{"id":52772,"date":"2020-07-28T20:02:54","date_gmt":"2020-07-28T14:32:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vwo.com\/blog\/?p=52772"},"modified":"2025-04-25T16:36:36","modified_gmt":"2025-04-25T11:06:36","slug":"wordpress-ab-testing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vwo.com\/blog\/wordpress-ab-testing\/","title":{"rendered":"Optimizing Your Site For Conversions: A Primer On WordPress A\/B Testing"},"content":{"rendered":"

What is WordPress A\/B testing?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n

If your site is powered by WordPress, you need no introduction to the endless range of A\/B testing plugins and tools<\/a> that enable you to optimize it for conversions. Just like WordPress is a platform known for its robustness and ease of use, using a tool like VWO makes A\/B testing<\/a> an easy and effective technique that helps you outdo your website user experience and grow your key metrics. By simply installing a plugin on your WordPress site<\/a>, you can run as many tests on the critical elements as you need to confidently make data-backed optimization decisions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Download Free: A\/B Testing Guide<\/span><\/a><\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In this post, we discuss how you can leverage A\/B testing on your WordPress site and how it can be a game-changer for your business.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"What<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n

What can you test on your WordPress site?<\/strong>\u00a0<\/h2>\n\n

Headlines<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n

While there are several golden rules and best practices you can follow while writing interesting and impactful headlines, testing them could surprise you to no end. Run A\/B tests on your headlines to see which ones drive more traffic to your posts, engage your readers better, result in a higher number of social shares, and more. VWO\u2019s GPT-3.5 Turbo-powered AI copy generator<\/a> allows you to choose from a large set of headline suggestions based on the existing copy on your website. You can check this feature by taking a 30-day free trial<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n

Forms<\/h3>\n\n\n

Website forms are indispensable for any lead generation business, and optimizing them can have a direct and tangible impact on your conversion metrics. However, given the wide scope for refinement and sometimes contradictory best practices, forms can be quite challenging to optimize. What works for one niche might not necessarily work for yours, and the only way to find the sweet spot between insightful answers, high attempt rate, and frictionless filling experience for your forms is to run experiments. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Consider contact forms, for instance. From testing for the required and optional form fields, the form length, placement of the form, there are a plethora of parameters for which you can streamline your forms<\/a> and get better results.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Image source: colorlib<\/a>
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Call-To-Action (CTA)<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n

A lot rides on those big, bright, attention-grabbing buttons that prompt desired responses on your pages. The color, placement, size, copy \u2013 you want everything to be perfectly optimized for maximum conversions. Test them out before you commit to a particular variation of a CTA to be confident that it will drive better engagement.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Image source: SmashingHub<\/a>
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Page copy<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n

Your page copy is critical. You need to ensure it is persuasive, impactful, conversion-focused, and yet centered around your target persona. While you could just hit the jackpot and write a copy that checks all boxes, zeroing in<\/em> on the one that perfectly resonates with your audience is usually a virtue of methodical testing. So, whether you are revamping old WordPress pages or creating brand new ones, go ahead and test out the copy before you finalize on the<\/em> one, to watch your conversion rate go up, to the north, and beyond!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Blog<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n

Widgets<\/h3>\n\n\n

Widgets<\/a> are the cornerstone of any well-built WordPress site and play a major part in improving its functionality and adding new features. Whether it is search, social media, or a subscription widget, the placement, size, copy, and design can directly influence your conversion numbers. Experimenting with multiple variations will ensure you choose one that adequately draws visitors\u2019 attention and helps them fulfill their purpose.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Image source: WordPress<\/a>
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Images & illustrations<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n

Text-only content has a retention rate of 10%, but when supplemented with the right kind of visuals, it increases the retention rate for the piece of information to 65%<\/a>. Massive, right? So, testing your graphics becomes all the more important. You can experiment with them on your posts, home page, and landing pages to see which ones cause an uptick in your critical metrics and optimize your pages like never before.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Image source: decolore.net<\/a>
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Themes<\/h3>\n\n\n

Themes determine a majority of the layout and visual of your WordPress website, and altering the same is an absolutely critical decision. To avoid leaving any scope for guesswork or instinct, be sure to test your shortlisted variations before making one live universally. While themes can only be tested on the server-side<\/a>, it is worth going that extra mile as they form the cornerstone of your site and greatly determine its usability.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n

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Image source: WordPress<\/a>
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Menu layouts<\/h3>\n\n\n

The site menu directs your visitors to important pages on your website. Its layout is critical as it can directly impact user experience and conversions. Therefore, to facilitate ease of navigation within your site, you must continually optimize your menu layout to figure out which layout helps your visitors seamlessly browse and take the desired action. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Image source: Bashooka<\/a>
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Design & layout<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n

It can be overwhelming to narrow down on a website design that highlights all essential elements, provides clear information, along with being de-cluttered and engaging. Therefore, A\/B testing the critical elements such as images, white spaces, navigation bar, color scheme, etc. can help you zero in on the optimized version of all your pages, in alignment.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Image source: colorlib<\/a>
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Benefits of A\/B testing your WordPress site<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n

Keep data at the forefront of all decision-making<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n

In today\u2019s day and age of consumer-centricity, the closest you can get to making foolproof decisions w.r.t. optimizing your digital experiences is by relying on testing to validate your hypotheses. Once you decide to base all your optimization efforts on the data gathered via A\/B testing on your site, your digital experiences evolve from being dictated by opinions, biases, or guesses to being driven by data, clarity, and facts. No matter how big or small the conflict, you can always bank on testing for a logical and objective answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In one of the sessions in VWO\u2019s online summit, ConvEx, Lukas Vermeer, Director of Experimentation at Booking.com<\/a>, spoke in length about how the travel behemoth manages large-scale experiments<\/a>. One particularly interesting segment was where he highlighted how leadership at Booking.com encourages making data the cornerstone of every decision. Here\u2019s what he had to say:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It\u2019s pointless to allow teams to run experiments if you\u2019re not willing to listen to what they find. This puts an enormous onus on leadership because it means that as a leader, you need to be willing to say that \u2018I think this is the direction our product should go but I\u2019m not sure, I don\u2019t know and please show me how I am wrong, what assumptions I\u2019m making that are incorrect. What I think or my ego is less important than ensuring the product offers a good user experience and that users want to use the product\u2019. To put your own opinions and ego below the data that the people in your teams are going to find is something that I\u2019ve rarely seen and I think that really is the hallmark of an exceptional leader and I\u2019m happy that is something that we have here.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

His insights clearly indicate how testing facilitates rational decision-making in an organization and how great leaders value data way more than individual opinions.<\/p>\n\n\n

Improve ROI on existing traffic<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n

The amount and quality of traffic you drive to your site depends on your marketing budget and numerous other factors in your marketing strategy that might be beyond your control. However, testing rigorously helps you find optimization opportunities on your site<\/a> that enable you to deliver better experiences to your existing traffic. This, in turn, improves your conversion rate and fetches better ROI from the same traffic. What\u2019s important to note here is that even minuscule tweaks made to your site can attribute to a significant impact on your critical metrics, and testing is a powerful approach to validate it for yourself before you make any change.<\/p>\n\n\n

Eliminate friction in user experience<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n

Measuring user experience on your site can be tough. Very often, it\u2019s impossible to gauge what exactly could be breaking your site\u2019s experience and causing poor conversions, drop-offs, abandonment, etc. And even if you do, you wouldn\u2019t want to go ahead and make any decision before being absolutely sure of your hypothesis. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Therefore, once done with user research leveraging tools such as Website Analytics, Heatmaps, Surveys, Session Recordings, you can build your hypotheses based on the insights gathered, and finally, validate them using A\/B testing. This way, you can ensure that every change you make solves visitors\u2019 pain points, eliminates friction from your site experience, and reflects positively on your conversion metrics. Sign up for a free trial by VWO<\/a> and assess it for yourself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Watch how to formulate a testing strategy using UX research data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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