What to Test

You can test almost anything, but testing time and traffic are limited. Smart marketers choose tests by potential impact, not curiosity.

A good test targets a page or step that touches many users and sits close to revenue. Testing a button color on a low-traffic page wastes weeks for little learning.

Start where the money flows. Map your funnel and look for the steps with the biggest drop-off and the highest traffic.

A checkout page with 40% abandonment and 10,000 monthly visitors is a far better target than a thank-you page nobody complains about.

The biggest wins usually come from value proposition, headline, offer, and page layout, not tiny tweaks.

Changing your headline or pricing framing can shift conversion by double digits. Changing a font rarely does. Save micro-tests for after you have exhausted the big levers.

Group ideas so you cover the full experience, not just the obvious bits.

Common categories: messaging (headline, copy), offer (price, bundle, guarantee), layout (above-the-fold order), social proof (reviews, logos), and friction (form fields, steps).

Every extra field, click, or distraction costs conversions. Friction tests are reliable winners because they remove work for the user.

Cutting a signup form from seven fields to three, or removing a forced account creation, often produces clear, repeatable lifts.

Use a simple framework to rank a backlog of test ideas. ICE scores each idea on Impact, Confidence, and Ease, from 1 to 10.

Average the three. The highest scores go first. This keeps the team from arguing about opinions and focuses on expected value.

The best test ideas come from data and user research, not brainstorms. Watch session recordings, read support tickets, and study analytics.

If users keep abandoning at the shipping step, that is your signal. Test ideas grounded in evidence convert more often than guesses.

To know what caused a result, change one meaningful thing at a time in an A/B test. If you alter the headline and the layout and the price together, a win tells you nothing about why.

When you must test many changes at once, use multivariate testing, but only with enough traffic.

Endless tiny tweaks can trap you at a local maximum. Sometimes you need a bold, radical redesign to discover a much higher peak.

Balance your roadmap: mostly safe incremental tests, plus occasional big swings that could unlock a step-change in performance.

Low-traffic pages cannot detect small effects in reasonable time. On thin traffic, only test changes expected to produce large lifts.

Reserve subtle optimizations for your highest-traffic pages where you can collect enough data to see a small difference clearly.

Keep a living list of test ideas with their ICE scores, the problem they address, and the metric they should move.

This backlog turns optimization into a steady pipeline instead of random one-off experiments, and it makes your reasoning visible to stakeholders.

Which test should you prioritize first?

Prioritize tests by impact, traffic, and proximity to revenue. Start with big levers like value proposition, offer, and friction before micro-tweaks.

Ground ideas in real data, score them with ICE, change one variable at a time, and maintain a prioritized backlog so optimization stays a disciplined pipeline.