How to Calculate Your Website’s Traffic Growth

It’s great to see how many visitors your site has had, but it’s even more valuable to compare your traffic over different periods.

After reading this guide, you’ll know how to calculate:

• How much your site’s traffic has grown
• How much your top traffic sources have grown
• Which individual pages are growing (or slowing) the most

The calculations are quite simple, plus there are free tools that can help.

Without further ado, let’s dive into the simple math required to calculate growth.

How to calculate website traffic growth

Calculating your website’s traffic growth is easy, and it’s good to understand how the underlying math works.

There are a couple of ways to calculate traffic growth, but this formula is the simplest:

((Traffic / Previous traffic) - 1) * 100

Let’s say you want to see how much your site grew in May. You find that you had 1,200 visitors in May and 1,000 visitors in April. Here’s how you would write the equation:

((1,200 / 1,000) - 1) * 100 = 20%

While you can run through the entire formula, the nice part about this equation is that there’s a shortcut. You can take the first step and then skip the rest.

Take a look:

1,200/1,000 = 1.2

Everything after the “1” is the percentage, so you can see that the growth is 20% without needing to finish the calculation manually.

This example shows how you can calculate traffic growth over a month, but it can be applied to any date range. It’s also a great idea to find the growth of individual pages and traffic sources in addition to sitewide traffic growth.

Calculating traffic growth for referrers

One of the best ways to use a traffic growth calculation is to determine which traffic sources (referrers) are growing the most.

For instance, you may want to know how much your traffic from Google or Facebook has increased. You can run the same formula from before to figure this out:

((Traffic / Previous traffic) - 1) * 100

This analysis is extremely useful for tracking the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. If you have been posting regularly on Facebook but aren’t seeing any growth, that could be a good sign that you need to change your strategy.

Alternatively, you could find that your results are beyond your expectations, and you should double down on your efforts.

While it’s great to know how to calculate traffic growth on your own, it can be rather tedious. With the right tools, you can skip the number crunching and jump straight to the insights.

A free plugin that calculates growth for you

If your site runs on WordPress, check our free plugin, Independent Analytics.

It takes seconds to install and begins tracking visitors right away. You’ll get a beautiful analytics dashboard inside the WP admin where you can view your stats at any time.

In regards to traffic growth, you’ll love that this is auto-calculated for you.

The Quick Stats at the top of the page include your basic web metrics, like Visitors and Bounce Rate.

In addition to the raw count, you can see the growth percentage compared to the previous period.

In the example above, you can see the number of visitors has increased by 31%, and the average session duration has decreased by 10%.

As mentioned previously, sitewide metrics are useful, but you’ll find more valuable insights by looking at individual pages and referrers.

In the Pages report, you can enable the Visitors Growth column to discover how much each page has grown (or shrunk):

With the Visitors Growth column enabled you can then sort your pages to see which ones have grown the most.

You can repeat the same steps to find your fastest-growing referrers and countries too.

As you can see, this is much faster and more intuitive than calculating growth rates yourself. This is even more evident when viewing different date ranges.

You’ll see stats for the past 30 days by default, but you can easily modify the date range to compare the growth of any page or referrer over a different period, such as today vs. yesterday or this year vs. last year.

Regardless of which analytics tool you end up choosing for your site, make sure it provides growth metrics already calculated so you can rapidly analyze your data.

Grow your site even more

Now you know how to manually calculate the growth of your website and how to find this data automatically with a tool like Independent Analytics.

Using a tool is far superior because you can immediately see the growth of your site, individual pages, and traffic sources.

I hope this guide helped you understand how to calculate the growth of your site, but if you have any remaining questions, please leave a comment below.