What Is Find and Replace?

You know that feeling when you’re writing a report and then you realized you spelled someone’s name wrong? Every time? You would probably do a find and replace to fix it in your document. It’s a familiar feature, and makes it way, way, easier to make changes occur everywhere they’re supposed to. Find and Replace is also how SiteSpect works, and this revolutionizes how you A/B test, personalize, and optimize on your website. 

Find and Replace Explained

If you’re A/B testing a change on some category of pages, you only need to create the variation once and SiteSpect will apply it everywhere it’s supposed to appear. This is the crux of Find and Replace. If you want to change the look of all the “Add to Cart” buttons on your product detail pages for example, you simply tell SiteSpect to Find all the buttons on all of those pages, and replace them with the new ones. 

Let’s walk through an example. Say you have the following criteria:

1. You want to find all “Out of Stock” buttons on product detail pages
2. You want to replace those with “Add to Wishlist” buttons

When you create your variation, you identify the “Out of Stock” button, enter the new “Add to Wishlist” button, and that’s it. SiteSpect does the rest of the work for you. 

The same thing works in your visual editor. Make the change you want, and then choose which category of pages you want it to apply to. This is huge, as it means you can implement large scale A/B tests across your site in minutes rather than weeks. 

The Technical Stuff: How it Works

Because of SiteSpect’s architecture, site variations apply before content appears in the browser. This diagram demonstrates SiteSpect’s architecture.

In the flow of traffic, SiteSpect can search all of the content on your site and replace it where necessary. Other tools can’t do this, because their changes live in the code and render after delivery to the browser. Each change occurs separately. This means a lot more work for them, and a slower experience for the user. 

So, if you’re overwhelmed by a big site with a lot of content, remember that Find and Replace helps you ensure consistency no matter the experiment.

To learn more about SiteSpect, visit our website.