size is, and it already tells you "On average 3623 reviewers say this product is true to size" directly under the selector. Preselecting the modal size, with the size guide one tap away, shortens the path without hiding anything.

Immediately below Add to bag, the page opens a "Get The Look" block with a second full size selector and a second Add to bag for the same leggings, plus a matching headband at $14. Scroll past that and you reach a merchandising rail of nine more products. The reviews, which are the strongest thing on this page, do not appear until after all of it.

Cross-sell is a good idea after the first yes, not before it. Placed where it is now, it splits attention at the exact moment the shopper is deciding, and it puts a duplicate buy button on screen that means the same thing as the one above it. The fix is ordering, not deletion: buy box, then proof, then the look, then the wider rail.

Credit where it is due: the rating does appear near the title as "4.1 (5148)". That is the right instinct and most stores do not manage it. But the substance sits at the bottom of the page — 82% of customers would recommend this, a full rating breakdown, and averaged scores for squat-proofing, sizing, value, comfort and length. Those attribute ratings answer the exact objection someone has while looking at $54 leggings.

A 4.1 with 5,148 reviews also needs handling, because 485 of them are one star. A shopper who notices 4.1 and cannot immediately see why will assume the worst. Surfacing one attribute line near the buy box, something like "True to size, per 3,623 reviewers", converts a mediocre-looking average into a specific reassurance.

Directly under Add to bag the page says "Purchasing this product earns 432XP". To a logged-in loyalty member that is a reason to buy. To someone arriving from an ad it is an unexplained unit of something, and unexplained things near a payment decision create hesitation rather than momentum. It also implies there is a programme they should probably understand first.

The fix is audience-aware: show it to members, and for everyone else either hide it or spend one clause explaining it in money. The place to recruit someone into a loyalty programme is the order confirmation, when they have already paid.

The product costs $54. Standard delivery is $5 and free over $75. The page does say so, both in the announcement bar and under the buy box, which is better than most stores manage. What it never does is close the $21 gap. Nobody tells the shopper they are $21 away, and the matching headband sitting right there in Get The Look costs $14.

This is the cheapest leak on the list to fix and the one most likely to move average order value. A cart progress line — "Add $21 for free shipping" — plus one relevant add-on under it turns a stated policy into a reason to add a second item. The information is already on the page; only the arithmetic is missing.

Gymshark passed seven of nine automated checks and still leaks in seven observable places. It can absorb that, because acquisition spend covers a multitude of frictions. A store spending $500 a month on ads cannot: the same leaks take a bigger share of a smaller number of visitors, and there is no budget above them to compensate.

Note also which leaks were found by a machine and which were not. The missing alt text and the long meta description came from the automated checks in about fifteen seconds. The rotating bar, the ordering of Get The Look against the reviews, and the unclosed $21 gap needed someone to read the page as a shopper. That is the difference between the free audit and the paid one, and it is why this teardown exists as a work sample rather than as a claim.

Run the free audit on your own URL and you will get the machine half in seconds. If you want the read-the-page half, prioritized with a fix for each leak, that is the $97 Shopify Conversion Audit.