How to A/B Split Test WordPress Post Titles to Get More Clicks

Have you ever found yourself stuck choosing which title to use for your post? Having a good title is important for getting more clicks and shares. However often people just publish their posts without ever knowing how their other title would have performed. What if we told you that you can test different titles? In this article, we will show you how to A/B split test WordPress post titles to get more clicks and increase your pageviews.

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First thing you need to do is install and activate Title Experiments Free plugin. Upon activation, you need to visit Settings » Title Exp Settings to configure the plugin.

If your site uses heavy caching, then you can choose to use JavaScript for post titles. This will ensure that the plugin works as intended instead of having the same title being shown to everyone due to caching issues.

For SEO purposes, by default the plugin shows the first title to the search engines. However you can change this setting if you want.

The plugin recalculates display probabilities every 5 minutes to ensure maximum results. You can increase or decrease this time if you want. However please understand that setting it below 5 minutes may cause our site to slow down.

Once you are done, click on the save settings button to store your settings.

Now you need to head over to Post » Add New to see the plugin in action. On the post edit screen, you can add multiple post titles for your post. Try creating different variations of SEO friendly post titles with different keywords.

After you have added a few titles, you can save and publish your post.

Once your post has attracted enough traffic, you can see which titles performed better by editing the post. The plugin calculates the click probability based on how many times a title is displayed, and how often it is clicked by the users.

For busy websites, you will instantly start noticing which keywords trigger a more positive response from your users. You can then start using those keywords creatively into your post titles to write more effective headlines. For smaller sites, this kind of micro-testing might not be as useful because of the small sample size.

We hope this article helped you A/B split test WordPress post titles to get more clicks. For more comprehensive split testing, take a look at our guide on how to do A/B split testing in WordPress using Google Analytics.

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