Boost Conversions with WordPress A/B Testing [Tools & Techniques]

We will never be tired of repeatedly repeating that WordPress is the world’s leading CMS that powers more than 39.5% of all websites available online. If your site is also running on WordPress and you look for ways to improve conversion rates on it, WordPress A/B testing will help you improve user experience and grow the key metrics of your site. One of the best things about this approach is that it lets you run as many tests on as many elements as you need to watch the desired boost in statistics.   

In this article, we will discuss what you can test on your site and what tools will help you reach the best results for your business. 

How Can You Benefit from WordPress A/B testing

Before we dig into details on where you can apply A/B testing and what plugins prove to be the most effective for this purpose, let’s discuss how the concept works and what benefits you can derive from using it. 

A/B testing is also known as split (or bucket) TESTING. It’s an online marketing tactic that lets you compare how different versions of the same product or website element work to see which option your customers prefer most of all. In terms of WordPress, it’s the approach of comparing different elements of a web page. It includes the comparison of color schemes, content, headers, widgets, page layouts. CTAs, titles, etc. WordPress A/B testing can bring many benefits to your business, like the following ones: 

Better ROI on Your Site’s Traffic 

The traffic that you drive to your site mainly depends on your marketing efforts and the strategy you follow. While running A/B testing on your website, you can find what particular elements of your web page should be optimized, in what ways you can do it, and what optimization opportunities let you deliver better UX on your site. Even some minor tweaks on your site can bring impressive results. As a result, you can get improved conversion rates and better ROI on your site.   

Make Wise Decisions on the UX Improvement 

Many applications let us measure user experience on our websites. However, it may be tough to predict what might be causing your site’s troubles and result in poor conversions and worse user experience. Even if you feel certain about your decision regarding the changes that should be done on your site based on the results of your research, you need to check if your hypothesis is absolutely right. That’s when WordPress A/B testing comes into play. 

Based on the insights you gather after using Heatmaps. Website Analytics, Surveys, and other tools, you can validate them using A/B testing. By doing so, you may feel certain that every change you make on your site will be positively reflected by your audience and result in higher conversion metrics. 

Reduce the Risk of Doing Wrong Changes 

If the research reveals that your website is outdated and needs significant changes, you need to make sure that you do everything right. A major update of your site’s design could go either way. It could hit the right points and fix the major issues, thus attracting more visitors and engaging them more effectively. At the same time, people may not be ready for drastic changes on your site, so building a new element on top of the previous one is a surefire method of creating an evolutionary redesign. By doing so, you can avoid making any radical changes and get your audience ready for the entire web design to revamp before you are completely sure of it and its effect on your audience. 

Standing Out Among Competition

Every business strives to stand out from competitors and appeal to the target users’ minds. A website is your business card and a reflection of your brand. It should be a clear demonstration of your ideology, goals, values, and offers. It should encourage the audience to take the desired actions. While running A/B tests on your site, you can keep your audience at the forefront of your optimization efforts and provide them with the web resource that meets their expectations, thus keeping your business ahead of the curve.  

What Can You Test on Your WordPress Site? 

You can apply WordPress A/B testing to every element of your site. Let’s consider the most popular examples. 

Headlines on Your Site 

There are plenty of rules and recommendations on how to write headlines. However, you never know what works best for you until you test it. The A/B testing will work for the headlines on different pages of your site and blog posts. When you compare statistics sometime after the headlines’ update, you can see which headlines drive more traffic to your posts and which of them help you drive better conversions. 

Online Forms

Contact forms are vital elements that let you establish better communication with your audience. A well-designed and well-organized contact form has a direct impact on the conversion metrics of your site. Although many contact form builders are available on the web, it may be challenging to decide on the best solution that will appeal to your audience. What works best for one business may not work for another one. Using A/B testing, you can run experiments on your site and find the optimal form fields, form length, form placement, and other aspects that will help you get better results on your site. 

CTA

The conversion metrics and user engagement stats depend on how call-to-action buttons are designed and where they are located on your site. The size, color, shape, and placement are crucial factors that drive maximum conversion. Choose the perfect combination for your site with the A/B testing.

Content

The content that you add to your website should be persuasive, impactful, and valuable to your target audience. As a rule, it takes some time until you come up with the perfect content strategy that perfectly resonates with your customers. It requires time and testing until you find out what appeals to your readers the most. Whether you are building a website from scratch or working on the rebranding of the existing web page, you need to run some methodological testing until you finalize the content version that would increase conversion rates on your site. 

Website Menu

Your website’s menu layout and navigation patterns play a major role in directing your customers to important pages. To facilitate your site navigation, take care of testing different menu layouts to develop the one that will drive users to browse your site and take the desired actions seamlessly.

Widgets

Widgets are the essential component of any website. You may run a personal blog or a large corporate website. With the right choice of size, copy, placement, and design of widgets, you can significantly influence the conversion numbers on your website. While running A/B testing, you can experiment with different widget variations on your website to ensure that you pick the solution that will fulfill your site’s right purpose.

Visuals

Images speak louder than words. While supplementing texts with images, you can increase the retention rate for your content to 65%. For comparison: text-only content features an average retention rate of about 10%. That’s why testing your site’s visual content in combination with different pieces of content is vital to optimizing your pages for better performance. 

WordPress Themes

Recently, it’s become trendy to build websites with ready-made themes instead of working on custom-made solutions. WordPress themes pre-define the majority of the layout and visual aesthetics of the future website. Before bringing your site live with a theme, you need to test the chosen WordPress theme and determine how usable your client’s chosen design will be. 

WordPress A/B Testing Plugins

There are many handy A/B testing tools available in the WordPress community. Most of these tools are free plugins and extensions that are easy to install and use on your site. Many of them do not require any coding skills, so that you can manage them easily by yourself. If you can install WordPress, you should have no issues with running effective A/B tests on your own. 

In the collection of WordPress A/B testing tools listed below, you can find plugins that let you test specific elements on your website and some general testing tools. Let’s check them out and see what functionality each of them includes. 

Google Optimize

The tool is absolutely free to use. It is integrated with Google Analytics, which is easy to use for beginners and pros, and offers plenty of advanced A/B testing opportunities. Using Google Optimize, you can run up to 5 experiments on your site at the same time. 

To start WordPress A/B testing with Google Optimize, all you need to do is to insert a piece of code into your site’s header. For example, you can use this tool for testing different copies in the sidebar widget on your site. While changing the copy, you can track which sidebar converts better and invites more customers to click on the widget.

Using the Google Optimize tool, you can easily change any element on your WordPress site. Thanks to the integration with Google Analytics, you can set up Google Optimize to match your business goals.

Marketing Optimizer

With the help of this free WordPress A/B testing tool, you can test every element of your site, including landing pages, CTAs, headlines, page layouts, button styles, etc. There are also plenty of free templates ready to go straight out of the box. Marketing Optimizer also features full compatibility with popular WordPress caching plugins and web hosts that use server-level caching. 

Nelio A/B Testing

Using Nelio A/B Testing, you can define, manage, and keep track of A/B testing experiments on your WordPress site. For better understanding and career visualization of test results, the tool features heatmaps. It seamlessly integrates with WordPress and WooCommerce and lets you manage your experiments right from your site’s admin panel. 

Unlike Google Optimize, this tool is not free. There are several premium plans available: 

• The basic plan costs $29/mo.
• The professional-level plan is priced at $89/mo.
• The enterprise-level plan is $259/mo. 

Title Experiments 

As the name of the tool suggests, it’s intended to be used for split testing of titles on your site. It’s a free plugin. There is also a premium version available for $19.99. With the premium version of the plugin, you can also test multiple featured images, check detailed statistics, and benefit from automatic experiment freezing. 

Split Hero

This WordPress A/B testing tool perfectly suits freelancers, web design agencies, and DIY web builders looking for ways to optimize their artworks and bring their web design projects to a whole new level. 

To start the A/B testing with Split Hero, you need to select up to 4 variations of a web page you’d like to test, a conversion page (it may be a contact form thank you page), set the dates when the campaign will be running, and launch the test. While Split Hero runs A/B tests on your WordPress site, you can continue working on new content for your site and improving the already published data so that your customers will enjoy the best web browsing experience. 

The tool is not free. It offers one premium plan priced at $27/mo. You may feel free to use it on an unlimited number of websites with unlimited page views and unlimited visitors. The only limit applies to the number of campaigns you can run at the same time. Split Hero lets you run 3 concurrent campaigns, with extras priced at $5 per one campaign. 

Simple Page Tester 

The plugin is available for free download. Yet, it comes with the $59 premium upgrade. The latter adds the opportunity of running split testing on custom post types, shortcodes, conversion tracking, WooCommerce integration, and more. Simple Page Tester is fully compatible with WooCommerce. It’s SEO-friendly and supports caching solutions. 

AB Press Optimizer

Using AB Press Optimizer, you can run A/B testing of different elements of your site, including visuals, headlines, contact forms, and content blocks. The tool provides you with shortcodes to test your themes, web pages, blog posts, and custom post types. It is also the ultimate choice for split testing of widgets and different kinds of advertisements placed on your website.

It’s a premium WordPress A/B testing tool. For $49, you can install it on one website. Testing up to three websites costs $99. Web design agencies can benefit from using unlimited site testing for $199. 

WordPress Calls to Action

If you are looking for a tool for split testing of calls to action on your site, WordPress Calls to Action is the best choice for you. Use it for testing links, social media buttons, file downloads, tracking conversion rates, and running multivariate tests on your site. 

WordPress Landing Pages

Unlike other split testing tools that let you test single elements of your site, you can test the entire landing pages. It’s a free tool, which also supports premium add-ons to extend its functionality further. WordPress Landing Pages tool features a visual editor suited for building versatile landing pages. The built-in functionality of the tool lets you customize templates, track conversion rates, and run multivariate A/B tests. 

Bottom Line

While looking for the best approaches to update your website in a way that would help you increase conversion rates, WordPress A/B testing is the right way to go. With the help of split testing tools, you can check what headlines, CTAs, menu and page layouts, contact forms, etc., have the best effect on your audience. The sky is the limit, and there is always a road to perfection. WordPress A/B testing is the best approach to see what appeal to your audience the most. Using split testing tools from the list above, you can optimize your site and boost conversions.