Start Usability Testing Your Website Today!	Visited: 1604 5.0/5.0 (1 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Ben Finklea February 22, 2011

It seems that every business that has some sort of presence online is always focused on gaining traffic and acquiring visitors. It's strange to think that so many of these same companies pay no attention to how well their website works to achieve the business' goals. Imagine a shopkeeper opened up a supermarket, and spent a sizable budget in construction and getting people to the store. However, as time goes by, the supermarket leaves everything the same, never rearranges the aisles or promotions and never asks shoppers, "How was your experience?" The assumption is that your store, or your site, is working. This could be for a number of reasons, however by not testing, or asking your customers, you'll never really know whether your website is truly doing the best for you that it can.

In the past, many webmasters frowned upon A/B testing due to cost and complexity. It was far too expensive to hire a usability agency to perform focus groups, heat mapping, and user tracking. For those wanting to venture into it themselves, the technical and statistical knowledge required was too great.

However, nowadays, none of this really is a factor anymore. Any webmaster out there, regardless of the size of their site or budget, can perform highly valuable testing on their website and optimize their online success rate, all it takes is a bit of work. Over the past few years, numerous tools have risen that provide webmasters with a vast amount of information that once cost a small fortune to obtain.

Google Analytics is a free user-tracking tool that will give you valuable insight on how people are navigating your site. From what pages they visit, to how long they stay on each page, to whether they achieved one of your desired goals (ex. Purchase an item, or sign up for a newsletter), Google Analytics acts like a surveillance video at a store, tracking what everyone is doing. By simply installing a small snippet of code on each page of your site, you can begin tracking today for free. Get it at http://www.google.com/analytics.

Google Website Optimizer is another great free tool that lets you create A/B tests on your website without being a development whiz. By installing a snippet of code around a section of your website you want to 'test', you can show visitors different variations of that section and then see which works best in achieving your goal. The tool uses statistical algorithms and tracking code to give you the best variation to use. You can test individual sections of your site or entire pages. Check it out at http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer.

Clicktale Analytics is a relatively inexpensive service that gives you further insight to how people are navigating your website. Starting at $99/month, this service allows you to visually track visitor actions, see move hover and click heatmaps, and even how people fill in contact forms. By carefully analyzing this information, you may find unexpected barriers that are causing high abandonment rates and decreases in sales. For more information go to http://www.clicktale.com.

So why wouldn't you want to start testing on your site today? The tools are not only free (or fairly cheap) but are relatively easy to use. Start testing today, and you'll quickly see that it's well worth your time and money.