Homepage: Product Category Links on Homepage
Hypothesis
Adding popular product category links to the homepage will help users navigate to relevant products faster, increasing sales.
Test Results
Key Learning
Problem: Users arriving at the homepage can't efficiently find what they're looking for, increasing bounce rates.
What worked: Category shortcuts remove the burden of discovery from users. For ecommerce sites, showing popular categories on the homepage reduces friction for users who know what they want but haven't started browsing. Consistent wins across multiple tests and sites. (+12.5% lift)
Takeaway: A meaningful improvement that compounds with other optimizations. Navigation improvements affect every page — measure downstream engagement and conversion to understand the full impact.
How to Apply This to Your Site
This experiment demonstrated that homepage: product category links on homepage can produce a +12.5% improvement in conversions. The test was run on a homepage page in the e-commerce industry.
Before you test: Consider that navigation tests typically require adequate traffic to reach statistical significance. Run your test for at least 2 full business cycles to account for weekly traffic patterns.
This result reached 95% statistical confidence, meaning there is a very low probability the observed effect was due to chance. Results at this confidence level are generally considered reliable for making business decisions.
What Was Tested
Test #418 on Online.metro-cc.ru (online grocery store): popular product category links added near the bottom of the homepage produced +17.1% completed sales. Test #567 (mobile+desktop) adding popular categories at the top produced +5.4% sales. Low-effort navigation shortcut with reliable positive impact.
Methodology
Build On These Learnings
Save your own experiments, spot winning patterns across your test history, and stop repeating what's already been tried.
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