Hey Sumo-lings,

Here's how theme changes usually go on WordPress.

You want to try a new layout. So you edit your live theme, push it, and every visitor gets it. If the numbers go the wrong way, you're unpicking your own changes by hand a fortnight later, hoping you remember all of them.

Otter now gives you the other option.

Duplicate. Change. Test. Delete the loser.

1. Make a copy of your theme — a child theme, or a straight duplicate

2. Make your changes in the copy. Templates, CSS, layout, whatever you want

3. Run the two against each other on real traffic, scored on your goals

4. Keep the winner. Delete the loser.

Your live theme is never edited. It runs as control, exactly as it does today. Everything you're trying lives in a separate theme — and if it loses, you delete a folder. Nothing to revert, nothing left behind.

That's the actual point. It isn't "which theme is better." It's being able to make real changes without betting the site on them.

Why this beats the usual approach

Most A/B tools patch the page with JavaScript after it loads. Fine for a headline. But a layout change means the page visibly rebuilds itself in front of the visitor — and a test that wins leaves you folding a pile of CSS overrides back into your theme by hand.

Otter picks the theme server-side, before WordPress loads a single template file. The first byte is already the right theme, so nothing flashes. And because the winner is a real theme, shipping it means activating it.

No staging site. No second URL. No redirect.

The safety rails

- Only themes you explicitly approve can be served

- Assignment cookies are HMAC-signed — hand-edit one and you get control

- Admin, REST, cron, WP-CLI, feeds and the Customizer always show your real theme

- Returning visitors stay on the theme they were given

- Theme testing stays switched off until you confirm the assignment cookie is excluded from your page cache or CDN. A cache that ignores it would serve one visitor's theme to everyone, so we block the feature rather than risk it.

Getting started

Install the Otter plugin, approve your copy under Settings → Otter A/B Testing, then choose Create a WordPress theme split test. Otter prefills a site-wide test with your current theme as control.

Works with or without WooCommerce.

Go break something safely.

Hey Sumo-lings,

If you run Google Tag Manager, this update removes a step you never should have had to do twice.

What shipped

Otter now has a DataLayer Event goal type. If your site already pushes an event into the GTM dataLayer — generate_lead, purchase, add_to_cart, form_submit, whatever you named it — you can score an A/B test on that event directly.

Setup is one field. Choose "DataLayer Event", type the event name exactly as your site pushes it, done.

Why it's good

No new tag. No code change. No GTM access needed.

That last one matters more than it sounds. If you run an agency, you know the drill: the client's GTM container is behind a login belonging to someone who's on leave, and your test sits in draft for a fortnight waiting on it. Otter reads window.dataLayer straight from the snippet you already installed. Whoever owns GTM never has to be involved.

It also means your test and your client's analytics are counting the same thing. You're scoring on the exact event their dashboard already reports, instead of a second click-selector that quietly drifts away from it.

Confirm it before you launch

Open the Preview Tool on your real site, go to the Goals panel, and push the event. The goal flips to ✓ Fired the moment Otter sees it. Preview bypasses conversion tracking entirely, so fire it as often as you like — nothing is recorded against your results.

Live now for everyone, on every tier, no upgrade and no action needed. Your existing tests are untouched.

Hey Sumo-lings 👋

You've been asking for this one, and as of today it's live for everyone: multi-armed bandit is now a traffic strategy you can pick on any new test.

Quick version of why you'd want it:

A classic A/B test holds your traffic split fixed until you call a winner - still the right tool when you want a clean, rigorous read. But for a promo, a seasonal landing page, or a short campaign, every visitor you send to a losing version is money left on the table. A bandit fixes that by shifting traffic toward the winner while the test is still running.

Here's how ours works:

- Starts fair. Every version gets an even share of traffic while it collects a warm-up sample (50 visitors per version).

- Learns from your primary goal. Conversion rate or revenue per visitor - whichever you set — decides which version is leading.

- Adapts automatically. Most new visitors go to the current leader, and 20% of traffic keeps exploring all versions, so a slow starter can still take the lead.

- Stays consistent. Returning visitors always keep the version they first saw - no flip-flopping mid-session.

- Reports in plain probabilities. Bandit tests use Bayesian reporting automatically, so you see each version's chance to be best instead of squinting at p-values.

You'll find it in the test wizard right next to the usual manual split, and the results page shows exactly how traffic is being allocated and why.

It's included on every AppSumo tier at no extra cost - lifetime deal, lifetime features.

Docs: https://www.otterab.com/docs/building-tests/creating-a-test

Go squeeze more wins out of your traffic 🦦

Hi Sumo-lings,

Otter now runs properly under GDPR and CCPA. This was the most-asked-for thing in the Q&A, and it shipped this week.

Opt-in consent mode

Switch a project to opt-in and the SDK stays completely dormant until your visitor agrees. Not "loads but holds off on tracking" — nothing happens at all. No SDK download, no configuration request, no cookie, no variant applied. The install snippet carries a small inline loader that checks your consent signal before it ever fetches Otter.

Your page still reveals immediately. Someone who ignores the banner sees your site normally, they're just not in a test.

It reads your banner for you

Otter detects Google Consent Mode v2, Cookiebot, OneTrust, Usercentrics, CookieYes, Complianz and Iubenda automatically, using each vendor's own analytics category. For anything else, call optimo.grantConsent(true) when your banner is accepted.

One caveat you should hear from me rather than discover: IAB TCF v2.2 is detected but deliberately stays dormant, because we don't have an IAB Global Vendor List ID yet. Registration is underway. Until it lands, bridge TCF with the manual call.

Otter never resolves consent optimistically. If a banner is present but unanswered, the SDK stays asleep — so a misconfigured banner shows up as no data, rather than as data you weren't allowed to collect.

Only where you need it

Require consent from every visitor, or only from visitors in the EEA and UK. The region check fails closed: anyone we can't confidently place gets asked.

IPs and retention

Otter has never written a visitor IP to the database — it's read in-request only, to resolve a country for geo targeting. You can now mask it even for that transient use (IPv4 to /24, IPv6 to /48), and set a retention window per project. When a visitor ages out, their identifying fields, sessions and events are deleted.

Your experiment totals don't move. Assignment, conversion and revenue history survive an erasure as anonymous facts. A right-to-be-forgotten request should never quietly rewrite a test you already made a decision on.

Nothing changes unless you want it to

Opt-out stays the default on every existing project. If you do switch one to opt-in, reinstall your snippet — the new one carries the consent mode, and that has to be known before the first request, because that request is the thing being held back.

Setup guide: https://www.otterab.com/docs/getting-started/privacy-and-consent

Also shipped recently

Branded print-ready reports with a proper title page, faster results via grouped Bayesian bootstrapping and caching, a table view for the experiments list, and a fix for visual editor saves on sites that send COOP headers.

Hey Sumo-lings,

Quick update on what we've shipped since launch. Most of it came out of your feedback, so thank you for that.

WooCommerce revenue tracking

There's now an official Otter plugin for WooCommerce. Install it and purchases get tracked with real revenue read from the order itself, not scraped off the page. Orders are deduplicated by order ID, so a customer refreshing the thank-you page won't double count. No theme edits needed.

Preview before you launch

The Preview Bar opens your real site and lets you flip between variants before anything goes live. It'll also do a dry run on your goals to confirm they actually fire, which beats finding out a week later that you were tracking nothing.

Visual editor

It now stays open while you click around your site, so you can edit a page that's three clicks deep. You can also switch between desktop, tablet and mobile to check your changes hold up on small screens.

Revenue in your currency

Set a currency per project and we handle the exchange rates in reporting.

Smaller things

Archive experiments you're finished with, and unarchive them if you change your mind. We killed a slow query that made the results page drag on tests with a lot of data. Your AppSumo license and tier now show up properly in billing.

One for the tinkerers

We published an MCP server, so you can drive Otter from Claude or any AI assistant. Create projects, launch experiments, pull results.

That's it for now. If something's broken or missing, tell us. We read everything.

Chris