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Do hero image A/B tests work on homepages?

About the same as anywhere else. Hero image tests win 15% of the time on homepages, against 12% 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 15% No measurable change 74% Lost 12%
homepagesall page types
Tests analysed50+100+
Beat control15%12%
No measurable difference74%
Lost to control12%
Median lift when it won +19.5%

Median traffic per variant was 2026 visitors.

What else is worth testing on homepages

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

The main visual is swapped, cropped or replaced. Surrounding copy stays as it was.

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

Hero image tests that won on homepages

  • The image inside the specified block was replaced with a different photo.

    Finance & Insurance+19.5%

  • The homepage hero area changed from a static section to a new autoplaying background video with a headline, text, and a CTA button above the main content.

    E-commerce+19.4%

  • The hero video source and poster image were swapped from one language version to another, while the surrounding content stayed the same.

    Health & Wellness+24.9%

  • The plain text headline and static screenshot hero were replaced with an illustrated mind-map graphic and a new translated headline.

    SaaS / Software+13.4%

Hero image tests that did not

  • It replaced the desktop and mobile hero images with new versions and reduced the top margin above the hero graphic on mobile.

    SaaS / SoftwareNo significant difference

  • The hero banner image changed from a mother and son hugging to a different photo of a family on a muddy walk, while the layout and cropping stayed the same.

    Finance & InsuranceNo significant difference

  • It added a new hero section with three linked promotional images above the page content and hid the existing banner wrapper.

    E-commerceNo 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.