What Should You A/B Test First?
Key Takeaways:
- The best experiments begin with opportunities rather than ideas.
- High-traffic, high-value pages often produce the biggest optimization wins.
- Visitor behavior provides critical evidence for prioritization.
- Every experiment should answer one specific question.
- Optimization success comes from consistently identifying and acting on meaningful opportunities.
Summary
Choosing what to test first is one of the biggest challenges for new optimization programs. This article introduces the Opportunity First Approach, showing readers how to identify high-impact pages, recognize friction through visitor behavior, and prioritize experiments that are most likely to produce meaningful business results.
One of the most common questions teams ask after deciding to start A/B testing isn’t how to run an experiment. It’s much simpler than that:
"What should we test first?"
It’s a fair question, but it’s also where many optimization programs go off track. Faced with an endless list of possibilities, teams often start testing whatever feels interesting. A different button color. A new headline. A redesigned hero section.
Sometimes those experiments uncover meaningful improvements. More often, they consume valuable time without answering an important business question.
The most successful optimization teams don’t start with ideas. They start with opportunities.
Opportunity First Optimization
Every website has opportunities to improve, but not every opportunity deserves to become your next experiment.
Before creating variations, step back and ask where the greatest opportunity exists. Is there a page that attracts significant traffic but rarely converts? Does a lead form have a high abandonment rate? Are visitors consistently leaving a pricing page without taking the next step?
Rather than guessing where to begin, let evidence guide your decisions.
That’s what we call the Opportunity First Approach. Instead of asking, “What should we test?” ask, “Where are visitors struggling the most?“
The Opportunity First Approach isn’t about finding the easiest page to change. It’s about finding the pages where better decisions are most likely to create measurable business impact. When you consistently start with evidence instead of ideas, your experiments become more meaningful, your hypotheses become stronger, and your optimization efforts become far more effective.
That one shift in perspective often leads to more meaningful experiments, stronger hypotheses, and better business results.
Start Where the Impact Is Greatest
Not every page deserves equal attention. If your goal is to improve conversions, begin with the pages that have the greatest influence on your business.
Good places to start include:
- High-traffic landing pages
- Pricing or product pages
- Lead generation forms
- Checkout or sign-up flows
- Pages with unusually high exit rates
Improving a page that receives ten visitors each month probably won’t move the needle. Improving a page that thousands of visitors see every week might.
High-traffic pages give your experiments enough visitors to produce meaningful results more quickly. High-value pages directly influence revenue, leads, or sign-ups, making improvements on those pages far more impactful than optimizing low-traffic content. By focusing your efforts where they can make the biggest difference, you’ll learn faster and generate insights you can apply across the rest of your website.
Let Visitor Behavior Tell You Where to Look
Analytics tell you what happened. Visitor behavior helps explain why.
For example, imagine a landing page with strong traffic but very few demo requests. Analytics tell you the conversion rate is low, but they don’t explain the reason.
Reviewing session recordings may reveal visitors repeatedly scrolling up and down looking for information they can’t find. Heatmaps might show that very few people ever reach the primary call to action because it’s buried too far down the page.
Together, those insights provide a much stronger foundation for deciding what to test than simply guessing.
The same approach works for lead generation forms. Imagine your contact form receives hundreds of visitors every week, but very few submissions. Session recordings reveal that many visitors abandon the form after reaching the phone number field. Rather than redesigning the entire page, your first experiment could test whether making that field optional improves completion rates. Instead of guessing what might improve conversions, you’re using real visitor behavior to build a focused hypothesis.
If you’re new to interpreting visitor behavior, our CRO Insights Guide walks through practical techniques for identifying friction before building your next experiment.
Prioritize Before You Experiment
Once you’ve identified several opportunities, resist the temptation to test everything at once.
The strongest optimization opportunities usually share three characteristics:
1. High Visibility
Large numbers of visitors interact with the page, allowing you to gather meaningful insights more quickly.
2. High Business Impact
The page directly influences leads, revenue, sign-ups, or another important business goal.
3. Clear Evidence of Friction
Analytics, heatmaps, or session recordings suggest visitors are struggling to complete the next step.
When all three conditions exist together, you’ve likely identified a strong candidate for experimentation.
Every Experiment Should Answer One Question
One mistake many teams make is trying to solve several problems at once.
Imagine redesigning an entire landing page because conversions are low. You update the headline, replace the imagery, shorten the copy, move the form, and change every button.
If conversions improve, which change made the difference?
Instead, focus each experiment on answering a single question.
For example:
“Will moving our primary call to action above the fold increase demo requests because more visitors will see it without scrolling?“
That’s a focused hypothesis built around a specific opportunity.
If you’d like a step-by-step framework for building stronger hypotheses, our How to Run A/B Tests guide walks through the entire process.
Great Optimization Is Built One Opportunity at a Time
Organizations that consistently improve their websites rarely discover one magic change that transforms everything overnight.
Instead, they identify one opportunity, learn from it, apply those insights, and move to the next opportunity.
Over time, those improvements compound.
That’s why optimization is less about finding brilliant ideas and more about building a repeatable process for recognizing opportunities, validating assumptions, and continuously improving the visitor experience.
Better experiments begin with better opportunities. By learning to identify the pages where thoughtful improvements will have the greatest impact, optimization becomes less about guessing what to change and more about knowing where to focus next. That’s the mindset Bluvia A/B Testing is built to support.
Before You Decide What to Test
Before launching your next experiment, take a few minutes to evaluate whether you’ve identified the right opportunity. Ask yourself:
- Is this page important to our business goals?
- Do enough visitors interact with this page to produce meaningful results?
- Is there clear evidence of visitor friction from analytics, heatmaps, or session recordings?
- Can this experiment answer one specific question?
If you can confidently answer “yes” to each of these questions, you’ve likely found a strong candidate for your next A/B test. If not, spend a little more time understanding visitor behavior before building your experiment. The better you prioritize opportunities, the more valuable every experiment becomes.
Continue Your Optimization Journey
Finding the right opportunity is often more valuable than testing more ideas. Once you’ve learned how to identify the pages with the greatest potential, the next step is turning those opportunities into thoughtful experiments. These resources will help you continue that journey.
- CRO Insights Guide ā Learn how visitor behavior reveals friction and uncovers opportunities for improvement.
- How to Run A/B Tests ā Build stronger hypotheses and create a repeatable experimentation process.
- Best WordPress A/B Testing Plugin ā Discover what to look for when choosing an experimentation platform for WordPress.
When you’re ready to turn opportunities into experiments, explore Bluvia A/B Testing and discover how WordPress teams build stronger optimization habits through continuous experimentation.
By Rebecca Streeter
By Bluvia Team 
