Some months ago, I changed one link in the menu in my website postpaycounter.com. After that, it looked to me more people were purchasing products, i.e. the conversion rate had increased. But how to check whther that was really the case, or if it was just an accident/impression? Use an A/B test, I told myself!
With an A/B test, half of the users are served one version of the page, the one with the old link, and half of them another version of it, the one with the new link in place. When a sale happens, we may then log that as a success for the kind of page that was used, be it the A version or the B one.
In my case, the two versions of the page simply consisted of two different links in the menu, while I wanted the success to be logged when the user purchased something (I use Easy Digital Downloads to handle purchases).
I could find a bunch of plugins that allowed to set up A/B tests, but they all seemed pretty difficult to customize from a developer perspective, and I was already seeing myself wrestling with someone else’s code that provide tons of features useless to me, but through which was nearly impossible to interact with Easy Digital Downloads. So I decided to build my own, simple implementation, with the aim of it being tailored to developers rather than users who needed an interface.
An A/B test implementation example
This is an example of how to use the little framework. To set up a test, you only need to provide two functions: