three customers and one is my old boss — do testimonials help or just look thin

Disagreeing with the direction of the whole thread. At twelve trials from nine hundred visits, the testimonial section is not what is stopping anyone. That is a page that is not making it obvious what the thing does.

What I would do with that slot instead is a forty second screen recording, no voiceover, no music, that shows the boring job being done end to end. People who are unsure what a tool is will watch a short silent video and will not read a quote. When I swapped a quote block for a clip like that on a page with similar traffic, trials moved more than any wording change I have ever made.

Keep one quote underneath it. Just do not expect the quote to carry the page.

Real name, real company, real sentence, or leave it empty. Anonymous initials under a stock photo are worse than nothing and everybody can spot them.

Since you gave numbers: at nine hundred visits a month you cannot test this. To detect a small improvement in a twelve out of nine hundred rate with any confidence you would need months of traffic per variant, by which point you have changed six other things and the seasons have moved.

So test only changes you expect to be large, run them as a straight before and after over a few weeks, and accept the result is directional rather than proof. Anything you would describe as a tweak, just make the judgement call and move on. Time spent building a testing setup at this traffic is time not spent getting to a hundred trials.

How I got my first one, since asking felt impossible until I did it once. A customer emailed to say the import finally worked and thanked me. I replied fixing the actual issue, and at the bottom wrote: that line about the import is exactly what I struggle to explain to people, would you mind if I quoted it on the site with your name and company. He said yes in four words. That is the entire process. The quote was already written, I just asked to borrow it.

The ask matters as much as the quote. Ask immediately after something good happens, usually a support thread where you solved their problem. Ask for one sentence on what was annoying before and what changed. Offer to draft it so they only have to edit, because most people are happy to approve and hate to compose. My acceptance rate went from about half to nearly everyone with that last part.