To increase website conversions, find where visitors drop off, fix the biggest leak first (usually speed, an unclear offer or a weak call to action), and test every change against your own baseline. Generic checklists give you ideas. Your own data tells you which ones are worth running.

This guide is for Canadian business owners and marketing managers who already get traffic and want more of it to turn into calls, quotes and sales. It covers the measurement, the fixes that usually pay off, and the Canadian rules that apply to your forms.

TL;DR

• Set your own baseline first: conversions divided by visits, per page and per traffic source. A published “good” rate is not your target.
• Speed is the cheapest lever. Google research links even small mobile speed gains to more conversions, so check your Core Web Vitals before redesigning anything.
• One page, one primary action, written in value-based words. Cut the options and the jargon.
• Treat every tip, including the ones below, as a hypothesis. Test for at least two weeks on a lower-traffic site and keep a log.
• If you collect emails in Canada, your opt-in must follow CASL: no pre-checked boxes, clear identification, a working unsubscribe.

Table of Contents

• Start by measuring what a conversion is worth to you
• Fix speed before you touch the design
• Make the page say what you do in five seconds
• Write calls to action people want to click
• Build trust at the moment of decision
• Shorten your forms and make them CASL-safe
• Use landing pages for paid and campaign traffic
• Test properly, and keep a log
• Where to start: a 30-day order of operations
• Our perspective: conversion is a system, not a trick
• When it makes sense to bring in help
• FAQ
• Sources

Start by measuring what a conversion is worth to you

A conversion is any action you want a visitor to take: a form submission, a phone call, a booking, a purchase. Before you change anything, decide which one matters most to revenue. A newsletter signup and a quote request are both conversions, but they are not worth the same.

The formula is simple. Divide total conversions by total visits and express the result as a percentage. Then split it:

• by traffic source (organic search, paid search, social, email)
• by device (mobile and desktop usually behave very differently)
• by landing page

A site-wide number of 2% can hide a landing page at 6% and a service page at 0.4%. The second page is where your work starts.

What is a good conversion rate?

There is no universal answer. Aggregate industry rates often sit in the 2 to 4% range, but that range mixes retail checkouts with B2B quote forms, and it is not a goal. The sturdier approach is to set your own baseline and keep improving against it by segment.

This also answers the question of whether 12% or 30% is good. It can be, for a branded search landing page or a warm email list. It would be suspicious for cold traffic to a service page. Compare like with like: same source, same device, same goal.

Fix speed before you touch the design

Slow pages lose visitors before your message is read. Google’s “Milliseconds Make Millions” study analyzed mobile data from 37 retail, travel, luxury and lead generation brands over four weeks. It found that improvements as small as a tenth of a second correlated with higher conversions, with retail and travel sites seeing lifts of roughly 8% and 10%.

Google measures user experience through Core Web Vitals. The “good” thresholds, assessed at the 75th percentile of real visits, are:

The thresholds come from Google’s PageSpeed Insights documentation. Run your top five landing pages through PageSpeed Insights, on mobile first. The usual culprits are oversized images, heavy scripts from old plugins and cheap hosting. If hosting is the cause, no amount of copy testing will compensate for it.

Make the page say what you do in five seconds

Most underperforming pages fail at clarity, not creativity. Open your page on your phone and ask a colleague who has never seen it three questions:

1. What does this company do?
2. Who is it for?
3. What should I do next?

If the answers take more than a few seconds, rewrite the headline and the first screen. Name the service and the audience in plain words. “Bookkeeping for Montreal contractors” beats “Solutions that empower growth.”

Keep design in service of the action

Beautiful pages can still convert badly. A common failure in B2B and e-commerce, as Shopify notes, is giving up usability for looks: headers that fill the whole mobile screen, or buttons pushed below the fold. Simplify the navigation so the visitor’s intent is served first. Design comes second.

If your site is several years old and these problems are structural, a rebuild may cost less than endless patches. Our guide on building a high-converting website walks through that process step by step.

Write calls to action people want to click

Weak CTAs are one of the easiest wins. Words like “Submit” or “Click here” tell the visitor nothing about what happens next. Unbounce’s guidance is to use action-oriented, value-based wording, such as “Get My Free Consultation”, and to limit a page to one primary, highly visible CTA so visitors are not overwhelmed by choice.

A practical rewrite pattern:

Keep one primary button per page and make secondary actions visually quieter. We cover more on this in our post with four tips to improve your website’s CTA.

Build trust at the moment of decision

Visitors hesitate where the risk feels highest: next to the form, the price or the button. Place proof there, not buried on an “About” page:

• a short testimonial with a name and company
• client logos you have permission to show
• a concrete result, such as a number with its time frame
• certifications and guarantees, only if they are real and current
• a visible phone number and a Canadian business address

Address objections directly. If buyers always ask about timelines or contract length, answer on the page rather than hoping they call. Specific beats vague: “We reply within one business day” is more credible than “fast service,” as long as you keep the promise.

Shorten your forms and make them CASL-safe

Every extra field costs you some submissions. Ask only what you need to follow up. For a quote request, name, email, phone and a short project description is usually enough. Add fields back only if the leads you receive are unqualified.

Canadian rules for opt-ins

If your form adds people to an email list, Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation applies. The CRTC summarizes the core requirements: prior consent (express or implied), identification and contact information, and a working unsubscribe mechanism. In practice:

• Do not pre-check the consent box. Consent must be an explicit, affirmative action.
• State who is asking for consent and include a physical mailing address.
• Make unsubscribing easy and honor it promptly.

Guidance prepared for Canadian real estate members lays out the same three rules in plainer language, and it is a useful checklist for any small business. For anything unclear in your situation, such as implied consent or B2B exceptions, ask a Canadian lawyer who handles privacy and marketing law before you launch the form.

Use landing pages for paid and campaign traffic

Sending paid clicks to a homepage is one of the most common ways small businesses waste ad budget. A landing page has one audience, one promise and one action. It matches the ad’s wording, removes the main menu and keeps the form close to the top.

Two of our own pieces go deeper: why you should use landing pages, and a landing page design swipe file with the layout choices behind a 50% form lift.

Visitors who leave without converting are not lost. Remarketing strategies bring a share of them back with a message tied to the page they viewed.

Test properly, and keep a log

A/B testing only works if you let a test run long enough. For lower-traffic sites, practitioners recommend running a test for at least two weeks so that random swings do not fool you. High-traffic sites may reach a reliable answer sooner.

The same source recommends documenting each experiment: the hypothesis, what you changed, the result and what you learned. That log stops you from repeating failed ideas and makes each test smarter than the last.

A simple test plan for a small site:

1. Pick one page with meaningful traffic and a clear goal.
2. Look at the quantitative data (analytics, heatmaps) to find where visitors drop off.
3. Look at the qualitative side: session recordings, customer calls, form comments. This tells you why.
4. Write one hypothesis: “If we change X, then Y will improve, because Z.”
5. Change one thing, run it for at least two weeks, record the result.
6. Keep the winner, log the lesson, move to the next page.

With very low traffic, A/B tests may never reach a clear result. In that case, make the obvious fixes (speed, clarity, CTA, form length), then compare before and after periods.

Where to start: a 30-day order of operations

The order matters. Fixing speed and clarity first means every later test starts from a healthier page.

Our perspective: conversion is a system, not a trick

We see the same pattern with small and mid-sized businesses. They invest in traffic through SEO or Google Ads, then lose a large share of it on a slow, unclear page. Money spent on clicks is wasted if the page cannot close the visit.

So we look at the whole path. Which ad or search query brought the visitor? What did the landing page promise? Was the form easy on a phone? Did the follow-up happen quickly? Fixing one link rarely moves results. Fixing the weakest link often does.

We also distrust universal rules. A tactic that works for a large retailer can fail on a local service site with a tenth of the traffic. That is why we treat tips as hypotheses and measure results against each client’s own baseline, in line with the performance-first approach we have always taken.

Our advice to owners: do not start with a redesign. Start with the data, fix the obvious leaks, and test the rest. If the data shows the site itself is the problem, then rebuild with conversion in mind from the first wireframe.

— Ruthwik

When it makes sense to bring in help

You can do much of the above in-house if you have time and someone comfortable with analytics. Help is worth it when traffic is paid and every wasted click costs money, when the site needs structural rebuilding, or when nobody on your team owns testing.

Courimo is a Montreal-based digital marketing agency and a certified Google Partner. We work on website development built around conversion, Google Ads management that sends traffic to purpose-built landing pages, and SEO that brings in qualified visitors. We guarantee a response within 24 hours. If you want a second opinion on what is holding your site back, you can request a free website development quote.

FAQ

How can I increase my website conversion rate quickly?

Start with the fastest fixes: improve mobile page speed, rewrite the main headline so the offer is obvious, and replace generic buttons with a specific one such as “Get my free quote”. Remove extra form fields and extra links competing with the main action. Measure your rate before and after so you know what worked.

Is a 12% or 30% conversion rate good?

It depends on the traffic source and the goal. Aggregate rates across industries often fall around 2 to 4%, so 12% or 30% would be strong for cold traffic, yet normal for a warm email list or a branded landing page. Judge your rate against your own baseline for the same source and device.

How long should I run an A/B test?

On a lower-traffic site, run it for at least two weeks so random fluctuations do not mislead you. Higher-traffic sites may need less time. Do not stop a test the moment one version pulls ahead.

Do Canadian businesses need to follow special rules for sign-up forms?

Yes, if the form leads to commercial emails or texts. Under CASL you need consent, clear identification with contact details, and a working unsubscribe, and you should never pre-check the consent box. For edge cases, speak with a Canadian lawyer experienced in marketing and privacy law.

Does website speed really affect conversions?

Yes. Google’s research on mobile sites across retail, travel, luxury and lead generation found that small speed improvements correlated with higher conversions and engagement. Check your Core Web Vitals in PageSpeed Insights and fix the slowest pages first.

Sources

• Milliseconds Make Millions, Think with Google
• About PageSpeed Insights, Google for Developers
• CRO best practices, Contentsquare
• Website Conversion: What It Is and How to Improve It, Shopify
• How to Increase Conversion Rate, Unbounce
• 6 Steps to Perform Conversion Rate Optimization, Semrush
• The Act, regulations, and guidelines, CRTC
• Guidance on Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation for REALTOR members

Recommended

• Swipe File: Landing Page Design for Marketers, 50% Form Lift
• Four Tips For Improving Your Website’s Cta
• Ways To Convert Website Visitors Into Customers
• 10 Steps to Building a High-Converting Website