EVERY WEBSITE IS DIFFERENT. What works for one website may or may not work for yours.

Best practices are great in theory, but difficult in practice. Team members often disagree on the best website or landing page design, the best visitor flow, or the best sales. Stakeholders usually have different opinions of what changes you should make to your website.

Resolving these differences is challenging. You should judge the quality of any change that you make to your website or sales process based on its impact to your bottom line in both the short and long terms. We are always looking for designs that persuade more visitors to convert. So, how do you make that determination? How do you measure the impact a particular change to your sales funnel will have on your conversion rate? You must test any modifications you introduce to your website and compare your new conversion rate to your previous conversion rate.

Direct mail marketing companies have been testing the impact of different mailers on conversions for more than 40 years. Before running a large national direct mail campaign, a marketing company usually prepares several versions of the mailer that include variations in design, copy, elements, and so forth. The company then sends the mailers to different target prospects and monitors the results. The mailer that generates the best response is the one it will use in its national campaign.

Testing software allows you to do the same online. By testing variations of a page against one other, you can observe which designs result in higher conversions. Usually you would do this after you’ve created the page variations, using the software to direct a percentage of visitors to each variation and then comparing different key metrics for each page. For example, testing software allows you to determine which of two main home page designs is better for conversion. If the main home page receives 15,000 visitors per day, the software can direct 7,500 visitors to one design and 7,500 visitors to the other design. The software will then record which of the two designs generated more orders. By monitoring visitors’ reactions to each design and reporting the different metrics on each design, you can decide which design to keep and which to toss.