Using Testing to Evaluate Your Website and Its Performance Employ A/B and UX testing to enhance your site Testing your site is a great way to help your business create the best version of its website. Testing gives you proof of what will work best for your website and its visitors. The two main types of tests run on websites are A/B and UX. A/B testing lets you compare alternative web pages to gauge which will work best for your website. UX testing can help your company reveal any website issues before launching it and having major customer issues and dissatisfaction. What is A/B Testing? A/B testing, also known as split testing, is comparing two different versions of a page to see which one is better. Different versions are shown to similar website visitors at the same time to see which variation performs better. You can set the percentage of visitors that will be displayed each variation of the page. You can have your existing page display more than the one you are testing if you are apprehensive about the change and want to see data before displaying a new page to too many customers. The one that has the best conversion rate at the end of the test is the best version and should be used for the website. Why Use A/B Testing? A/B testing is a great way to compare two possible variations of a site page. Split testing helps you choose what works best for your site by giving you actual proof of what works best for your site visitor or customer. A/B testing enables you to try out different versions of your web pages, even if it’s just minor changes because even small changes can make big differences. The best decisions are those based on data! How Do I Use A/B Testing? After you decide what you want to test, for instance the wording of your title on a page, you make two different versions with only the title changed. You can also test against your existing page, in which case you will only be creating one new page. You then need to decide how many visitors you will need to complete the test. Then you run a site wide test with the different versions being displayed to site visitors at the same time. The variation with the best conversion rate is your winner. You can use A/B testing to test a multitude of items on your web pages including the layout, pictures, titles, and call to action buttons. What is UX Testing? User Experience (UX) testing analyzes the way that a user interacts with, uses, and navigates your website. UX testing is usually done at the final stage of website development before it is publicly launched. Why Use UX Testing? User experience testing helps you judge how well your website works for the end user. The testing can reveal issues users may have with website navigation as well as technical issues. The testing can also show how users react to your website and whether they find it confusing or simple to use. How Do I Use UX Testing? There a various types of user experience testing that can be used to evaluate your website. The more traditional version of UX testing is to have people that have not seen or worked with the website come in and explore the website and try to use it for its intended purposes. The test users are watched to see how they work with the site and are asked to give their feedback. Another type of UX testing is having experts use and evaluate the site to see how well it works. A third type of user experience testing is remote UX testing where people in different regions and countries test out the website to see how well the website works for them. The testers are asked to do a variety of tasks while software collects information about how long and how many clicks it took them to complete the tasks. A more advanced and convenient kind of UX tracking has been developed that records visits to your site. It can track the user's mouse movements and produce heatmaps that show you exactly how they are interacting with your page, where they are getting hung up, and see what parts of the page they are paying attention to. Using this software, you can see all this without having to bring anyone in for testing. You get to see actual customers on their actual visits and make changes as a direct result of real customer behavior. This information can assist you in creating an efficient path for customers from any page on the site to the information they are looking for, to the call-to-action that turns visitors into conversions. Clarity Can Help Our team at Clarity has decades of combined experience helping clients run A/B and UX testing to help improve their websites’ performances. Our team understands how important it is to run the right tests with the right variations at the right time. To find out more about A/B and UX testing, and how Clarity can help you run the tests that will give you the best insight into your website, call or click to contact us today!