Important!

This article applies to Nelio A/B testing versions prior to 5.0.

If you are looking for documentation for our newest version, please bookmark neliosoftware.com/testing/help/



Starting at version 3.1.1, Nelio A/B Testing is able to work with Staging/Live (Testing/Production) environments seamlessly. Essentially, this means you'll be able to define A/B testing experiments in your Staging (or Testing) environment and push them to your Live site without any further problems.


There are, however, a few considerations you have to take into account when using our service in such an scenario.



How does Nelio A/B Testing works?


This is how our service works without a production/testing environment:


  1. You subscribe to one of our plans.
  2. You install the plugin in your WordPress site.
  3. You register the site (using the options within our plugin). From now on, your site has a unique identifier that we use to validate you're a legit user of our service (along with your customer ID and a Product Registration Number).
  4. You create an A/B testing experiment. The information an A/B testing experiment generates is divided in two parts. The first part, which contains the actual alternative pages/posts, is stored in your own server. The second part, which is meta-information about the experiment (such as its name, type, the IDs of the alternatives, the conversion goals...), is stored in our backend servers.
  5. You start the experiment. Our plugin caches the meta-information from our backend servers (for speed purposes) and it starts the actual A/B testing process. All tracked information (visited pages, heatmaps, and so on) is sent to our backend servers for processing.
  6. You view the results of the experiment (whilst it's running, or once you've stopped it). The plugin retrieves the results from our backend servers and displays the progress of the experiment (page views, conversions, ratios, statistical data...).



How is a Testing/Production setup integrated in Nelio A/B Testing?


As aforementioned, the information we need to run an A/B testing experiment is divided in two parts: one stored in your own server, the other in ours. If you want to create an A/B testing experiment in a Testing environment, and then push it to Live, you simply need to:


  1. Copy all the information from your Production environment to Testing.
  2. Create the A/B Testing experiment in Testing. This will create the alternative content in the Testing database and some meta-data in our backend servers.
  3. Copy all the information from Testing to Production.


So, basically, if we copy all the information (that is, all tables) back and forth both environments, the plugin will work seamlessly, for the fact that using Nelio from either a Staging or a Live environment is transparent to us.