How to calculate your website conversion rate, and what to compare it to

October 10, 2026 · 4 min read

Conversion rate is the share of visitors who do the thing you care about: sign up, buy, book a call, join the waitlist. The formula is simple. Choosing what to count, and what to compare the result with, is where most of the value is.

The formula

conversion rate = conversions ÷ visitors × 100

If 2,000 people visit in a month and 50 sign up, the rate is 50 ÷ 2,000 × 100 = 2.5%. The conversion rate calculator does the arithmetic and also works backwards: how many visitors you'd need at your current rate to reach a goal of, say, 100 signups.

Decide what you're counting

Visitors or sessions. For signups, count visitors (people), since someone who returns three times still signs up once. For purchases people repeat, sessions can make sense. Pick one and keep it.
One conversion. Choose the action that matters most and count only that. Mixing newsletter signups with paid plans produces a number nobody can act on.
The same period for both. Visitors and conversions from the same dates, or the rate drifts with every launch.

Why one number misleads

A site-wide conversion rate blends visitors who were never going to convert with those who came ready to buy. A post that goes viral can halve your rate while bringing more signups than ever, because thousands of curious readers join the denominator. Nothing got worse; the mix changed.

Split it by source instead. People from your newsletter, a comparison page or a recommendation usually convert far better than visitors from a busy social feed. Seeing the rate per source tells you which channels deserve more effort, which the blended number never will.

To split by source, the visits need to be labelled. Tag every link you share with UTM parameters (the UTM link builder makes this quick) and record the conversion as an event, so your analytics can divide one by the other per campaign.

What's a "good" conversion rate?

Published averages vary so much by industry, price, traffic source and definition that they're rarely useful for one site. The better benchmarks are your own: this month against last month, each source against the others, and the page before a change against the page after it.

If you change a page to improve the rate, compare the before and after properly. Small differences between two versions are often luck, and the A/B test significance calculator tells you whether a gap is big enough to trust.

Find where people drop off

A conversion rate tells you how many made it to the end, not where the others left. A funnel does: landing page, pricing, signup form, confirmation. The step with the biggest drop is usually the one worth fixing first. In measuremy.site you can build that funnel from page paths and events, see conversion by source, or ask your coding agent which channel converts best this month.

See it on your own site

measuremy.site is cookieless analytics your coding agent can read. 30-day free trial, no card. Plans from $9/month.

Start free trial See the live demo

Add measuremy.site analytics to this project: connect the measuremy.site MCP server at https://a.measuremy.site/mcp (it signs in with OAuth, no key), then tell me how to sign in. Details: measuremy.site/llms.txt

Free tools

Free conversion rate calculator: Conversion rate from visitors and signups, plus the traffic needed for a goal.
Free A/B test significance calculator: Is your A/B test result real or luck? Check significance.
UTM link checker: Find broken UTM tags and see which GA4 channel a link lands in.

All free tools