Hotjar is a behaviour analytics tool that shows how people use your website through heatmaps, session recordings, on-page surveys and feedback widgets. Where Google Analytics tells you how many people left a page, Hotjar helps you see what they did before they left.
How Hotjar works
You add Hotjar’s tracking code to your site, either directly or through a tag manager. The script captures the structure of each page along with visitor actions such as clicks, taps, mouse movement and scrolling, and sends them to Hotjar. From that, it builds several kinds of report:
- Heatmaps, which overlay where visitors clicked and moved, and how far down they scrolled, combined across many visits.
- Session recordings, which replay a single visit. They are a reconstruction of the page and the visitor’s actions, not a video of the person’s screen.
- Surveys and feedback widgets, which ask visitors a question on the page or after an action such as submitting a form.
Hotjar is part of Contentsquare, and its plans, limits and product names have changed several times, so check the current plan details before relying on a particular feature (at the time of writing, October 2026). There are free alternatives, notably Microsoft Clarity, which offers heatmaps and recordings without Hotjar’s survey tools.
Why it matters
Most conversion problems are invisible in numbers alone. GA4 might show that most mobile visitors leave your booking page without enquiring. A dozen recordings might show why: the date picker does not respond on smaller phones, or people keep tapping a photo they expect to open a gallery. That turns a vague worry into a specific fix, and gives you something worth testing.
For a UK website, Hotjar also brings legal duties that are easy to overlook. It stores cookies and reads interaction data from the visitor’s device, and the site works perfectly well without it, so under PECR it needs the visitor’s consent before it runs. Recordings and survey answers can contain personal data, which brings UK GDPR into play: you need to mask anything sensitive, describe the processing in your privacy notice, and have a data processing agreement with Hotjar in place.
Common mistakes
- Loading Hotjar before the visitor has made a choice in the cookie banner, or listing it as strictly necessary.
- Leaving account pages and confirmation screens unmasked. Hotjar suppresses what visitors type into form fields by default, but text displayed on the page, such as a name and address on an order confirmation, can still be captured unless you suppress it.
- Watching recordings without a question in mind. Hours of viewing produce anecdotes, not decisions.
- Reading a heatmap built on a few dozen visits, or one that mixes mobile and desktop layouts.
- Leaving the script on every page for years, adding page weight and collecting data nobody reviews.
How to act on it
Decide what you want to learn first, for example why visitors from paid search abandon a particular page. Limit recording to the pages that answer that question. Set Hotjar to load only after consent through your consent management platform, and check the masking by recording a few of your own test visits, including one where you submit a form with made-up details.
Review recordings in batches, filtered to the behaviour you care about, such as visits from paid search that ended without a conversion. Note patterns that appear across several sessions rather than one memorable visit. Each pattern becomes a hypothesis that you either fix straight away, if the problem is plainly a bug, or test against the current version.
When I build or review landing pages for Google and Meta ad campaigns, I use recordings and heatmaps in exactly this way, alongside the analytics numbers, to find where a page loses people before changing anything.