If reading is not your thing, you can see a summary of the content below in the infographic at the bottom of the page.
Are you running enough tests on your website? In a world where we are constantly striving for more traffic and better conversions, is it enough to design a website and then just put it out into the world with no future testing? We don’t think so and we don’t think you should either. We see so many companies redesign their website without conducting any testing before it goes live in the first place, never mind doing any further testing once it is live. The question we always ask is ‘do you know that page X is delivering the best possible conversions?’ The answer we usually get is ‘Erm..I’m not too sure’ which is why testing is so important, especially to e-commerce sites who rely on converting users once they have done all the hard work getting them to the page in the first place.
How often should you be testing your website?
Companies who were seen as testing pioneers 5 years ago were maybe testing between 1-5 times a month (so about once a week on average). Today that number is more likely to be pushing 50 times in any given month and is more of a constant cycle of testing, with multiple test running concurrently. Why test so often? In highly competitive markets, conversion is crucial so businesses want to make sure that the on-page experience allows users the easiest and smoothest path to a sale. Not only this, they want to leave customers with a positive experience of the site and of the purchase to keep them coming back for more.
What should you be testing?
The websites who are doing the most testing are testing multiple things at any given time but these are likely to include:
- Calls to action
- Page layout
- Navigation
- Copy
- Promotions and offers
- Checkout process
- Images
- Product selection process
- Security fields
Each of these elements can impact on a user’s decision making process so those websites carrying out the most effective testing will carry out multivariate testing to look at many changes simultaneously. Those sites who are testing one version versus another will typically split the traffic evenly between two versions and see which delivers the highest conversion. This is call A/B split testing. Each of the methods is effective in helping inform you of the content, layout, calls to action etc which will help to drive more traffic.
Website testing results
We can’t recommend highly enough testing your key pages on a regular basis. Maybe 50 tests in any given month is too many but if you are serious about conversions, then settling for the original site design and trusting that it is the best way of converting traffic is a dangerous game. The pages that we find are most commonly tested include:
- Landing page – specific to a campaign
- Homepage
- Search results page – a page where many sites see a high drop off rate
- Product category page
- Product details page
- Checkout page
Testing these pages and tweaking individual elements to find out what works and what doesn’t will help improve your conversion results and ultimately your bottom line. Testing may take some time, but in the long run is ultimately worth the investment. Check out the infographic below which summarises visually the points made in this blog:
