The days of static & stagnant websites are gone. Since there is a very good chance that your website plays an important part in representing your business, it should be constantly evolving.
Design trends and consumer needs are also shifting based on the economy and your industry.
Testing and implementing small changes to your website is the best way to optimize the site to make it a better marketing tool.
There are a wide variety of strategies to test your website ranging from the use of A/B landing pages to lead magnets.
5 Tips for DIY Website Testing
1. Audit Your Website Data
Before you start making changes to your site, you always want to have a baseline of data and understand where you stand in terms of traffic, engagement, and sales.
Make sure you have Google Analytics tracking set up on your website and review the last month or two of reports. If you have goal tracking set up within Google Analytics, you can also review the number of conversions. If you have an email sign-up form on your site, review the data in your email marketing platform to see how many users have signed up and how users are interacting with newsletter campaigns.
If you have live chat on your site, there are tons of reports available in the various live chat platforms in terms of the number of chats per week.
Lastly, check in with your sales team. Are leads from the website and various marketing campaigns turning into great opportunities and new clients? This can provide insight into the quality of any website conversions and opportunities.
2. Landing Pages & A/B Testing
If you are running different marketing campaigns, creating a landing page design template is a great way to match the page content to a specific campaign.
For instance, with Google Ads, you may see better performance by driving clicks to a unique landing page that matches the ad messaging rather than sending traffic to a general page on your site.
We’ll typically create a custom landing page design for clients with a contact form and the top navigation excluded, if needed. Once the page design is ready, clients can keep re-using the template to create unique landing pages for each marketing campaign.
What is A/B testing?
When discussing website testing, you’ll often hear the term A/B testing. This is a specific strategy where you set up a page on your website where a version A of the page or “control” is shown to half of your visitors and a different version called version B, that has 1 element changed, is automatically shown to the rest of the web visitors.
There are great WordPress plugins and tools for setting up and running A/B split testing. However, many websites do not receive enough traffic each month for this approach. It’s typically recommended that the site receive from 50,000 to 100K+ visits per month in traffic. Otherwise, it will take an extremely long time to run a test and achieve a statistically significant result.
Even without A/B testing though, you can test out improvements to your site with a new landing page or the following tips below.
3. Call to Action Testing
One of the best places to test improvements on your website is with your call to action. A call to action or CTA is typically the tool on your website that converts a visitor to a lead.
Having a strong call to action for visitors plays a huge role in driving conversions on a site, especially if you are focused on lead generation.
Typically, you’ll want a call to action in the top section of the home page and/or in the top navigation of your site, so it is very easy for visitors to see and click. You can test out changing the messaging on the CTA button, such as Schedule a Call or Get Started. The placement of the CTA button in the navigation or home page can be another small but impactful change.
For some industries, such as the financial advisor industry, it can make sense to drive visitors to what is called a CTA page. This page is different from a generic contact page or from, and it has a custom page design & messaging that is focused on your initial offering to clients, what they can expect from the process, and an easy way to fill out a form or book a call through a scheduling tool.
4. Email Opt-In Offerings
Building up an email marketing list is another important conversion objective for your website. Email marketing is a valuable marketing strategy in terms of staying in touch with potential and existing clients.
If you aren’t seeing good results in gaining more email subscribers, evaluate the email sign-up form on your website. Offering a valuable white paper or template to visitors can be an excellent strategy to boost email sign-ups. Consider your ideal clients and craft a white paper or resource that fits their needs and concerns.
Once you’ve created the giveaway, make sure the form is properly integrated with your email marketing platform. It’s helpful to refresh any of these resources over time or consider adding a 2nd and different giveaway that is tailored to a different service and set of customers.
5. Live Chat Testing
If you’ve never tested out live chat on your website, it can be a great way to boost conversions because it’s easier for visitors to submit a question.
With WordPress, it’s very easy to set up a third-party live chat widget and Live Chat Inc., one of the most popular and flexible platforms, offers a mobile and desktop app so you can easily manage incoming chats.
Once you’ve set up live chat, keep testing different features. Most live chat widgets allow you to configure a prompt, which means the live chat pops open or shows an initial message to visitors after they’ve been on the website for a certain number of seconds.
For our TinyFrog site, we tested different types of prompts and language until we found one that generated regular chats. The Live Chat Inc. widget allows you to customize the messaging based on the page a web visitor is currently on or whether they are returning to the site.
With all these testing strategies, implement a change and track the performance until you find what works best for your audience and website goals.
