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Do headline A/B tests work on homepages?

About the same as anywhere else. Headline tests win 8% of the time on homepages, against 8% across all page types. This page neither helps nor hurts the change type.

Layout tests carry a higher published rate on homepages — 20% on 100+ tests — though see the note below before reading that as a recommendation.

The numbers

Won 8% No measurable change 78% Lost 13%
homepagesall page types
Tests analysed250+500+
Beat control8%8%
No measurable difference78%
Lost to control13%
Median lift when it won +34.7%

Median traffic per variant was 1371 visitors.

What else is worth testing on homepages

change typewin rate on homepagestests
Layout 20%100+
Price framing 16%49 tests
Hero image 15%50+
Split URL 13%100+
CTA copy 11%100+
Social proof 10%50+
Styling 10%500+
Headline (this page) 8%250+
Body copy 8%100+

Only change types with at least 30 tests on homepages appear here.

What tests on homepages measured

A win rate only means as much as the thing being counted, so this is what these tests were actually optimising for.

measured outcomeshare of tests
Purchase / order complete43%
Signup / registration16%
On-page click / engagement14%
Lead / form submission8%

Outcomes below 5% of the set are not listed, so these do not sum to 100. How the outcome was measured moves the win rate a lot — see the methodology.

Why this table is not a ranking

These rates are not like-for-like. How often a test wins depends partly on what it chose to measure: a goal that records a soft signal — a click, a scroll — clears the bar more often than one that records a purchase. Across this data, tests measured against a proxy goal win 13%, against 9% for tests measured against a business outcome.

Categories differ a lot in that mix — proxy goals account for anywhere from 2% to 41% of a category's tests.

Hold the metric fixed and the spread narrows sharply. Comparing only tests measured against a business outcome, the gap between the highest and lowest category falls from 9 points to 6 — at which point the intervals overlap and the categories are not statistically distinguishable.

So read the table as a description of what happened, not as a ranking of what works. If you want the comparison to mean something, compare categories that were measured the same way. The methodology page has the full breakdown.

What counts as a headline test

The main heading is rewritten. Structure, styling and every other element stay put.

Control and variant wireframe for a headline A/B test
Control on the left, variant on the right. For how this differs from adjacent categories, see the headline benchmark.

Headline tests that won on homepages

  • The hero headline and subhead copy were changed, and the hero image of a person with an app screenshot was replaced with a phone and laptop mockup collage.

    SaaS / Software+34.7%

  • The left-aligned headline and subhead were replaced with a centered mind-mapping headline, eyebrow text, and a new illustrated hero graphic with converging lines and avatars.

    SaaS / Software+7.1%

  • The plain text headline and static screenshot hero were replaced with a translated headline inside an illustrated mind-map graphic, and the CTA button was restyled as a pill shape.

    SaaS / Software+6.9%

  • The headline changed to promote a 20% sitewide discount that could be redeemed with the code CYBER20.

    E-commerce+44.4%

Headline tests that did not

  • The modal headline was rewritten to emphasize the expiring dollar credit, and a new subline was added warning that the credit expired after submission.

    Professional ServicesNo significant difference

  • It replaced the flat-lay image and business headline with a hand-on-book photo background, a longer headline, and a newsletter signup panel instead of the CTA button.

    Finance & InsuranceNo significant difference

  • The headline was changed to mention a specific omega product, and the video source and poster were switched to a different omega video.

    Health & WellnessNo significant difference

These are individual tests, not rules. Each ran on one site, with one audience, against one page we are not showing you. They are picked to be illustrative rather than sampled at random, and a change that won here can lose on your page for reasons none of this captures. Read them as prompts for what to test, not as findings to copy.

Who ran these tests

This is every Mida account that ran a readable test — in-house marketers, founders, product teams, and agencies working on client sites. Nothing here is filtered by who ran the experiment or how experienced they are.

Low win rates are normal in experimentation, including at the top end. Microsoft's experimentation team, reporting on its own platform, found that only about one third of ideas improve the metric they were designed to improve — and that roughly another third actively hurt it. That is a dedicated experimentation organisation with research, prioritisation and review behind every test.

A mixed population like this one runs below that. The gap is roughly what disciplined practice buys you: ideas grounded in research rather than opinion, one variable at a time, and tests built so the result can actually be read.

A win is a variant that beat its control on that test's primary goal with a statistically significant result. Tests that never got enough traffic to say anything either way are excluded. The methodology has the full detail, including what these numbers cannot tell you.