Familiarize yourself with Optimize and learn how optimizations and variations work.
Optimize is designed to help you move fast, test often, and continuously improve your site’s performance. Whether you’re tweaking a headline, redesigning a layout, or targeting specific audiences, Optimize helps you tailor your site experience to what works best. Driving engagement and boosting conversions starts with optimizations and variations — the foundation for testing and delivering personalized experiences to your visitors.
Why personalization matters
Just like with clothing, one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to websites. What resonates with one visitor might fall flat with another. With Webflow Optimize, you can personalize your site experience to the individual.
Instead of showing the same version of a webpage to every visitor, optimizations let you display alternate versions based on who someone is or how they interact with your site. This kind of dynamic personalization can increase engagement and drive more conversions — helping you reach your goals more effectively.
(Optimizations can show alternate versions of page elements to visitors.)
What's a conversion?
A conversion is when a visitor completes the action that your webpage or website is trying to accomplish. For example, if your goal is for visitors to click a Subscribe button, then a conversion is counted when a visitor successfully clicks Subscribe.
Leverage optimizations on your website to drive more conversions.
What are optimizations?
Optimizations are core building blocks in how you use Optimize. They define:
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Where — the specific page(s) on your site where you want to test or personalize content
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What — the changes you want to make to a page, grouped into variations
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Who — which visitors should see each variation — i.e., all visitors or a subset
An optimization is a container for one or more variations. For example, to test different headlines on the homepage, you'd create one optimization for the homepage headline and a separate variation for each headline idea.
What kinds of optimizations are there?
You can run test optimizations and personalization optimizations, which both contain an AI-optimized option.
Traditional test optimization — run a traditional A/B/n test
This type randomly shows different versions of your content to a set percentage of your traffic. After enough traffic has seen the variations, a single winner is determined based on statistical significance. Use this when you want to validate a specific hypothesis with measurable outcomes.
Manual personalization optimization — target specific audiences
Use rules-based personalization to define who should see which variation. For example, you might show different content based on referral source, location, or device type. These optimizations run indefinitely until you choose to stop them, and every visitor in the target segment consistently sees the same version of the page.
AI-optimized optimization — use machine learning to maximize conversions
Leverage AI to automatically deliver the best-performing variation to each visitor. As user behavior shifts, the AI adapts in real time, learning which versions yield the most conversions. You can continue adding new variations to the optimization, and the AI will test and promote the most successful ones.
Pro tip
Not sure where to start? Check out the AI assistant — it recommends best practices and generates ideas you can launch as variations. Get up and running fast with proven ideas.
What are variations?
A variation is a single version of a change that you want to present to visitors. This could be:
- A single change to a page element — e.g., swapping in a different headline
- Multiple changes to a single element — e.g., new copy, font, and color for a CTA
- A combination of changes to multiple elements — e.g., an alternate layout
- A redirect to a different page entirely
All variations live inside an optimization. You'll create an optimization first, then build variations to test your ideas.
Where are Optimize’s settings and results?
Above the canvas in the top bar, click the Insights tab to open the Insights panel. This is your primary entry point for Optimize, where you can adjust settings, create goals, manage optimizations, and review results. Below, we'll cover each option in the Insights panel.
Good to know
Analyze also uses the Insights panel. If you also have the Analyze add-on, its options appear at the top.
Optimize overview page
The Optimize overview page provides a high-level view of the overall impact your optimization efforts are having across your website. These metrics help you uncover insights into visitor engagement, identify which companies are visiting, and compare your performance against common what-if scenarios using the ROI simulator.
This page requires an Enterprise plan and at least one account goal. Learn more about the Optimize overview page.
All optimizations page
The All optimizations page lists all your optimizations and lets you create new ones. This page also includes some basic info about each optimization:
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Basic info — Optimization name, target goal name, optimization type, and date updated
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Status — shows the state an optimization is in (e.g., live, draft, off). Use the Status filter to hide or show optimizations.
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Changes — shows a high-level description of what the optimization changes (e.g., button color). For multiple changes, hover over the change to see more info (i.e., what changed and where).
Click an optimization to access the optimization's results page, which includes detailed insights.
Goals page
Goals track visitor behavior (e.g., viewing a webpage, clicking an element, or submitting a form). Optimizations can include multiple goals for reporting, and you set one goal as the target to define how an optimization measures success.
The Goals page lets you create goals you can add to any of your optimizations. If you want to use the same goal in multiple optimizations, create it on the Goals page.
You can also create goals while editing an optimization from the Optimizations dropdown, but these goals stay tied to that specific optimization and can’t be used anywhere else.
Good to know
If you have Analyze, goals you create on the Goals page also appear in your Analyze reports.
Tracking settings
To use Optimize, you need to enable tracking and decide how you want to track visitor behavior (e.g., always track, opt out, or opt in). You can also choose which domains and/or subdomains to use Optimize on.
Audiences settings
An audience is a subset of your site visitors (e.g., visitors in New York). You can use audiences to refine who is eligible to see variations by targeting or excluding visitors. Learn how to create rules-based audiences.
Integrations settings
You can integrate with third-party services to enhance your Optimize experience. For example, you can integrate with HubSpot to track form submissions and compare how different versions of your pages affect form submissions.
Learn more about which services you can integrate with.
What is the Optimizations dropdown above the canvas?
The Optimizations dropdown in the context bar gives you quick access to Optimize and context-sensitive options.
- While viewing a base page, you can edit an existing optimization or create a new one for that page
- While editing an optimization, you can create or edit variations, switch between them, or adjust the optimization’s settings (e.g., create goals, change the target goal, apply audiences)