A non-significant result is still a decision

Product teams in a hurry sometimes leave a treatment live because “it didn’t hurt.” That sentence skips the cost of extra code, extra analytics branches, and a future test that now has to fight a leftover banner.

When the interval around the primary metric includes zero and the test had a realistic chance to see the effect you cared about, the clean close-out is hold. You learned that this variant is not a priority. That is information. It does not require a participation trophy on the live site.

If the test never had the traffic to see the effect, say that. The decision then is not “keep it just in case”; it is “run a longer window, change the metric, or stop this line of work.” Those are different memos. Mixing them is how a homepage collects three unloved experiments by the time 11.11 arrives.