Super Simple (aka Ghetto) A/B Testing

Looking to test a couple variants of your landing page?  Sure there are a bunch of great tools out there, but that takes time/effort to find, register, and install on your site. 

If you’re just at the point (like I am) where you want an easy free way to test landing pages quickly.  This little PHP A/B tester is the simplest way to compare two versions of a webpage.  Here’s how it works:

1. Save on your php enabled web server as something like test.php
2. A user will go to yourserver.com/test.php
3. test.php will randomly pick one of two webpages to send them to (ideally a form/google survey where you can collect output)
4. test.php will record where the user was sent in data.txt
5. At the conclusion of the test you can easy grab the resulting text file (in this case called data.txt).  Count the number of visits and compared to the number of conversions to get your rate.  The higher number wins!

Code below.  Happy Testing!

<?php

$filename = 'data.txt';
$somecontent = "Placeholder";

//this will pick randomly spit out 0 or 1
$path = mt_rand(0,1);

// Let's make sure the file exists and is writable first.
if (is_writable($filename)) {

    // In our example we're opening $filename in append mode.
    // The file pointer is at the bottom of the file hence
    // that's where $somecontent will go when we fwrite() it.
    if (!$handle = fopen($filename, 'a')) {
         echo "Cannot open file ($filename)";
         exit;
    }
   

/*for the purpose of this test we’re just sending folks to google.com or microsoft.com.  Replace those URLs with desired content */

    if($path>0){
        //Write $somecontent to our opened file.
        if (fwrite($handle, "Google") === FALSE) {
             echo "Cannot write to file ($filename)";
            exit;
        }
        header("Location: http://www.google.com");
    }else{
        if (fwrite($handle, "Microsoft") === FALSE) {
            echo "Cannot write to file ($filename)";
        exit;
    }
    header("Location: http://www.microsoft.com");
}   
echo "Success, wrote ($somecontent) to file ($filename)";

fclose($handle);

} else {
    echo "The file $filename is not writable";
}
 
?>