This page summarizes some experiments conducted by the Appropedia team and their results.
[edit | edit source]
For some time, Appropedia had Template:Footer, a meta template used to create footers with links to related pages (very similar to Wikipedia's navboxes). However, the meta template was deleted and Appropedia no longer has any footers (they were replaced by menus). Essentially the reason was that they proved to be inferior to menus, but more specifically:
- Their function is very similar to menus, making it confusing when to use each.
- Their visibility is very low compared to menus, since footers go near the bottom of the page while menus go near the top right (usually above the fold)
- Their location is already crowded with other related links, including the "See also" section, Template:Page data and categories.
- They tend to grow indefinitely, leading to huge, confusing and ugly footers that nevertheless fail to be exhaustive, unlike categories.
- User:PedroK and User:Sophivorus did a pseudo A/B testing in which the Template:Athena menu was replaced for an Athena footer. Before the replacement, the Athena menu received 119 clicks in 30 days. After the replacement, the Athena footer received only 8 clicks in 30 days. This suggests that footers are way less effective at directing users to related pages than menus.
Page naming[edit | edit source]
Between 2021-11-05 and 2022-07-17, User:PedroK and User:Sophivorus did a pseudo A/B testing to find out whether "How to" titles bring more organic traffic to Appropedia than regular titles. The pages used for the experiment were solar cooker projects that had building instructions in their content. Some of these projects showed organic traffic before the renaming while others did not. The results were that the ones which already had organic traffic (such as Parabolic basket and tin can solar cooker) showed a decrease in it, while the others stayed the same as before. From this results we can deduce the following:
- "How to" titles don't necessarily increase organic traffic
- If a page has a good SEO, the name should not be changed
