I recently re-worked a site for a client. He was moving over from Joomla to WordPress, so I started from scratch with his theme design. They liked the new theme I came up with – however I’d put the menu and other navigation (Links to recent articles, etc) in a right hand sidebar, and they weren’t too sure about that.

“Doesn’t everyone have the menu on the left?”

Now I’m no usability expert, and while I figured they were probably right I thought we’d run a little experiment. I trawled around a bit, and I found a nice little post by David Dellanave. While I was OK implementing David’s solution I though it was probably a little complicated for some of my other clients, especially when it came to running 3 Google analytics accounts – so I did some digging.

The result is the SES Split Testing plugin.

To use the plugin you’ll need to be using Google Analytics tracking on your WordPress blog already (If you’re not, then I’d recommend the “Google Analytics for WordPress” plugin), then :

• Create two (or more) versions of your theme
• Select them in the plugin settings
• Define custom segments in Google Analytics
• Sit back and watch the results roll in

Create theme variations

In most cases, you’ll want to test two versions of 1 theme with some slight changes. Let’s assume your theme is in the folder wp-content/themes/mytheme. Take a copy of your theme and put it in fresh folder, e.g. wp-content/themes/mytheme_2. Open up the style.css file in the second folder, and change the Theme Name, e.g.

/*
Theme Name: MyTheme
*/

to

/*
Theme Name: MyTheme (v2)
*/

Set up plugin settings

Now you can drop the plugin into your plugin directory, activate it in the WordPress backend, and then go to the settings page (Settings->SES Theme Split Test). The plugin will list all of your available themes, and you can choose which ones you want to be part of the test.

Once you’ve saved the settings, the split testing will kick in. Visitors will be randomly assigned one of the chosen themes, and they’ll receive that theme any time they visit in the next 30 days. Not only that, but their visit will be tagged with a special variable that you can pick up on in Google Analytics.

Set up Custom Analytics Segments

Google Analytics lets you define custom segments (Ways of grouping customers). In this example we want to group customers according to which theme they were shown and then we can measure our chosen metric (Purchase / sign-up / page views – whatever) for the two groups and compare them. To get started, you probably want to wait 24 hours so that Google starts to receive the tagging data.

Log into your analytics account, and click on the “All Visits” dropdown (Top-right, just above the date selector), and then choose “Create a new advanced segment”. Then, you want to expand the “Visitors” dropdown under “Dimensions”

Scroll down until you find “User Defined Value” and drag it onto the right hand box that says “dimension or metric”. If Analytics has got your tagging data (See – I told you to leave it 24 hours!) then you’ll get to choose from the values being passed, e.g.

Create a segment for each of your themes, and give them a meaningful name, then you’ll be able to select them as custom segments in your reports.

Now it’s just time to wait, see what happens, then decide. Once you’ve got a winner then just set that as your blog’s standard theme in the normal way, and either deactivate the plugin, or unselect the themes in the settings and users will see the blog default.