A/B and multi variate testing is a powerful feature within Sitecore to further optimize your user’s experience. One downside though, it requires multiple renderings/components. I have submitted a feature request to Sitecore, to support using SXA Rendering Variants to test the layout. But in the meantime you have to be creative.
So let’s say you do not want to create a new rendering and although cloning renderings in SXA is easy, you still do not want to go there. Simply because it can quickly become a chaos of components that are hardly used.
Here comes the creativity. Why not use the HTML component of SXA and a content test to actually test your layout? Create two rendering variants, copy the HTML, use the HTML component with two content items, make sure CSS classes are set and setup a content test. Kind of a sneaky way but it does the job :).
In the video below, which I created, I will explain how to achieve this. Happy A/B testing!