Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete a specific action on your website. It’s the most direct measure of whether your site is doing its job.
If 500 people visit your product page and 20 of them buy, your conversion rate is 4%. Simple enough. But which visitors you’re counting, and which action you’re measuring, changes the number completely and which changes are actually worth making.
Key takeaways
- Conversion rate = (conversions ÷ sessions or visitors) × 100
- What counts as a “conversion” depends on your goal. It can be a purchase, a signup, a click or anything else you define
- Conversion rate varies enormously by industry, traffic source and page type
- A low conversion rate usually points to a mismatch between visitor intent and what the page offers
- Tracking conversion rate by traffic source is more useful than tracking an overall site average
How conversion rate is calculated
The basic formula:
Conversion rate = (number of conversions ÷ number of sessions) × 100
Some tools calculate it against unique visitors instead of sessions. Both are valid, just be consistent. Using sessions tends to give a more conservative number; using visitors inflates it slightly because one person can visit multiple times before converting.
A few examples:
- 1,000 sessions, 35 purchases → 3.5% conversion rate
- 500 sessions on a landing page, 80 email signups → 16% conversion rate
- 200 sessions on a contact page, 12 form submissions → 6% conversion rate
The formula is the same. What changes is which action you define as the conversion.
What counts as a conversion
A conversion is any action you’ve decided matters for your business. Common ones:
Ecommerce: completed purchase, add to cart, reaching the checkout page
Lead generation: form submission, booking a call, downloading a lead magnet
Content: newsletter signup, account registration, time on page threshold
SaaS: free trial start, feature activation, plan upgrade
There’s no single right answer. The conversion you track should match the outcome your page is trying to drive. A blog post’s conversion goal might be newsletter signup. A product page’s goal is a purchase. Tracking the wrong action gives you a number that looks fine while the thing that actually makes you money isn’t being measured.
What is a good conversion rate?
It depends heavily on industry, traffic source and page type. General benchmarks as a rough reference:
| Page / context | Typical conversion rate |
|---|---|
| Ecommerce store (overall) | 1–4% |
| Landing page (email opt-in) | 5–15% |
| SaaS free trial | 2–10% |
| Checkout page completion | 40–65% |
| Contact form | 3–8% |
These ranges are wide because they’re averages across very different businesses. Your real benchmark is your own historical data. If your ecommerce store ran at 2.8% last quarter and is at 1.9% this quarter with the same traffic mix, that gap is worth investigating.
Why conversion rate is more useful segmented
A single overall conversion rate for your whole site is usually misleading. Visitors from different sources behave very differently.
Organic search traffic typically converts better than social traffic because the intent is more specific. Someone searching “buy [product]” is closer to a decision than someone who saw a post scroll by. Email list traffic often converts best of all because it’s already warm.
In practice, what I look for is conversion rate broken down by:
- Traffic source (organic, email, paid, referral)
- Landing page
- Device type
A 2% overall rate hiding a 6% rate from email and a 0.4% rate from display ads tells you where to focus and where to pull back. The average is almost useless without that context.
Common reasons for low conversion rate
Traffic intent mismatch. People arriving from a broad keyword or a top-of-funnel ad aren’t ready to buy. High traffic, low conversions often means you’re attracting the wrong stage of visitor, not that your page is broken.
Slow page load. Checkout and landing pages that take more than 3 seconds to load lose a measurable share of conversions. For WooCommerce stores specifically, page speed at the product and cart stage directly affects revenue.
Friction in the conversion path. Too many form fields, confusing checkout flows, required account creation: each extra step is an opportunity to drop off.
No clear next step. Pages that don’t explicitly tell the visitor what to do next convert poorly. If someone has to figure out where to click, many won’t bother.
Cookie banners blocking attention. This one is underappreciated. A full-screen cookie consent wall on a product page interrupts the buying moment. Cookieless analytics eliminates this friction entirely.
Tracking conversion rate in WordPress
WordPress doesn’t track conversions natively. You need to define what a conversion means for your site and configure your analytics tool to record it.
Burst Statistics lets you set up goal tracking directly inside WordPress. You define the action: a page visit, a button click, a form submission and Burst records every time it happens. No external dashboard, no Google Tag Manager required.
Burst Pro’s WooCommerce integration automatically tracks purchase conversions from your store. You can see your ecommerce conversion rate, revenue per session and which pages in your funnel are losing visitors, all from inside WordPress admin.
Your data stays on your own server. No third-party sees your customer behaviour.
FAQs
For a new store with organic traffic, 1–2% is a realistic starting point. Stores with strong email lists or high-intent paid search can hit 3–5%. Don’t compare to averages. Track your own trend over time and optimise from there.
Either works as long as you’re consistent. Sessions-based conversion rate tends to be slightly lower and is more conservative. Visitor-based rate is more flattering but can be misleading if visitors regularly visit multiple times before converting. Sessions is usually the safer choice for reporting.
It usually means the new traffic has lower intent than your existing base. This is common after a broad PR hit, a viral social post or a wide-targeting ad campaign. Check where the new sessions are coming from and whether those sources have historically converted for you.
Start with the page that already gets the most traffic but has the lowest conversion rate. That’s your highest-leverage fix. Check for load speed issues, unclear CTAs and friction in the form or checkout flow before anything else.
Know which pages are actually converting
Understanding conversion rate means knowing which traffic, which pages and which actions are producing results. Burst Statistics tracks goal completions and conversion rates directly inside WordPress, no third-party dashboard required.
Understand your customers without the cookie banner
Track conversions, WooCommerce revenue and goal performance on your own server. No consent banner. No data sent to Google.
Related definitions: what is a conversion, what is goal tracking and what is cart abandonment rate. For the broader context, learn how to track conversions in WordPress.
