A foot is 0.3048 metres, exactly
Like the inch, the international foot has been defined in metric terms since 1959: exactly 0.3048 metres, which is twelve inches of 2.54 cm each. Going the other way, one metre is 3.280839895… feet — a recurring decimal, because the exact relationship is a division rather than a round number.
Decimal feet are rarely what you want
Outside surveying, almost nobody writes a length as 32.81 feet. Building drawings, property listings and height records use feet and inches, so the decimal has to be split: take the whole feet, multiply the remainder by twelve, and that is your inches. The page does this for you and shows both forms, because which one you need depends entirely on who is reading it.
The US survey foot, and why it was retired
For most of the twentieth century the United States kept a second, very slightly longer foot for land surveying — the US survey foot, defined as 1200/3937 metres. The difference is about two parts per million, which is nothing over a room and roughly 3 cm over 100 km. It was enough to matter for state plane coordinate systems, and NIST and NOAA formally retired it at the end of 2022 in favour of the international foot used here.
Useful anchors
Three metres is a little under ten feet (9 ft 10 in). A two-metre door is 6 ft 6.7 in. A 100 m sprint is 328 feet, and a 400 m lap is just under a quarter mile at 1,312 feet. For rough work, multiplying metres by 3.3 is within half a percent.