You've had a new website built and you love it. Your designer's spent countless hours sculpting it to your exacting specifications; it's a thing of beauty and you couldn't be happier...

... but it's not making any money.

Maybe it's not as great as you thought. Maybe you've got too close to the project and can no longer see it for what it is. Why not show it to your friends for some honest feedback - perhaps they can tell you what’s wrong.

Surprise surprise, they all love it too. They gush with praise. It's heralded as a visual triumph, an aesthetic tour de force. They can barely tear their gaze away, such is its beauty.

So what's going on? Everyone agrees the site looks great so why can't you convert those visitors into customers?

Well here's the kicker - I wouldn't know either. Not yet at least...

Having spent the last few years of my life studying and practicing conversion optimisation, I might be able to make some educated guesses but the only way to know for sure why a website isn't performing is to test it.

The good news is that basic conversion testing can be a fairly simple affair, the easiest form of which is a two way split test. Here's how it works:

Over time, you will usually find that one version of your site out performs the other. Once you are happy that you've found a winner you can switch off the inferior version leaving you with a site that has been proven to be more effective.

This process can (and should) be repeated time and time again, altering a different element of your site each time. In fact, you should keep repeating this process until the improvements you are making become so negligible that it's no longer worth your time to continue.

So, no matter how precisely engineered or beautifully constructed your website, the only way to know if the design is actually going to be effective is to test.

Even if you think you already have a site that converts fantastically well, couldn't it stand to be better? If you aren't testing then you've no idea just how high it could get. I have worked on sites that converts traffic to applicants at a rate of over 60% so the sky really is the limit!

At the end of the day, getting visitors to your site either takes a lot of effort or a lot of money and if you aren't making the most of them when they get there then you're wasting both.

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