Every website has a purpose

Jun 2, 2010

Every website has a purpose. Maybe you want people to buy a product, donate to your cause, download your app, or subscribe to your mailing list. How can you confidently modify your site to make it more effective with respect to this goal?

A/B testing is a process by which multiple variants of a website are presented to different users randomly and statistical tools are used to see whether any variant is more effective, according to an overall goal metric such as conversions or revenue.

While various A/B testing products—many free—exist, none are made from the ground up to work within the WordPress ecosystem. I believe a solution made particularly for WordPress could make A/B testing so much easier and more straightforward, and that such a solution could be greatly beneficial to the platform as a whole.

I’m happy to announce my new project, code-named ShrimpTest,¹ which is directly aimed at filling this void. I’ll be working on this project this summer together with the fantastic folks at Automattic.

The best way to keep up with development is on the project’s development blog, the ShrimpTest P2. Most updates will most likely be much shorter than this initial post. You can get less frequent, milestone-like updates by following ShrimpTest on twitter. Development will be open so feel free to check it out (haha) and submit patches as well. As I go along, I’ll also look forward to your feedback.